White Lutherans Self-Flagelatte

I suppose it was inevitable. There are already ethnic caucuses in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America for African-Americans, American Indians, Asians and Pacific Islanders, Latinos, and Arabs. Today, the ELCA announced the formation of…wait for it…

The European-American Lutheran Association!

According to the ELCA News Service:

Forty Lutherans of European descent met here Oct. 30-Nov. 1, approved a constitution and bylaws for a new European American Lutheran Association (EALA) of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), and elected officers and a board for the new organization.

There is a crucial difference, however. Whereas the other ethnic caucuses are meant to be a voice for their group’s empowerment, the EALA will be a voice against their group’s empowerment:

“The European American Lutheran Association is a group of white Lutherans who seek to dismantle structures within the ELCA that give privilege to white people and disadvantage people of color,” said Katherine B. Long, Redmond, Wash., EALA’s newly elected president.

It has often been noted by observers of the ELCA that when it was founded in 1989 through the merger of three denominations, the defining characteristic of its polity was an all-encompassing quota system based on gender, race, and ethnicity. At this point, 20 years on, it’s hard to see what “white privilege” might remain, or how the few ethnic minority people in the ELCA might be disadvantaged. (The latest figures show the non-white membership of the ELCA to be 151,897 out of a total membership of 4,709,956.)

“We seek to reclaim for the ELCA our biblical heritage as one family created in God’s image.  We will stand as partners with our brothers and sisters of the other ethnic associations working within the ELCA to fulfill its commitments to anti-racist multiculturalism, and to become inclusive and anti-racist,” Long said.

In November 2006 the ELCA Church Council affirmed the EALA’s creation as the church’s sixth ethnic association.

This sounds like it was put together by a politically correct phrase generator.

“In a sense we are trying to create a new vision,” the Rev. Sherman G. Hicks, executive director, ELCA Multicultural Ministries, told the council.  “This church has looked at ‘multicultural’ as basically ‘ethnic-specific,’ and that is not multicultural,” he said.  “It is time that we start giving the vision that is truly representative of the words and what I believe this church has been saying it wants to be and do.”

I have no idea what that means, but it is of a piece with the dominant ideology in the ELCA since its beginning. That ideology was described well by Robert Benne of Roanoke College in an article in the August-September 2008 issue of First Things:

The ELCA, begun in 1988, wanted so badly to be a “new church” that it produced detailed regulations imposing racial, ethnic, and gender quotas on the entire organized life of the church. These quotas are supposed to guarantee “inclusiveness.” They unfortunately include among the formerly “excluded” a menagerie of self-described “victims,” self-marginalized complainers, and self-conscious heretics-all now required by the regulatory church to be represented at every table of deliberation. The spirit of interest group liberalism pervades every nook and cranny of the church. So it is that traditional Lutheranism becomes just one of many perspectives-alongside feminism, multiculturalism, and political correctness-to be taken into account in the affairs of the regulatory church.

Such is the price of perpetual guilt, I suppose.

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