I share a hometown—West Point, Nebraska—with some prominent Lutherans: Martin Marty, the famed historian; Ralph Bohlmann, the former president of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod; and now Tim Walz, the first Lutheran to run for vice president of the United States. (Hubert Humphrey’s mother was a Lutheran, but he himself was a Methodist.)
Walz was born in West Point, Nebraska, in 1964, then raised in a nearby town. He was not raised a Lutheran, as the Walz family was Catholic. After graduating college from Chadron State in western Nebraska in 1989, Tim started teaching in Alliance, Nebraska, where he met his wife, Gwen Whipple. She had grown up Lutheran in Minnesota and attended college at Gustavus Adolphus, a thriving Lutheran college at the time. When they left Nebraska for Mankato, Minnesota, in 1996, the Tim Walz family was solidly Lutheran. At Mankato High School, Walz was a coach and the faculty advisor of the school’s first gay-straight alliance.
After supporting John Kerry’s presidential campaign, Walz ran in 2005 for the United States House of Representatives from the First Congressional District. He won as a moderate but then moved to the left. He was elected governor in 2018 and moved sharply to the left, a move consistent with the convictions of his new parish, Pilgrim Lutheran Church in St. Paul, a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).
Pilgrim Lutheran was once a Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS) congregation, but in the mid-1970s it joined the merger process that was to form the ELCA in 1988. As the Pilgrim Lutheran website explains, the debates that led to the formation of the ELCA “basically involved views on the inerrancy of the Bible. The Missouri Synod was quite firm in the belief that the Bible was without error. Others . . . felt that the Bible, while inspired, had portions where informed people could have differing opinions.”
From its beginning, the ELCA was shaped by its commitment to “diversity” and “inclusion,” and Pilgrim Lutheran exemplifies these teachings. Its website (archived here) has been made largely inaccessible to non-members since the selection of Walz. No doubt they did not appreciate all the press attention they were getting. But judging by available information, Pilgrim Lutheran appears to be fully reconciled to the sexual revolution. It works for full LGBTQIA+ inclusion through its membership in the ReconcilingWorks ministry. The Pilgrim Lutheran website specifies the staff members’ pronouns: he/his, she/her, and in one case, she/they. Pilgrim Lutheran uses a version of the Lord’s Prayer that avoids patriarchal language: “Our guardian, our mother, our father in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” It practices open communion.
The elite of the ELCA no doubt relish parishes like Pilgrim Lutheran, because they implement at the parish level what the ELCA commends from its headquarters in Chicago. From its beginning in 1988, the ELCA’s leaders pushed for the blessing of gay unions (and soon enough for gay marriage) and for the recognition of openly gay pastors. When it finally won those campaigns in 2009, those of us who left believed that the floodgates were open to ever more extreme versions of the sexual revolution. Sure enough, the ELCA has embraced transgenderism by propagandizing it in two of its giant youth gatherings in 2018 and 2024. Its synods have elected gay and transgender bishops. Its presiding bishop talks of “persons who breastfeed” and greets her congregants as “siblings in Christ.”
As for Walz, he has supported LGBTQ causes from the time he advised the gay-straight alliance at Mankato High. In Congress he was a member of the LGBTQ caucus. The state of Minnesota is committed to DEI strategies in all its offices. It stands for gender-affirming care. It has a 90-percent rating from the Human Rights Campaign.
On abortion, Walz has pursued a radical program, unhindered by his church. Despite a 1991 statement that opposes “the total lack of regulation of abortion,” the ELCA has rather chafed against regulation. Its health insurance policies for church workers cover abortion for any reason for the first five months of pregnancy. In response to leaked news that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade, presiding bishop Elizabeth Eaton lamented that the decision would “upend 50 years of legal precedent in our nation and damage the health and well-being of many. The prospect is daunting.”
Without promoting abortion, the ELCA does little to discourage it, and has done nothing to discourage Walz from promoting one of the most radical abortion agendas in the country. Thanks to legislation signed by Walz in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson, Minnesota has no limits on abortion at any point during pregnancy, and no provision even for saving babies who survive the procedure. There has been no pastoral message from the presiding bishop criticizing those extreme policies.
And yet the ELCA’s progressivism has, it seems, not gone far enough. The denomination has hired a law firm to lay out blueprints for a more thorough and comprehensive DIE strategy. The conservatives who remain in the ELCA worry that the provision whereby some congregations and individuals maintain traditional sexual ethics through a “bound conscience” clause will soon come to an end. It is difficult to see how such changes will stanch the loss of members—from 5.2 million in 1988 to 2.9 million now.
Tim Walz’s church membership, at both the parish and the national levels, coheres with his personal beliefs and political achievements. The first Lutheran to run for vice president is indeed as progressive as the church to which he belongs. He is not the kind of Lutheran I would like to see pursuing that high office.
Robert Benne is professor of Christian Ethics at the Institute of Lutheran Theology.
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Image by Lorie Shaull, provided by Wikimedia Commons, licensed via the Creative Commons. Image cropped.
