The Ecclesiology of Doing Whatever the Guy on the Screen Says

American Lutheranism in the Year of Our Lord 2025

In a surprising turn of events, Lutherans have been in the news.¹ We’ve been accused of money laundering and being a criminal conspiracy. The accusers are retired general, undeclared agent of a foreign government, convicted felon, and prominent Christian Nationalist Mike Flynn and Elon Musk, whose DOGE office boffins dug up the damning spreadsheet entries. Lutheran Social Services and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (now Global Refuge) are among the putative culprits, guilty of helping to settle duly-authorized refugees, house the penurious elderly, and care for children in foster homes with the help of public funds.

A branch of the Lutheran crime syndicate specializing in after-school programs for local youth

In a season of normalized slander and outrages against decency, this one admittedly rates as merely average. But in my small world, it was a shock and an agony. Whatever else you want to say about Lutherans, we are not very good at being radical or devious. However, the head of one branch of the American Lutheran family felt compelled to send a clear and morally courageous message to the world and to his flock about these scurrilous accusations, and that message was “that’s not us; it’s the other Lutherans.”

That’s the substance of an overlong and downright bizarre statement from Matthew Harrison, president of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. While there are significant theological and historical differences between the LCMS and my church body, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, all of it has been shorthanded as “conservative” and “liberal.” I regret that shorthanding, both for what it obscures and for what it reveals. I was baptized in an LCMS parish when I was eight, and while we weren’t there very long, I managed to pick up the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed before we moved along. I’ve only ever had good relationships with the few LCMS pastors I’ve known in a professional capacity, including one colleague I deeply admire. And as anyone who’s read this newsletter over the years knows, I have plenty of criticisms of the ELCA (including its post-theological cultural drift).

But Harrison’s message is mostly culture-war boilerplate. I recommend Clint Schnekloth’s response for its perspective on the history here, and in particular this point:

But the most disturbing aspect of Harrison’s letter isn’t just this misplaced trust in Flynn. It’s that the entire statement reads as a transparent attempt to ingratiate himself to the current administration. Harrison goes out of his way to boast about Trump’s visits to the service work he’s been involved in. There’s a word for this kind of behavior: sycophancy. This letter comes across as less Christian and more like pure sycophantic flattery.

It’s no longer surprising, but it’s still a notable development for a denomination that prides itself on resisting the authority and intervention of the German state in church affairs in the 19th century.

But the moment in Harrison’s splenetic rambling that struck me most deeply was neither the servility nor the by now rote digs at the ELCA, but the ecclesiology implicit here:

When our congregations, pastors and people come into contact with individuals who are not legally in the U.S., particularly when such individuals find themselves in our churches, we welcome them. We tell them about Jesus’ forgiveness. We also always urge and often assist them in doing the right thing, that is, becoming legal residents. The LCMS is officially pro-immigrant. Our church was founded by German immigrants.

Harrison knows, or is morally responsible for knowing, that in very few cases is it possible for people who are here without legal authorization to do “the right thing” by “becoming legal residents.” It is a common misunderstanding in America that people who migrate without authorization are “skipping the line” or should “do it the right way” when there is often no line and no legal way for them to come here at all, let alone to cure their status once they’ve arrived, but church leaders are obligated to know better. This shouldn’t be so; such cures have been proposed in bipartisan immigration reform legislation periodically this century, though such reforms have never made it through Congress. And there have been work-arounds created by executive order such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, and Temporary Protected Status (the second has been revoked, and the third has been revoked for Venezuelans and may be for others too).

But more than that, Harrison’s language here makes it clear that people with irregular immigration status are not really part of the Body of Christ in “our churches.” They are not united to the “patriotic” and “law-abiding” mass of the LCMS through faith and the Sacraments and thereby subject to the higher loyalty and authority of the Kingdom of God. When, as if by accident or waking from a coma, they “find themselves” in LCMS churches, they are graciously “welcomed,” of course. But the ecclesiology of this “welcome” is implicitly national, contingent on doing the “right thing,” however impossible, and revocable whenever the state insists that it be revoked. To say that a church body is “officially pro-immigrant” is a rather chilling way to avoid acknowledging the simple reality that the Body of Christ includes people of varied citizenship and migration statuses, none of which by definition can be normative.

As if to underline the point that the state, and not the Sacraments, determines the contours of the church and its ministries, Harrison actually welcomes this intrusion of the extra-legal DOGE project into the operation of LCMS affiliated organizations:

The LCMS grants special status to certain agencies as Recognized Service Organizations (RSOs). Like LIRS, we have no ownership of, governing authority over or hand in the financial management of such agencies. They are independently audited. Some of the organizations on the list circulated by Flynn for public scrutiny are LCMS RSOs and at the same time retain affiliation with the ELCA. Because of the public uproar over Flynn’s post, many of our LCMS people are asking for a review of these RSOs. Rightly so. We are following up on these concerns.

This is a remarkable capitulation for the leader of a tradition that once upon a time championed the freedom and independence of the church. Matthew Harrison’s neighbors and fellow Christians deserve better than this, of course, but more importantly, the church he leads does, too. It is not too much to ask that a church leader should speak not just about but to the undocumented people in his flock, and treat them not as regrettable exceptions but as integral to the Body. And it is not too much to ask that a church leader should speak to the citizens in his flock to remind them that they are called to a higher level of mutual charity than the state commands.

I mentioned at the beginning that this is a minor story in an age of routine slander. But it’s part of a larger smear campaign directed against Christian organizations who work with immigrant and refugee communities (in the case of the Catholic Church) or who just find themselves out of step with the new quasi-official state version of Christianity (in the case of Christianity Today²). It makes it clear that Christian Nationalism, like any nationalism, does not actually protect the in-group for which it claims to speak, but thrives by continually redefining dissenters out of that in-group.

That’s the central tension of Christian ecclesiology in America in 2025 in a nutshell. There is no ideal embodiment of the church in this benighted age, or in any age, least of all my own deeply flawed denomination. But I suppose it is useful to know who has decided in advance to follow orders—who will dance to the tune piped by social media demagogues, who will turn their backs on communities in need, the staff who serve them, and fellow Christians who are trying, however imperfectly, to show forth the grace of God in their actions.

On that note, while I would go further than Bishop Eaton in making it clear that the poor and the migrant and the refugee are in fact part of the church and not an object of care external to it, I do think this is a better way to respond to unofficial and semi-official attacks on the ministry of the church, even, or perhaps especially, if those ministries are functionally independent of all but the founding ethos of Christians who knew the experience of poverty and migration and didn’t want to pull any ladders up after them:

1. I have a joke “American Christianities Power Ranking” post in drafts in which Lutheranism is slated for relegation, influence-wise.

2. Can’t bring myself to link this one but if you’re curious/masochistic you can start here.