An Open Letter to the WELS

Even among those few people who seem to come across this blog now and then, most won't be interested in this post. It involves a church body of which I was once a member: the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (hereinafter referred to as WELS or the WELS). Indeed, I initially started this blog, and decided on the name Leftist Lutheran, as a push-back against things I was seeing in the WELS and some of its affiliated organizations that were of concern to me (and my spouse). So if you have no interest in the esoterica of Lutheranism, you might want to skip this.

The things that concerned us started pretty much when Barack Obama was elected, and that should have raised even more of a red flag at the time as to some of the motives behind what we were seeing. WELS has an officially-affiliated organization called Christian Life Resources (CLR), whose primary purpose is anti-abortion. If you read my blog in its earliest days in 2010 and onward, you saw that I spent a considerable amount of time challenging this group's activities. They were contrary to the doctrines and teachings of the WELS, and I wrote about that. (I also pushed back directly at both CLR and the WELS leadership, but to no avail.) What was concerning was that moral relativism was creeping into their activities, as well as out-and-out falsehood.

For example, they bought into and encouraged the false allegation of death panels in the ACA. They used the edited and discredited tapes of supposed Planned Parenthood selling of body parts. For many years they had the Life Wire News on their website, a highly questionable advocacy news source with questionable journalistic standards. In short, as long as something "served the greater good" it was deemed "true". There were lots of other issues, but you'd have to go back and read posts from the first few years of the blog. It was disturbing at the time but we never dreamed of where we'd be today.

Later on in the Obama presidency, the Synod itself started putting out public statements concerning Obamacare and same-sex marriage that were misleading at best and untruthful at worst. When we challenged the WELS President the response was basically "you are probably technically correct but we still think that generally what we said is true." The WELS had become openly political. This was the point at which we decided we could no longer be a part of that church body.

Fast forward to the Trump years. This embracing of untruth in order to justify social or political or cultural beliefs has become a central tenet of the majority of WELS people we know (also Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, which has a lot of similarities to the WELS). We know quite a few members of these two church bodies, and anecdotally the impression we have is that many or most have gone full QAnon. And these people believe they are living their religion. And some of these people were preaching from pulpits or teaching our kids in Lutheran schools. I have come to believe that you tell the beliefs of a church body by what people in the pews believe, not what is written in some tomes in the Synod archives. These people believe this stuff. And I don't think they would if they weren't getting some sort of validation (or more) from the pulpit and other church leadership. What started as fudging the truth to help along in the culture war in the Obama years has metamorphosed into total QAnon conspiracy craziness. It is sad and scary to see people I though I knew being a part of this.