Yeah, I'm Lutheran. You gotta prollem widdat?

So, The Lutheran Zephyr has asked to write about why we're Lutheran and what it means.

So I've got a story. Or more like two. Anyway, they both start out with the fact that my grandmother was raised Methodist, and my grandfather was raised Catholic. The story of how we wound up Lutheran takes two different turns from here, depending on what kind of mood my mom's in, or how many cocktails she's had.

The first version says they split the difference, since Lutheranism is only once removed from Catholicism, whereas Methodism, being an offshoot of Anglicanism, is twice removed.

The second version says my grandfather ran screaming from the Catholic church and didn't want to go to no church no how, but my grandmother put her foot down when the babies started coming. So my grandfather says, "Well, alright, but only if I can go to church with my buddy, Hans Pfeffengruberschmidt." (Not his real name)

Hans, being German and all, was a Lutheran. So we wound up being Welsh-Scottish-Irish Lutherans. Which is kinda weird, since a lot of American Lutheran culture is bound up with German and especially Scandanavian ethnicity, not to mention the regional culture of the Northern Midwest. So I grew up Lutheran on the East Coast, and neither lefse nor lutefisk has ever touched my lips.

Now, even on the East Coast, there are well-established chunks of Lutherans, in Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. But Maryland was established by English Catholics, so Lutherans were a bit exotic in the then-exurb where we lived. Our church had only been established in the mid-'60s and was very small, a Danish Modern quonset hut with folding metal chairs instead of pews. But the ceilings were festooned with handmade banners: peace and love and joy and doves. My mom sang and played guitar in a little group that sometimes augmented the traditional choir/organ music with "Michael Row the Boat Ashore." My friends and I, having picked up on the Jesus People/Folkie/Sing Out! stuff wore jeans to church and thought ourselves very Deep and Spiritual. (Hey, it was the '70s.)

Our church attendance tapered off when I was about 12 or so, but then one of my friends, who hadn't been raised in any faith, suddenly got religion when we were about 14 and starting riding her bike to services at the Presbyterian church two doors down from my church. Well, I wasn't about to let her show me up, no sirree. I'd been raised Lutheran. I had a real faith, not some teenage whim! So I signed up for confirmation class.

Hoo boy! I was going to the junior high one district over, and a new church had been planted over there, so other than Scott and Debbie, who I'd known since we were little, I didn't know anybody. Add to that the curriculum, which was somewhere between lame and nonexistent, and I was convinced I'd made a horrible mistake. All the time we'd been doing things with the Methodists and the Presbyterians on Church Row—Vacation Bible School, religious plays—and now I wanted to know how come we were Lutherans and they were Methodists and Presbyterians. And the classes consisted of seeing how many crackers you could stuff in your mouth and still whistle. I am not shitting you.

Well, I decided this was a big fucking waste of time, but I neglected to inform my mother of this decision, so the next Sunday when she got ready to drive me to confirmation class, I was nowhere to be found. This resulted in a screaming battle royale, the kind all mothers and daughters are all too familiar with. However, she's since decided I was probably right. Yeah, the curriculum sucked, but in addition I was there for the wrong reasons, and we were no longer attending church as a family, so there was no context.

Fast-forward to the early '80s, and I went off to college in Tennessee. No way that culture shock can be overstated. And it was my first introduction to the Church of Christ. My first off-campus roommate was the sweetest girl in the world, and she'd been raised in that faith. We got to talking the big questions one night, as college kids often do, and she told me—quite matter-of-factly—they were taught that anyone who wasn't Church of Christ was going to burn in Hell.

Well. I gasped in horror. No matter how many JAP jokes we shared, no matter how we grumbled at getting stuck behind an Amish wagon on a two-lane road, no matter how we snickered at the elaborate network of shelves in the basement of the house our friends bought from a Mormon family; I was taught that religion was a highly personal thing, and was always to be treated with respect (y'know, in public, anyway). I'd grown up around people from damn near every faith imaginable, and the idea that any of them was going to hell was unthinkable.

With that in mind, I immediately apologized for denigrating her religion, but she said, "Don't worry. I'm having a little trouble with that one myself."

Combine this with the rise of the Religious Right, and that's enough to put you off God right there. Add to that the fact that Lutherans are damn near invisible in Tennessee, and there I was, an apathetic agnostic. Ten years later, I was going through a rough patch in life, and thought going to church would be nice. I cruised a Lutheran church, and saw their affiliation: Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. "Well," I thought, not knowing about the ELCA merger, "even the Lutherans down here are all crazy." But I'd decided I believed in God, and found Deism, which worked for me at the time.

Fast forward to the gruesome aftermath of the 2004 Presidential Election. All the talk about "Values Voters" was roiling the community at Daily Kos. The atheists were pissed off at the religious people, and were blaming them for the anti-gay crap that none of the religious people in the community had endorsed. While I wasn't religious myself, I had enormous respect for people who were, and I knew enough about different denominations to know that the Religious Right wasn't the extent of Christianity in America. I started throwing in my two cents about my childhood faith experiences in peace and justice work, and then got into Lutheran doctrine.

I realized I was in over my head, so I started reading up a little. I remembered the Luther movie, which I'd really wanted to see, so I wrote to my mom and said we should watch it together, and by the way, how the hell did a bunch of Welsh-Irish-Scottish people get to be Lutheran? So we watched Luther, and she knew who everybody was! She'd had non-sucky catechesis, plus Luther League.

Well, I decided I needed to have my own personal confirmation class, so I read Web sites and blogs, and checked out books from the library. The more I learned, the more I thought this Luther guy was a beautiful cat—notwithstanding that anti-Semitic stuff.

But then I decided it was a little silly to just sit around reading books about religion, kinda like sitting around reading cookbooks without eating any food. So after several months of hemming and hawing and oversleeping, I moseyed my way to First Lutheran Nashville.

It just felt right. I felt like I belonged there, like it was just the right place to be. And I still feel that way, even if I oversleep and miss services. It's so different from what I grew up with, as it's and old, old, old congregation with a gothic building with kneelers and everything!

And the church has shaken off so much of its anti-Catholic, Pietist crap. I remember my mom envying her Catholic cousins when her uncle died, that they had all this ritual to lean on. She says our old church used to celebrate the Eucharist once a month, but I swear it was about quarterly. Whatever, I wanted to race through confirmation so I could celebrate it, too, but kids don't have to do that anymore, which is supercool. Like my beloved blogger LutheranChik says, Jesus said, "Take and eat," not "Take and understand."