He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Lutheranism and American Culture: The Making of a Distinctive Faith in the Civil War Era, and shared the following:
If a reader would open to page 99 of Lutheranism and American Culture, they would find themselves in the middle of the debates about slavery among the Old Lutherans of the Missouri Synod, a Midwest-based church body whose members were almost exclusively immigrants from Germany. Despite having no direct stake in the peculiar institution, several key leaders of the Missouri Synod vigorously defended slavery as biblically sanctioned. I then explain two reasons why. First, they were convinced that the abolition of slavery would lead to societal disorder and the elevation of a false conception of liberty. Second, they believed that the Bible clearly taught that slaveholding was not sinful.Learn more about Lutheranism and American Culture at the LSU Press website.
The Page 99 Test succeeds in some ways but fails in others.
This particular page certainly highlights a key theme in my book: Throughout the Civil War era, Lutherans were both distinctive in their outlooks and quintessentially American. So, on the one hand, it is quite surprising that these Midwestern immigrants would be defending the institution of slavery with such vigor. Yet, on the other hand, many of their pro-slavery (or anti-abolitionist) arguments resembled those made by other Christians in the United States.
That being said, if a browser just read page 99, that person would miss my book’s core argument. In my book, I show how the Civil War and Reconstruction forged a distinctive identity among American Lutherans. This identity had four key components: theological confessionalism, ecclesiastical separatism, political and social conservatism, and American exceptionalism. A reader turning to this page might get a sense of the third of those four ideas (political and social conservatism), but not the other three.
--Marshal Zeringue
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