Why the LCMS needs Doug Wilson More than it needs the WELS and the ELS
The On The Line podcast interview with Doug Wilson ultimately illustrates the futility and pointlessness of the LCMS's interminable dialogue with the WELS and ELS.
On the Line just aired its Doug Wilson interview. The obvious question: Why isn’t the LCMS allied with “Kirkers” and other willing co-belligerents in the public square? Whom do we have in our corner for the fights we’ve faced—and the ones we will have to confront? Sadly, there is no ready answer because the LCMS is the chief hermit kingdom of American denominations.
The absence of friends
With the Synod in existential decline and facing increasingly hostile social, cultural, economic, and political forces, it can no longer lean on its once-impregnable Midwestern and German heritage fortress to burrow below adversity. Closing the city gates, as was the default position, is no longer an option. The walls were breached long ago. How much less effete and inconsequential might Synod Inc.’s response to COVID-19 have been if it had immediately linked arms with allies like Wilson or even John MacArthur to counterattack the state’s ungodly intrusions?
It is a perverse form of indifferentism, where we have taken the fear of unionism and syncretism into such a purity spiral that we refuse to cooperate and ally with anyone who does not tick every box on our 1/128 fractional confessional checklist. Meanwhile, in our so-called “cooperation in externals,” we tolerate alliances with outright evil: marketing foster children to homosexuals and crossdressers, and rationalizing erasing the livelihoods of our parishioners through mass migration and off-shoring.
Consider also that the LCMS has met regularly with the Evangelical Lutheran Synod (ELS) and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) since 2012. Thirteen meetings later, disagreements over church and ministry, prayer fellowship, and the role of women remain unresolved—and will not be resolved without one side’s membership base being so embittered that it generates a permanent fracture spinning off yet more micro-synods.
Not whether but which: the LCMS must trade hermitage for principled alliances that fight for a Christian moral consensus in public life.
Reach out
Why isn’t the LCMS having these types of discussions with other church bodies? Are our pastors making inroads and friends in their communities? We can pursue alliances that do not compromise our Confession but give the church freedom to continue to exist. Note the open terms for the LCMS-WELS-ELS jamboree that prevent any collywobbles about unionism:
“The recent meetings have been conducted without joint prayer and worship, since church fellowship is not recognized between all the synods. However, meeting participants have found that they enjoy one another’s company, and they have come to understand that the three synods have much in common.”
Source: https://els.org/els-lcms-and-wels-leaders-meet/
It’s all very well to enjoy one another’s company at a confab in Florida each December, but it’s not going to produce the alliance of pugilists needed assert the rights of the church against the aggressive encroachments of the state. We might plead, paraphrasing St. Paul, that we want some benefit from all the meetings, in the Lord, so that our hearts might be refreshed in Christ (Phil 1:20).
End parochialism
The LCMS can no longer afford to be the Big Hermit Synod satisfied with occasional bonhomie with Little Hermit Synods A & B. The LCMS needs to be muscular in making friends and influencing people to tackle the big issues that are the locomotives for its decline and its quietest response to the demolition of Christendom in America.
We can surely align with any denomination that wants to “normalize overtly Christian moral reasoning in public law”, as Doug Wilson says. It is intolerable for the LCMS to look the other way in the face of the efforts to separate Christian moral consensus from the state. Led by its pastors in their local contexts, we must become vocal and known as unabashed advocates for the recovery of the Christendom that America was founded on and prospered with. We should be able to say without reservation that we want to return to being a Protestant nation, as designed and intended.
Wilson has laid out a skeleton political platform that is entirely palatable for Lutherans to subscribe to:
Theocracy ≠ ecclesiocracy; keep church and state distinct, but not in silos.
Outlaw all human abortion, including pills and abortifacient methods; scrutinize IVF’s cruel and inhuman unintended consequences.
Overturn Obergefell; return marriage law to the states, seeking one-man/one-woman in all 50.
Outlaw pornography (start with age-verification and explicit material; ultimately ban production/commerce).
End no-fault divorce.
Re-establish the household as a civic unit (household voting model).
Re-inscribe male/female distinction and hierarchy.
Historical recovery of our Christian self-understanding (prayer in schools, state religious tests, “soft establishments”).
Conclusion
If the LCMS means to survive and serve this moment, it must exit the hermitage and join/form coalitions that normalize overtly Christian moral reasoning in public law while respecting appropriate church and state distinctions drawn by Scripture. That does not have to devolve into unionism or syncretism; it is a sharing of and in first-order goods and First Article gifts: protecting life, fortifying the natural family, restraining sexual merchandizing, recovering marriage, and recovering the household as the basic civic unit. We do not need to share altars to share amicus briefs, model legislation, or public witness.
Wilson articulates the choice before us: not whether our laws rest on a creed, but which. Historically, America prospered under a soft, Protestant moral consensus; today’s vacuum is not neutral—it is deliberately and aggressively anti-Christian. LCMS pastors and parishioners should therefore cultivate rational allyship—with any partners where Christian aims align—to press for, at minimum: abortion abolition, the overturning of Obergefell with marriage returned to the states, the outlawing of pornography, the end of no-fault divorce, and policies that honor clear male–female vocations and the civic reality of households.
We can remain confessionally Lutheran and publicly muscular. It is a time for allies, not alibis.
This is written in a hard and direct way, and has gotten the attention of some of the confessional folks in the LCMS, which is good. The primary distinctive remains between God's realm of the left and God's realm of the right. Wilson (not taking the theocratic portion of his words too seriously) is speaking about - and you are speaking about - items in God's realm of the left. Who cares if Wilson is Reformed or any other brand of Christian? This is a specific case of what you have in other posts abhorred, which is "cooperation in externals." This isn't church fellowship with sclerotic participants in the LCMS, ELS and WELS, who would have the proverbial heart attack if they prayed together. This is collaboration bring civil righteousness back in the USA.
I disagree with much of Wilson's analysis. My analysis of those who have responded can't be that they don't know Left/Right Kingdom distinctions. They're too bright for that. What they fear is the division of the house that's left in the LCMS over moving in Wilson's direction in a fervent Convention Resolution way. Because although the right edged in the Realm of the Left have a supermajority at any national LCMS convention, the Synod design is to move to the religious right incrementally. Ergo the going nowhere ELS/WELS/LCMS prayer-free dialogs. Putting it in perspective, we're coming up on the millennial anniversary of the Great Schism, and its healing is going nearly nowhere.
Good on you for putting it out there, though
Dave Benke
I really don’t think the LCMS needs a self-ordained reformed guy