Northwoods Ecumenism
A Surprising Little Angle on Unity
I write from what may be the northernmost human structure in the old 48 states (according to a few anarcho-localist writers like Bill Kaufmann, Alaska and Hawaii still don’t count). Created by a surveyor’s error in the 1760s that was codified by the 1783 Treaty of Paris ending the American Revolution, Minnesota’s “Northwest Angle” is a hundred-square-mile patch of muskeg, bedrock, and pine and birch forests jutting above the 49th Parallel into the vast Lake of the Woods. I started coming up here as a teenager with my parents in the 1960s. With my wife and children, I have been a regular visitor since 1977. About a hundred people, mostly running fishing camps and related tiny enterprises, live in this curious corner of the United States.
A trip to “the Angle” actually casts a light, of sorts, on the status of “mere Christianity” in 2011 America. Driving north from Illinois, through Wisconsin and into Minnesota (via Duluth), the billboards record a telling change. Above Spooner on U.S. 53 and along Route 11 west of International Falls, it seems as though every third outdoor ad features an anti-abortion message: “Life Begins at Conception”; “The Embryo Is a Human Being”; and so on. There are frequent images of beautiful new babies.
Part of the explanation is that this part of American is lightly settled, decidedly rural, and by nature socially conservative. And yet, at the same time, this ubiquitous pro-life message is one of the promising features of early twenty-first-century America. Opinion polls record a marked nationwide shift in favor of the protection of infant life. Planned Parenthood is in a broad retreat, and the prospects for a new wave of pro-life legislation seem to brighten every year.
These Northwoods billboards also reflect the kind of practical ecumenism characteristic of mere Christianity. Some are clearly marked as sponsored by the local Knights of Columbus. Others have more of an Evangelical cast. Indeed, in a religious sense, this area is authentic Prairie Home Companion country. Your basic choices are Roman Catholicism (of the old German sort) or Lutheranism (of the old, pietistic Scandinavian sort recycled into the language of American Evangelicalism).
Accordingly, these Lutheran churches are generally not part of the increasingly liberal ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) nor even of the conservative Missouri or Wisconsin synods. Rather, most of the small Lutheran parishes in the Northwoods are members of tiny synods, like the Association of Free Lutheran Churches or the Eielsen Synod. These broke away from larger Lutheran bodies decades ago. In some cases, the cause of the split is lost in time. In several known cases, the shared motivation was a detection of some slight deviance from a strict commitment to Justification by Faith Alone. All the same, such once suspicious, pietistic Lutherans now find themselves in common cause with their old “papist” enemies.
Two Chapels
Even on the Angle, the two chapels to be found reflect a merging of old Catholic and Protestant narratives into a kind of rough harmony. The Catholic chapel is found at a remarkable archaeological site: the partially reconstructed Fort St. Charles, which lies about five miles east of our cabin on the watery Angle Inlet. Founded in the 1730s by the enterprising Verendrye family, the fort was the center of a vast French scheme to control North America. Seeking furs and political allegiance from—and converts among—the Indians, many voyageurs and Jesuit priests flowed out of this fort for about a generation, penetrating as far as Yellowstone and the Canadian Rockies. In what is now a quiet cove of Magnuson’s Island, past gatherings of French traders, Catholic priests, and Ojibway Indians could attract over 2,000 canoes at one time.
Having lost royal favor in the 1750s, the Verendryes abandoned the fort, which quickly surrendered to the forest. After an archaeological team from St. Boniface College in Manitoba rediscovered the fort in 1909, the Minnesota Knights of Columbus built a replica of it during the 1950s and 1960s. A tiny chapel, with a beautiful marble altar, rests on the site where the headless bodies of 21 voyageurs and priests, victims of a Sioux massacre, still lie.
The other chapel, situated about 500 yards from our cabin, is St. Luke’s [formerly Lutheran] Church. Built on land donated by the pioneer Carlson family (no relation), the church probably saw its last certified Lutheran pastor about four decades ago. The current congregation might be labeled generic pietistic Evangelical. Lay preachers and informality are the rules.
Today’s sermon was representative. Delivered by a layman who works for the U.S. Border Patrol, its main theme also harkened back to a species of eighteenth-century religiosity: in this case, to the anti-denominationalism of America’s First Great Awakening. In his handout, the preacher described a group of folks who were asked to identify their religion: “I call myself a Calvinist (CALVIN) . . . I call myself a Lutheran (LUTHER) . . . I call myself Mennonite (MENNO SIMONS) . . . I call myself a Quaker . . . I call myself a Methodist . . . a Baptist, a Rom[an] Catholic, a Greek/Russian Orthodox. . . .” How should believers properly respond? As in Acts 11:26: “They called themselves Christians (CHRIST!)” It’s a point right out of a George Whitefield sermon.
Allan C. Carlson is the author of numerous books, including Family Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crisis and The American Way: Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity. He attends St. Paul Lutheran Church in Rockford, Illinois. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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