# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1858_S288
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

288                    Church and Contemporary History.

The sum of it is that the present Lutheran church leadership and Lutheranism
did not create the sad condition but found it already there, though here and
there they have already removed or mitigated it. Among other things, it was
the poor church attendance, the desecration of the Sabbath, the illegitimate
births, the low state of popular education, with which people on church days
and in newspapers sought to beat Lutheranism to death. The article in the
Ev.-K.-Z. now proves that partly the political circumstances, namely the
conditions under the landed gentry, and partly also rationalism bear the
blame for this; but that conditions are by no means as black as they have
been made out to be. The Protestant K.-Z., which tirelessly rails against
Lutheranism, sees itself compelled, as a result, to confess: "In the
Ev.-K.-Z. there is an article to be read from Mecklenburg that has surprised
us by its sensible bearing. We take all the more willing note of its
argument, as it has itself repeatedly vexed us that the matter has found
such a portrayal in the liberal newspapers, and also in our own P.K.-Z., that
one might suppose the new Lutheranism had caused this moral and
ecclesiastical dereliction. For justice's sake we declare that we agree with
the author that these conditions have their cause quite elsewhere, if only
because they demonstrably existed long before the new Lutheranism. But of
course we are no more able than the author, for the sake of that same
justice, to lay them at the door of the forerunner of the new Lutheranism,
rationalism — although, on the basis of our own observation, we can confirm
that it has contributed its good share to the emptying of the churches. The
utter wretchedness of the moral and ecclesiastical conditions in the land of
Mecklenburg has a much deeper and older cause: the devastation of the land
by an incomparable landed nobility, the destruction of the free peasantry,
and the transformation of the population into an almost enserfed
proletariat, as has taken place, since the time of the Thirty Years' War,
more than in any other German land."

     If the author has up to this point been in the process of retreating, he
now promptly takes up again the pose of maintaining his old position. He
nonetheless holds up those wretched conditions to the new Lutheranism, so
that it may prove whether it is the universal remedy it claims to be when it
"unceasingly touts itself with full cheeks." It remains to be seen, at any
rate, whether it might not make the evils worse. According to exact
statistical data from a larger rural congregation, one sees, during the era
of rationalism, a year-by-year decreasing church attendance and number of
communicants, together with a rise in illegitimate births. Only in more
recent times, since the Word of God has again been proclaimed purely and
livingly, have conditions improved. In any case, then, Lutheranism has not
made the evils worse. As for the universal remedy that can bring all the
squires to their senses, transform all the pastors into men of God, abolish
the entire proletariat, and set up the thousand-year kingdom — Lutheranism
has never yet claimed to be that, and has therefore never spoken of the
rebirth of whole peoples, as have those who have covered the Mecklenburg
church government with disgrace.                              [Münkel's Zeitblatt.]