# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1861_S243
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Union and the Lutheran Church in Bremerhaven. 243

and comes in, he has all at once become united, without so much as
knowing it, let alone willing it. Only one thing is somewhat unjust in it: all
Protestants, all sects have the right and the duty to belong to it,
but only the Lutherans and the Reformed supply the preacher. Why
should not a Baptist, or even a Mormon, be able to be preacher there?

But how does the matter stand with the legal validity of this church order?
— By its content and by the history of its origin it conflicts
with all law. Its content is the most direct contradiction of the
state constitution. According to that constitution the state guarantees the recognized confessions
equal civil and political rights. But the highest
civil right of a member of a recognized confession is this,
that the state in no way restricts his free public exercise of religion.
Further, the constitution promises the citizens complete freedom of faith
and of conscience. In the city of Bremen it would surely not occur to the senate
to challenge the citizens' sense of right by such acts of force;
but in Bremerhaven the church order has abolished
all these rights with a stroke of the pen. There is accordingly
no question at all that, in view of the Bremen constitution, it lacks
all legal ground whatever.

To this is added the unlawful manner of its origin. If people
in Bremerhaven wish to have a united church, then let them unite,
throw away their old confessions, and then procure a law that
grants them recognition and free public exercise of religion. But
whence did the senate, together with those six men, take the right and the power
to form a new church fellowship for all the Lutheran and Reformed citizens?
Law is here turned right on its head. The
senate forbids the formation of a Lutheran congregation in a state
whose laws secure to Lutherans the free public exercise of religion, on the ground that it is
inadmissible according to the canonical circumstances of Bremerhaven; and the same
senate upholds the church order of a congregation whose existence and
free public exercise of religion are legally quite unlawful, since according to
the constitution a new religious body — which the united congregation
of Bremerhaven manifestly is over against the old recognized churches in the Bremen state —
can obtain the right to both these things only by an act of legislation on the part of senate
and burgher assembly, and no
such act has ever taken place. Thus the neck of the law is broken
and wrong is proclaimed as right.

When now in 1854 all Bremerhaveners could suddenly read, by decree of the senate,
in the newly published church order that they had without mercy
fallen to the Union, about 80 Lutheran citizens joined together
and sent in to the senate a declaration in which they protested against the church order
as violating their conscience and confession, and against every
union; declared that they wished to remain Lutheran; and asked for the
maintenance of the independence of the Lutheran church. Thereupon