Consideraciones éticas

No description of the synod’s history would be complete without mention of the

agricultural economy, which often acted [and continues to act] as both a foil and a complement to the industry. As Reverend Engel told me, in his region farming and mining existed side by side. Because industry was so transient in the area, residents considered themselves primarily farmers, but would work in the mines when the jobs were available:

There is a lot of farmland and folks have time to farm property up in the mountains. Yet it is not that clear that they are all farmers. Guys have worked in the industries, or some sons would work in the mines. You know, with the large families that they had, it wasn’t clear that all the five children would be farmers again.

Though the towns are smaller now, they are still tight-knit farming communities with deep roots in the area.

Rev. Schumann said that in Liberty, a town with 200 people, families have been there for generations, primarily farming but supplementing the meager income with mining or lumber jobs. Rev. Schumann joked:

I always wanted to do a family tree in the congregation, but we would only be able to do two generations at a time because there would be so many lines if you did three. When a new family moved in, we would get excited, and joke, ‘New genes for the gene pool!’ In the mountain towns, where the soil is less fertile than in the south of the synod, dairy farming is the norm, but is becoming increasingly hard to do. Milk prices have been flat for forty years:

We had farmers putting in these massive fish tanks to raise Tilapia, to have a

supplemental income. Because the area of Liberty is too hilly to have real commercial crops. We grow a lot of feed and something for their own families. But yeah, it’s a very different issue for those farmers and how they’re going to make a living. I remember that milk would come out with a new PR campaign every year and some of our guys would just shake our heads and say, ‘I wish they wouldn’t spend so much on commercials and just give us a little more for the milk.’

His wife insightfully pointed out that farming has changed a lot in the past few decades. The dairy farms that did survive are no longer “postcard picture Martha Stewart farm” but are industrial operations with a lot of modern machinery:

But when you live and work in agriculture or in a community that’s based on

agriculture, or what comes from the land (lumber and so on), you realize that there are no pretty post card kinds of farms anymore. Nobody lives on a farm like that. It’s a place filled with machinery and activity. It’s a kind of industry. So when they see this kind of gas drilling development, for someone who lives with that kind of agriculture, it’s just more complex machinery in their environment.

She explains that the rise of factory farms throughout the synod has fewer people squeamish about industrial development.

However, until the mid-twentieth century, small, non-mechanized, family-owned farms made up the majority of the synod and were the primary employment, especially in the south of the synod. The majority of German Lutherans that populated most of the synod churches were farmers. Mrs. Loft describes her experience growing up on a farm in the area in the 1960s and 1970s:

We grew corn; we grew vegetables; we raised our own cattle. We had three milk cows and drank our own milk. But we raised just enough to feed the livestock that we had. We were independent people. My mom would raise everything in the garden and can hundreds and hundreds of jars of fruit and vegetables every year. And that’s what we lived on. We were self-sufficient. We did go the grocery store, but we didn’t need to buy much. We churned our own butter; we even baked our own bread most of the time. My mom didn’t work and she was the one who took care of the vegetable garden. We all pitched in and did what we had to do. My parents both grew up on farms. My mom’s family and my dad’s family. My dad was one of 16 children.

But her dad had to work a full-time job to pay the bills, as small-scale farming could not

support a family by that time like it could in his parents’ and grandparents’ days. As the Green Revolution changed farming techniques across the world, Pennsylvania farming became industrialized and used less labor. Thus, employment in the synod became hard to come by, as is true of many agrarian communities in rural America. Mr. Hoffman still brags:

It’s the next most fertile land to Lancaster County. My favorite saying out of high school was ‘All future generations shall be born from farmers.’

This aphorism sums up the inherited mentality in the area, dating back to the first German immigrants who prized their farming lifestyle. But unfortunately, only those farmers who could afford to expand and modernize can support their families with the income from their farms. While they are doing quite well, Mr. Hoffmann worries about the next generation of farmers, as there are fewer young people interested in farming and fewer resources available for rural development.

Fig. 7: Lutheran Graveyard in Cogan Station (Lycoming County); Source: Lena Connor

Lutheran History in the Synod:

It was in this historical context of agriculture and industry that the synod’s churches were shaped. Rev. Dr. Vogt explained that in history of Lutheranism in Pennsylvania is long and nuanced:

There are a lot of Lutheran churches in Pennsylvania, and a lot up in those mountains. Generally, they were there before the industries came. Before oil even. The original Lutherans came to farm or be laborers in small communities. And then the when [the coal

industry began] they would import large groups of people to work the mines, because they needed lots of labor.

He explained that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and its predecessor Lutheran bodies were made of congregants who were farm-based and not college-educated up until the mid-twentieth century, when Lutherans began to “get educated, move to the suburbs, and transition to a market economy.” He explains:

The domination was very ethnically homogeneous before this change. Where it was German, it was German. Where it was Norwegian, it was Norwegians. And Swedes, there were a few of them. But now intermarriage has changed that. In this synod,

historically, it was mostly German. Some Swedes were imported to the oil and coal region up north. The Norwegian Lutherans were out in the Midwest.

The relationship between these Lutheran churches and industry and land use in central Pennsylvania is not often researched, but some early sociological texts on Pennsylvania Lutherans can give us some insight into how the churches might have viewed the industrial changes in their state.

Because Swedish Lutherans were in the minority, and often were similar in doctrine and form to German Lutheran churches.35 _{I will primarily focus on German Lutheran communities}

in this paper. Of the thousands of German immigrants who came to the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most settled in Pennsylvania initially. Most came from the Lutheran, Reformed, Moravian, or Catholic traditions, though there were also German

immigrants from persecuted Protestant “sects” such as the Anabaptists (the Mennonites and the Amish) and the Brethren (Dunkards or Schwenkfelders). The German Lutherans who came, also known as the “evangelicals,” were in the majority, though they associated with other groups of German immigrants and formed a distinct cultural identity in Pennsylvania and retaining the German language.36

35 _{Joseph Henry Dubbs. “The Founding of the German Churches of Pennsylvania.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of} History and Biography 17, no. 3 (January 1, 1893): 241–250.

As Lutheran theologian George H. Anderson recounts, the first German Lutheran immigrants were often poverty-stricken in Europe and came first as indentured servants.37 _Poor

evangelical Lutherans arrived after 1800 in great numbers, but because earlier arriving English, German Quaker, and Mennonite farmers took much of the cheap and fertile land in the

southeast these newcomers they settled farther west, in central Pennsylvania, in the synod counties.38

Writing in 1925, sociologist Heinrich H. Maurer set out to write a comprehensive sociological study of the Pennsylvanian German Lutheran and his findings are telling. He was interested in seeing whether this group of Lutherans fit into Max Weber’s theory about the “Protestant work ethic” and its affinity for capitalistic enterprise. His historical research led him to believe that unlike their Reformed, or Calvinist, counterparts, Lutherans were committed to an agrarian way of life and were suspicious of urbanization, speculation, and industrialization. As Maurer recounts, the president of the Pennsylvania German Society in his annual address is 1910, told the story of a Lutheran farmer behind a plow who, asked what he would do if knew that he would die tomorrow, answered that he would keep plowing. Maurer believed that this commitment to farming was a direct result not just of German culture, but also of his religion. “The essence of the Pennsylvania German personality is German Lutheranism.”39

The pietism of early German Lutheran pastors, such as Rev. Henry Melchior

Muhlenberg, who founded the first Lutheran body in Pennsylvania and in the whole of North America in 1742, gave Lutheran theology a personal and practical piety that suited the agrarian communities of Pennsylvania and informed their practices. The first Pennsylvania Lutherans

37 _{George H. Anderson. “Alms and Advocacy: Lutheran Ministry with the Poor.” Journal of Lutheran Ethics 5, no. 5}

(May 2005),1.

38 _{Ibid., 1.}

39 _{Heinrich H. Maurer. “Studies in the Sociology of Religion II. Religion and American Sectionalism. The}

were “strong in the Word” and very learned, but “worldly, wise and genteel,” remarks Maurer.40 _{Unlike Calvinist Puritans, they believed that Scripture grounded them not in God’s}

law but in the gospel of communitarian love and interdependence. As opposed to the Calvinist emphasis on reason and religious order, the Lutherans were focused on traditionalism, faith, and service to the common good.41

Maurer states that Lutherans believed that godly morality was integrally tied to agrarian social structures: “The function of the soil and of a natural-economy and manorial civilization in the psychic economy of this Lutheran Christianity […] becomes clearly evident in the Lutheran Utopia of this age: a sort of fantastic description of the promised land of the Lutheran pilgrim.”42 _{They believed the labor-rhythm on a farm from sunrise to sunset, with a}

biblical Sabbath on Sundays, was sacred, as was the tight and egalitarian community of with its emphasis on “collective usufruct instead of individual assignment of capitol and return.”43

Things to be feared were “the English,” cash nexus, enterprise, Calvinism, “the siren call of a new herd,” radical and experimental sects, and anti-traditionalism. They fought hard to retain the German heritage, German language, and Lutheran roots, because “if we do not remain Lutherans, we will not remain farmers, and we are nothing if not farmers,” was the sentiment at the time.44

As expressed in one Lutheran pamphlet to Pennsylvania churches, they worried that if their children were Anglicized, the children would squander the fruit of the parents’ toil on the farm, become lazy and loose and ruin the quality of the farm. “For the secular order which was not of the family farm, the guild-shop or the parish, they had a deep distrust; for the state,

obedience to law but alert suspicion of encroachment,” remarks Maurer.45 _{In contrast to}

Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and other reformed denominations, “This class [of Lutherans] was hostile to ‘big business,’ to the city and city ways; averse to speculative enterprise and

economics, but equally afraid of radical experiments.”46