By Lars Walker All right, I’ll come clean. Sam Karnick wore me down, and I have to admit it. I am a Lutheran. And that, at least according to Joshua Green at The Atlantic, would seem to be pretty fringey stuff. Definitely outside the realm of respectable opinion in today’s world. (Which must be a surprise to all those Garrison Keillor fans.) Or… maybe I’m not a Lutheran at all, really. If you were to speak to an official of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, to one of whose congregations presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann used to belong, they’d probably tell you that my own church, a member of a conservative but pietistic fellowship, isn’t really Lutheran in the proper meaning of the term. We’re insufficiently sacramental in our focus, and so not truly Lutheran. And you know what? I’m OK with that. Among ourselves, we other Lutherans laugh at the Wisconsin Synod sometimes. You might call them our Hasidim. A little strict, a little stiff by our standards. They have their own ways, which sometimes can even cause offense, as when we visit their churches and are denied communion. But at bottom we respect them. They have their principles, and











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