Walther League - Kum Ba Yah

Topic: Religious Folk Music Revival
On 6 January 1967, Time magazine declared people under the age of 25 its persons of the year, and dubbed them the Now Generation. [1] It aimed to ease the anxieties of its older, conservative readers by explaining the restlessness of the young. The conservative Henry Luce publication assured parents that not all were dropouts.

Inter-generational conflict had erupted in the Lutheran’s Missouri Synod in 1965 when the Walther League invited Pete Seeger to perform at the youth group’s convention. [2] The most vocal critic was associated with the man who published None Dare Call It Treason [3] in 1964. [4] Herman Otten [5] filled every issue of his weekly Lutheran News with reminders that Seeger had been accused of being a Communist. [6]

Tensions were inherent in the Synod’s evolution. Its nucleus had been a group who left Saxony in 1838 to escape Friedrich Wilhelm III’s attempts to standardize religious practices in Prussia. [7] It had expanded in the nineteenth century to include Lutherans from many cultural traditions. [8]

Lutherans split over slavery. Those who had moved to the South, often from German-speaking areas, owned slaves and supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. Scandinavians in the upper Midwest were against human bondage. [9]

The head of the Missouri Synod tried to stay neutral. C. F. W. Walther claimed being a slave was punishment for a sin, and abolitionists were misguided in their attempts to eliminate it. [10] On the other head, he opposed rebellion against the government because Martin Luther had supported Protestant princes and burghers in 1525 during the Peasant’s Rebellion. [11]

The Walther League was organized around the turn of the twentieth century by young northerners to help rural and European immigrants to cities remain in the church. [12] The Synod refused to recognize the group until 1920, [13] because it existed outside the oversight of local pastors. [14] In return for its support, the hierarchy demanded more time be devoted to Bible study, and less to other activities. [15]

The chasm widened in 1950 when the Texas-born head of the Synod moved its headquarters to Saint Louis from northern Illinois, [16] while the League remained in Chicago. [17] Club members were exposed to new ideas when they attended conventions [18] and summer resident camps [19] sponsored by the League.

In 1953, the League was selling a customized songbook published by Lynn Rohrbough’s Cooperative Recreation Service. [20] One member in Saskatchewan remembered singing "Jacob’s Ladder" and "I’m Gonna Sing" from Sing Again. [21] In 1914, when the League published its first song list, it didn’t even know what a spiritual was, despite tours by groups like the Fisk Jubilee Singers. It used the term to refer to the group’s spirit or pep songs. A few songs by Stephen Foster graced the collection of hymns. [22]

The League published Hymns for Now six months after Time introduced the Now Generation. It contained only one overtly political song, "We Shall Overcome." [23] It didn’t credit Seeger, but a publication from an even bigger nemesis for men like Otten, the World Council of Churches. [24]

Hymns for Now differed from the Methodist songbook described on 9 February 2020 [25] in ways that revealed how Lutherans in general, and those in the Synod in particular, differed from churches descended from the Anglo-Scots Reformation. It included fewer folk songs (19% versus 42%), [26] but about the same number of African-American religious songs (12% versus 10%). What was unique was the number taken from the Roman Catholic folk mass movement (about 15%). [27]

This suggests the Synod hierarchy wasn’t just feeling pressure from the laity over Civil Rights activities, and from young pastors over interpretations of the Bible. [28] It also saw one of its traditional enemies being more open to its youth after Vatican II in 1964 than it was itself. [29]

The Synod stopped funding the League the year it published Hymns for Now, [30] and sponsored a parallel youth program. [31] It 1968, Fortress Press issued an alternative record album, For Mature Audiences Only. [32] It featured settings by Richard Koehneke of poems by young parishioners collected by Norman Habel.

It 1969, the Board of Youth Ministries published a second volume of Hymns for Now. The numbers of African-American spirituals [33] and other folk songs declined, but the percentage of Roman Catholic ones remained the same.

Rohrbough’s version of "Kum Ba Yah" was included without an attribution. It simply said it was "Traditional."

1969 was the year men like Otten took control of the Synod. [34] The Board of Youth Ministries published a final edition of Hymns for Now in 1972, the year before the Synod began eliminating liberal professors from the Concordia Seminary faculty. It contained no spirituals or folk songs, but the same number of Catholic ones. Koehneke was the guest editor. He wrote 7 of the 27 songs. [35]

(Continued in next post, dated 28 June 2020)

End Notes
1. "Man Of The Year: The Inheritor." Time. 6 January 1967.
2. Jon Pahl. Hopes and Dreams of All. Chicago: Wheat Ridge Ministries, 1993. 266–267.

3. John A. Stormer. None Dare Call It Treason. Florissant, Missouri: Liberty Bell Press, 1964.

4. James C. Burkee. Power, Politics, and the Missouri Synod. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011. 64. In 1965, Stormer taught Otten how to self-publish.

5. Otten was the son of German immigrants. He began rebelling against modern trends in the Lutheran church when he was young. [36] Burkee believed Otten was used by men who sought power in the Synod. He wrote, Otten "was exploited by conservatives too cowardly to publicly associate their respectable names and clerical collars with his ethically questionable actions. Several times during his career as the synod’s chief antagonist, Otten led crusades that began with scores of professing supporters in underground gatherings, only to find himself alone and abandoned when the campaign reached daylight." [37]

6. Burkee. 61.
7. Wikipedia. "Saxon Lutheran Immigration of 1838–39."
8. Wikipedia. "Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod."

9. Mark Granquist. Lutherans in America. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015. No page numbers in on-line edition.

10. Granquist. C. F. W. Walther took over the leadership of the Saxon Lutheran community in Missouri in the early years. [38] The youth group was named after him.

11. Richard M. Chapman. "Just Enough? Lutherans, Slavery, and the Struggle for Racial Justice." The Cresset 71(5):16–20:2008. For more on Luther and the Peasant’s War, see Wikipedia’s "German Peasants’ War" and "Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants." This same acceptance of discrimination that did not end in civil violence remained part of the Synod’s intellectual tradition. In the 1920s, the Walther League Messenger simultaneously denounced African-American religious practices and the Ku Klux Klan. [39] Likewise, the publication’s editor, Walter A. Maier, had no problem with making anti-Semitic statements in 1933, then criticizing Hitler’s extremes in 1939. [40]

12. The League’s most important activity was sponsoring boarding houses. [41] One of Frank Buchman’s first tasks as a Lutheran minister was running such a hospice. The founder of Moral Re-Armament was discussed in the post for 16 February 2020.

13. Pahl. 108.
14. Pahl. 62.
15. Pahl. 109.

16. Burkee. 22. John Behnken spent much of his early life in a German community near Houston. [42]

17. Pahl. 189–190. Its Chicago headquarters was built in 1942.

18. Pahl. 239. Pastors complained about the conventions. One wrote the president of the Walther League in 1953: "In the home congregations the young people are warned against the sinful dances, [but] when they young folks return from the [Walther League] convention...they report what a wonderful time they had . . . ‘dancing to beat the band.’" [43]

19. Pahl. 217–218.

20. Gerhard Schroth. "Singing Is Fun." Walther League Messenger 61:16:June 1953. Cited by Pahl. 225. Larry Nial Holcomb listed Sing Again as a CRS publication done for the Walther League in "A History of the Cooperative Recreation Service." PhD diss. University of Michigan, 1972. 230.

21. Elizabeth Zoller. Letter to Jon Pahl. 23 September 1991. Quoted by Pahl. 225.
22. Pahl. 96.

23. Walther League. Hymns for Now I. In Workers Quarterly 39(3):July 1967. Edited by Dean Kell. Reprinted by Concordia Publishing House of Saint Louis. 11.

24. The song appeared in Paul Abels’ "New Hymns for a New Day." Risk 2(3):1–80:1966. Risk was sponsored by the Youth Department of the World Council of Churches. Otten attacked the organization with innuendos. [44] Stormer called the related National Council of Churches a communist front. [45]

25. The songbook was Sing It Again.

26. The folk songs were from China, Nigeria, Israel, Portugal, and the Netherlands. In contrast, half the songs in Sing It Again were from Europe, especially areas that spoke Germanic languages. "Shalom" was printed in the English translation used in Risk, not the Hebrew one publicized by CRS.

27. Two of the Catholic songs were by Ray Repp, who composed the first folk liturgy in 1964, Mass for Young Americans. The others were issued by FEL Publications, which specialized in post-Vatican II music for Roman Catholics. [46]

28. Challenges to inerrancy, or the literal interpretations of the Bible, were an underlying current in all the attacks by conservatives. Norman Habel drew their ire for arguing "the ‘fall narrative’ (the Genesis account of Adam and Eve) could be legitimately considered as a ‘symbolical religious history’." [47] In his second year as a student at Concordia Seminary in Saint Louis, Otten demanded an older student answer the question, "Do you accept Adam and Eve as real historical persons?" [48] Stormer, who was pastor of the independent Heritage Baptist Church in suburban Saint Louis, damned the National Council of Church’s edition of the Bible that changed the word "virgin" to "young woman" to describe Christ’s mother. [49]

29. Lutherans had an equally strong antipathy for Jews that was grounded in history. During the years Otten became active, evidence of the Holocaust was accumulating. First came Anne Frank’s diary in 1952, [50] then the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, [51] and finally Hannah Arendt’s introduction of the term "banality of evil" in 1963. [52] She didn’t see Eichmann as some kind of monster, but a logical consequence of the German acceptance of authority, which went back to Luther, and individuals’ desires to conform with their neighbors. [53] Otten began publishing his Lutheran News in 1962, [54] and soon became "active in the Holocaust-denial movemnt." [55] Pahl noted the Walther League magazine article that caused the greatest controversy was one published in 1965 on Lutheran anti-Semitism. [56]

30. Pahl. 271.
31. Pahl. 268–269, 271. The Board for Young People’s Work was reorganized in 1966.

32. Norman Habel and Richard Koehneke. For Mature Adults Only. Philadelphia: Fortress Records. 32-2147-74. 1968. [Discogs website.]

33. The "Introduction" said: "We have included some traditional spirituals, simply because they have taken on new meanings as more and more we share the struggles they express."

34. Jack Preus was elected head of Synod; he had taken over the conservative movement [57] and oversaw the purge of liberals from the faculty of Concordia Seminary in Saint Louis. Habel was banned for the heresy of Gospel Reductionism. [58]

35. Hymns for Now III. In Resources for Youth Ministry 4(1):Winter 1972. Edited by Martin W. Steyer.

36. Burkee. 27–28.
37. Burkee. 8.
38. Wikipedia. "Saxon Lutheran Immigration."
39. Pahl. 133–134.
40. Pahl. 172–175.
41. Pahl. 63–69.
42. Wikipedia. "John William Behnken."

43. Rev. T. J. Vogel, Amherst, Nebraska. Letter to Edgar Fritz. 21 March 1953. Quoted by Pahl. 239.

44. Burkee. 60.
45. Stormer. 125–126.

46. William Grady. "Publisher Won’t End Battle over Hymns." Chicago Tribune. 13 June 1990.

47. Norman Habel. "The Form and Meaning of the Fall Narrative." Saint Louis: Concordia Seminary Print Shop, 1965. Cited by Burkee. 25.

48. Burkee. 31.
49. Stormer. 128. The reference was to Isaiah 7:14.

50. 1952 book. Anne Frank. The Diary of a Young Girl. Translated by B. M. Mooyaat-Doubleday. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.

1955 play. Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. The Diary of Anne Frank.

1959 film. The Diary of Anne Frank. (Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation.)

51. The same year, a dramatization of one of the 1947 U. S. military trials, Judgment at Nuremberg, won an Academy Award for Maximilian Schell.

52. Hannah Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press, 1963.

53. Wikipedia. "Hannah Arendt."
54. Burkee. 6.
55. Burkee. 9.

56. Warren Saffen. "A Lutheran Looks at the Jews." Arena 73. Spring 1965. Cited by Pahl. 265.

57. Burkee. 9.

58. Norman Habel. "My Story." His website. "I first became a controversial figure when I gave a exploratory paper on Genesis 3 to the council of presidents of The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. That paper became known as the Green Dragon. The controversy about how to interpret the Bible escalated until a Synod assembly declared that the way a majority of our faculty was reading the Bible was, in fact, an unknown heresy known as Gospel Reductionism!"