Special Report
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=11885
The Race and the Not-So-Swift
By Lars Walker (AFLC)
Published 8/17/2007 12:07:54 AM
Like all conservatives, I've been called a Nazi more than once. But only once in my life did I feel like a Nazi.
I had a job as a church secretary in a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, this country's largest Lutheran body. One of the annual duties we all hated was completing the mandatory statistical reports. This was unpleasant partly because it involved going over a lot of records (total membership, number of communion acts, number of baptisms, etc.). But it was also morally noxious.
Because one section of the forms dealt with ethnicity. It required us to go through the entire congregational roll, name by name, and determine to what ethnic group we would assign each member.
Our senior pastor, a splendid old saint (now gone to his reward) without a corpuscle of bigotry in his body, nevertheless saw no problem in applying the old Jim Crow rule to the problem: "One touch of the tar-brush makes you colored." Thus, if someone casually mentioned to him that one of their great-great-grandmothers had been a Cherokee, the pastor would have us mark them down as "Native American." This looked good on the forms, since the ELCA was then -- and remains today -- desperate to be "diverse."
I CAME ACROSS A news item from the Christian Post Reporter the other day, concerning diversity efforts in the ELCA. It says that the denomination's constituting convention (1987) adopted the goal "that within ten years of its establishment its membership shall include at least 10 percent people of color and/or primary language other than English."
At that time their minority membership stood at 2 percent. By 1997, when the 10 years had passed, that percentage had skyrocketed to 2.13 percent. By December 2005 they were able to boast a whopping 3 percent membership of pretty-much-anything-except-Germans-or-Scandinavians.
