Modern But Not Liberal

For the people I grew up with in the Valley of Virginia, in the Lutheran Church in America (a denomination that no longer exists), modern science and American democracy seemed obvious goods, as did social mobility and religious toleration. We were acutely conscious of our differences from both Roman Catholics and other Protestants, but we did not regard the fact of religious diversity as a cultural or political scandal. We were not particularly aware of biblical criticism, but we were not much threatened by what we knew of it; I was taught the documentary hypothesis of the origins of the Pentateuch in Sunday school.

But this practical modernity was not underwritten by any modernist or liberal ideology. We worshiped according to a liturgy modeled on the Lutheran church orders of the Reformation era and deliberately composed in the language of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.