The news of the recent installation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s first transgender bishop has been leading me to wonder what makes a culture Lutheran and what impact Lutherans have on the cultures of the countries they live in.

Here’s the context. For the past week, I’ve been traveling about Iceland and Greenland, two countries where the Lutheran Church put down roots centuries ago as the national church. In fact, 2021 marks the 300th year of Christianity being introduced to Greenland via the Danish missionary Hans Egede.

Oddly, Greenland chose not to celebrate the anniversary in July, which is when Egede came in 1721.

Iceland has notorious rates of church non-attendance — in one of the world’s seven officially Lutheran countries, Iceland’s adherence rate may be the lowest at 10 percent. (One of the fastest-growing groups in that Nordic country are the pagans, a phenomenon about which I’ll be reporting on next week for my new gig at Newsweek).

I am no expert on religion in Greenland, but I do know this inaccurate piece put out in 2019 by the World Council of Churches is quite wrong in saying there’s only two churches in Nuuk, the country’s capital. Maybe there are only two Lutheran churches, but I stumbled upon a very lively Pentecostal assembly in the center of town during the Sunday morning I was there.

Which brings me to there being a Lutheran culture in these two countries, church attendance rates notwithstanding. There is a prominent church in the center of each Greenlandic town of any size. Confirmation day remains a big deal for teen-agers there. The Icelanders have made their futuristic looking churches a matter of national pride, whether or not people go inside them and even though some media call the church “irrelevant.”

And being that Greenland has some of the world’s highest suicide rates, does that make the church there is “irrelevant” as well? Hard to say. But these are countries where Lutheranism is part of the air they breathe.

Here in the USA, the ELCA is slated for statistical oblivion by the 2040s. No joke, read about it here. In view of how many of the world’s growing denominations are the ones that trend conservative, the denomination’s 2009 vote to allow same-sex marriages among its clergy and, now, non-gender-specific bishops is rather symbolic. Lutheran conservatives would call it a death wish.