From The "Living" Lutheran. . .

I was about to toss out some things that came in the mail but I had not read when I happened upon the Summer 2025 issue of Living Lutheran.  I did not get very far in my perusal of the pages until I sensed a pattern developing.  Thirteen of the seventeen authors were women (without spending time to discern their felt gender), two of the male authors were writing about women and one about LGBTQIA+, one other male author wrote partly about women (interviewed one), and eight out of ten news updates of the ELCA were about women.  So much for the face of diversity or is this a nod to historically underrepresented?  Oh, I forgot to mention that cartoon was about a man -- Moses who loved the font God had used the font to inscribe the commandments on stone (I presume part of the joke was that he liked the font better than he liked the commandments themselves).  Okay.  There you go.

The face of diversity historically has meant a view across age groups, marital status, and male and female. Now diversity has become something different in a church body that has almost inscribed diversity upon those stone tablets.  It is about anything but men and in particular about the individual over the family and domestic relationships that once were the hallmark of our identity as people.  Okay.  It is not my church so who am I to complain, right?  I am not really complaining, just observing.  There are so many profound things that you learn by looking at the flagship periodical of a church body.  I learned that women were in control (whether cisgendered or some other version).  The ELCA was saying this was a church body for, about, and run by women.  Oddly enough, the LCMS, which most would almost condemn as misogynistic, has more rostered female church workers than the ELCA.  You would not know it from their journal because its pages are mostly about the faith.  By the way, several of those Living Lutheran articles and news briefs were about or by their female presiding bishop (who is not going to run again, I am told) so it is not simply female but about their most prominent female -- again a not so subtle impression any reader ought to get from the pages of this periodical.

Without trying to gang up on the ELCA, this print edition seems to go overboard in pursuit of a diversity that is rather forced and that is my point.  When you have won the war on men (except for those who are not straight and presumably those with whom  you have no fight), there is only one thing to do -- you define diversity with a female byline, subject, or face.