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The Topline: Counting Lutherans • Minnesota Reformer [1]

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Date: 2024-08-12

Welcome to The Topline, a weekly roundup of the big numbers driving the Minnesota news cycle, as well as the smaller ones that you might have missed. This week: Lutheranism; spending on the arts; Walz’s net worth; and a population-based argument for annexing the Dakotas.

Are Lutherans too extreme?

In an effort to discredit Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, some members of conservative media have attempted to portray his church as extreme and out-of-touch with mainstream American values.

“Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz attends a church that preaches beliefs related to gender, race and sexuality that many Christian denominations strongly oppose,” the Daily Caller wrote last week.

Another conservative commentator claimed Walz adhered to “an extremely left-wing sub-denomination” of Christianity.

To be perfectly clear: Walz belongs to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the quintessentially Minnesotan brand of Protestantism that’s the biggest branch of American Lutheranism, the second-largest individual denomination in the state, and the seventh-largest of the nearly 400 distinct religious groups in the United States.

Those figures come from the 2020 Religion Census, an academic project that tracks religious adherence in the U.S. The ELCA is one of what religion scholars call the “mainline” Protestant churches, which have deep historic roots, are traditionally associated with the Northeast and Midwest, and tend to lean socially liberal.

More than 1 in 5 of Minnesota’s faithful are members of the ELCA, according to the Religion Census. The only larger denomination in the state is Catholicism. The ELCA is well-represented in other Midwestern swing states as well.

“The lion’s share of U.S. presidents — including Barack Obama, who came to Christ in a UCC church, and Donald Trump, who initially identified as Presbyterian — have hailed from mainline traditions at some point in their lives, if not during their presidency,” as Jack Jenkins of the Religion News Service wrote in 2021.

Numbers aside, good luck trying to get people to associate Minnesota Lutherans with extremism.

Minnesota leads nation on public support for the arts

Minnesota spends more public money on the arts, in per-capita terms, than any other state in the union, according to a report by the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies released earlier this year.

Minnesota spends $9.62 on the arts for every man, woman and child living within its borders, considerably more than the $7.20 spent by Hawaii, second-highest on the list. Just five states spend more than $5 per-capita on the arts each year.

We’re also neighbors with one of the most art-impoverished states: Wisconsin, which spends just 18 cents on the arts for each resident.

The reason for Minnesota’s large amount of spending isn’t exactly a secret: it’s due to the taxpayer-approved Legacy fund, which supports the arts and outdoor activities via a dedicated sales tax.

The worth of Tim Walz

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Tim and Gwen Walz’s combined net worth was somewhere between $112,000 and $330,000 in 2019, according to his latest available financial disclosures.

Net worth is a measure of a family’s assets, including real estate and retirement accounts, minus debts like mortgages and car loans. On that measure the Walzes look like typical middle-class Americans: the median family net worth in the U.S., for instance, is $192,000.

We don’t have an exact number on Walz’s net worth because politicians’ financial disclosures typically only report assets and debts within a range of values. That seems like an area ripe for reform at a time when millionaire and billionaire politicians are increasingly the norm.

Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s net worth is somewhere between $4 million and $10 million, the Journal estimates.

40% of Dakotans live east of Minnesota’s westernmost point

There’s a lot of tongue-in-cheek Minnesota chauvinism happening online these days. One community of Northstar redditors, in the “Megasota” subreddit, is working on plans to annex parts of neighboring states, and one of the arguments they’ve marshaled so far is this interesting map by former Minnesota Public Radio reporter David Montgomery.

Because the Dakotas’ population is so heavily concentrated in cities along the states’ eastern borders, it turns out that 40% of them are technically east of Minnesota’s westernmost point, which is a little corner of Kittson county in the far northwest.

“Our borders should scooch on over there,” the Minnesota supremacists claim.

This reminds me of my favorite Minnesota population factoid, which is that the state’s geographic center of population is at roughly the same latitude as all of Canada’s. This means you could make the argument that in population-adjusted terms, Minnesota is as far north as Canada. Perhaps the Megasota community needs to think bigger?

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[1] Url: https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/08/12/the-topline-counting-lutherans/

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