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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Behind The Numbers: A Traditional Church Faces A New America, Larry Vogel
Behind The Numbers: A Traditional Church Faces A New America, Larry Vogel
Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation
The dissertation examines membership data for The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) from the mid-1970s to the present. It considers the analysis of LCMS decline by two scholars, George Hawley and Ryan MacPherson, who independently proposed that LCMS membership decline was internal in causation due to diminished birthrates and fewer young families. While acknowledging the reality of such internal decline, this dissertation argues that the lack of external growth is a greater cause for LCMS decline. Its lack of external growth is due primarily to the racial and ethnic homogeneity of the LCMS and its failure effectively to evangelize the increasingly …
Christian Identity Meets Identity Politics: A Lutheran Approach To Political Engagement, Michael Hanson
Christian Identity Meets Identity Politics: A Lutheran Approach To Political Engagement, Michael Hanson
Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation
Identity politics has become a frequently referenced and much maligned term used to describe a trend in political engagement in the early 21st century. Identity politics is employed across the political spectrum and has critics on both the left and right in the United States. Christian Identity Meets Identity Politics examines the contours of identity politics to understand and consider the concerns which lead neighbors to engage in identity politics, accounts for the needs of those neighbors who are denied God’s gift of justice through the state, considers criticisms leveled against identity politics within the greater view of Western …