Denker: And now Elon Musk is coming after Lutheran refugee organizations

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Before I begin, you should know that I had vowed that this time around I would not allow my own vocation and journalism to be dictated by Donald Trump’s — or his people’s — social media posts.

I would not let my Friday nights be derailed by hysteria on CNN and MSNBC about the latest “Friday night surprise.” I was determined therefore to stay focused on my own unique role as a pastor, parent and writer. I’d set my own narrative.

Then, they came for Lutherans.

I understand of course that this particular threat toward a subset of American Christians may not be quite as motivating to most Americans as it was to me, a Lutheran clergy member for over a decade, granddaughter and great-great-granddaughter of Lutheran ministers who devoted their lives to a calling that often left them impoverished and forlorn.

Let me back up. Because like attacks against other groups, recent attacks against Lutheran Americans portend a much larger threat toward wide swaths of the American populace — Christian or not.

Before you know it, you may be soon saying: “Then they came for me.”

Recent headlines since Trump’s inauguration last month have revealed that — contrary to the reassuring “reporting” that Trump had disavowed the Christian nationalist aims of Project 2025, a bold blueprint that included dismantling much of the social safety net and public education, and targeting immigrants, women and LGBTQ people — Trump and his administration have in fact been following the Project 2025 playbook to a T.

Project 2025 is rooted in a particular idea of white, conservative American Christianity. For Trump’s moves against agencies that support immigration and refugees to fit into an American “Christian” framework, therefore, the proponents of Project 2025 must attack and delegitimize any forms of American Christianity that work to carry out the biblical mandate of “care for the stranger” and the poor, even as Project 2025 dismantles the social safety net.

This past week, as part of an onslaught of Project 2025-motivated attacks on U.S. foreign aid and immigration generally, retired General Mike Flynn, who has a felony conviction for making false statements to the FBI but was pardoned by Trump, launched an online missive against Global Refuge (formerly known as Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services), suggesting it was using religion as a shield for money laundering.

Flynn’s post was amplified a day later by wannabe Rasputin and X owner Elon Musk, who said that his Department of Government Efficiency was “rapidly shutting down these illegal payments,” referring to grants made to Global Refuge.

Flynn referencing “Lutheran” in his post set off a series of events that required a response, particularly in the Upper Midwest — Minnesota and the Dakotas, where Lutherans still outnumber all other non-Catholic Christians.

As a Lutheran clergy member and Minnesota pastor, I had several people send me the video response put together in defense of Global Refuge by current Evangelical Lutheran Church in America presiding bishop Elizabeth Eaton. Like Bishop Mariann Budde in her sermon plea for mercy to Trump, Eaton was not radical or revolutionary in her video, or even overly critical of Trump’s overall policies. Instead, she was defending the status quo of mainline Protestant institutions who participate in government organizations related to refugees and immigration. Mainline institutions are motivated to do so by the Social Gospel, which suggests that American Christians should participate in politics by supporting the needs of the poor and marginalized.

I’m glad the bishop responded. I think it’s important to explain why the work of refugee organizations is not in fact money laundering. Most of the time, they’re using that money to buy food and pay a month’s rent on modest apartments for desperate victims of war and genocide from around the world. “Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free … .”

However, there are several places where the actions of the Church itself, and Democratic-leaning Christian leaders in general, have made themselves susceptible to such attacks from the likes of Flynn and Musk.

Let’s first explain how Global Refuge is connected to the ELCA. Despite a flashy new website and graphics, “Global Refuge” is a corporate-style rebrand of an 89-year organization called Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS). It’s not lost on me that this organization began in 1939 in the wake of Nazism in Germany. LIRS was indeed founded in response to the needs of European Jews and other religious, ethnic, political and cultural minorities — including so-called Communists and LGBTQ people — who were being rounded up, stripped of their citizenship, and sent to ghettos and concentration camps. American Lutherans, many of whom were of German descent, wanted to separate themselves from their German Lutheran counterparts, a large majority of whom had signed oaths of allegiance to Hitler and a “German Christian” national church. The support of immigrants, many of whom weren’t Christians, by these American Lutherans was in direct resistance to a political movement in Europe that saw itself as returning Germany to its nativist home, exclusively for white (Aryan) German Christians only. All others were somehow not “real” Germans. Sound familiar?

Unfortunately, rebranding LIRS to the bland-sounding Global Refuge erases this relevant history at a time in America when immigrants and religious minorities are under threat of being arrested or stripped of their citizenship. The rebrand away from a religious identity as motivation for care for the poor and marginalized follows a troubling trend I’ve noticed since growing up Lutheran in the ’90s and early aughts. As part of this trend, Christians who consider themselves non-evangelical and not necessarily religiously conservative or fundamentalist have distanced themselves from our religious and theological motivations.

This distancing, as evidenced by the rebranding of Christian organizations to nonreligious terms, despite still being run by mainline churches, has created a reality in which American Christianity is understood almost exclusively as a conservative, fundamentalist religious movement concerned more with privileging American Christians above other groups than caring for the poor. The historical role of Social Gospel-motivated American Christian movements, like Global Refuge/LIRS, is flattened down and its religious connection is erased. Then, folks like Flynn and Musk can claim that there is no Christian imperative to care for refugees or the poor, and these organizations are simply “money laundering.”

To be clear, I am not saying these attacks are warranted whatsoever, but I am saying that an inability to identify a specifically Christian imperative to care for immigrants has left a vacuum where the Social Gospel as an essential part of American Christianity once was. Into that vacuum has poured a nonthreatening and vague white, privileged liberalism almost indistinguishable from the Democratic Party itself. Mainline institutions who had always enjoyed privileged seats of power within American government lost their sense of a distinct religious identity: a critique foreseen by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who warned about white moderates and their lack of commitment to gospel issues of freedom, civil rights, and care for the poor and marginalized in exchange for a seat at the table of government and political power.