Denker: Innocuous white supremacists and Midwestern small towns

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of material from 11 contributing columnists, along with other commentary online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

Dear readers,

I’ve so enjoyed getting to know many of you in the past few months as one of the Star Tribune’s contributing columnists. During this time, while writing columns and working as a Lutheran pastor here in Minnesota, I’ve also been deep in research for a new book about white men and boys, radicalization, violence, politics, religion — and ultimately hope for a healthier masculinity for the men and boys in my own life.

When I first started researching this book, my own two sons were still little boys. Now the oldest is almost a teenager. I also didn’t know — when I first started writing this book — the ways in which the topics of my book would play out on a national political stage, following Donald Trump’s second election to the presidency, and the role played by many leading figures in what we sometimes call “the manosphere,” including the podcasters, YouTubers, pastors and politicians I write about in my book.

It was nearly five years ago that I first read about the small-town Minnesota Lutheran church building that was purchased by a white supremacist group. I remember reading headlines about the story not only locally but also in national media. I was heartened to read about the strong response of small-town Minnesotans to disavow the white supremacists and to fight against the sale of the church to the group, but I was also saddened to see that the town eventually had to allow the sale to avoid facing a First Amendment challenge. Then, when I began researching right-wing radicalization among young white boys and men, I remembered the story of the Lutheran church building in Murdock, Minn. I realized that the former pastor of this church was an ELCA colleague of mine whom I’d met personally. I knew part of the journey to my new book would have to run through the southwestern Minnesota prairies that were also my family’s ancestral home.

I’m grateful to have a chance to share with you below a small excerpt from the work and research I’ve been doing in this area, just as “Disciples of White Jesus” is about to be released into the world. I wanted to share especially with you a portion of the book that’s focused on Minnesota, and the particular ways that race, religion and gender function here in this state that we all love so much. I hope you enjoy reading, and please do share with me your thoughts about future ways this topic area touches you — in all corners of our state. Now, here’s the excerpt:

•••

Before I came to do research in Murdock, Minn., where national news outlets swooped in to cover the purchase of an abandoned former Lutheran church by a white supremacist “folk” organization, I did not know that Murdock was only twelve miles from the picturesque small town where my grandma grew up. It made sense, though, because as I left the bustle of Minneapolis on a brisk October day, and I watched as the “little boxes on the hillside” of the suburbs faded into rolling green hills and brown row crops, ready for harvest, a part of me felt like I was coming home.

When I realized that my family surrounded the tiny town of Murdock, I didn’t want to see my connection to the story of Baldrs Hof right away, because it’s always easier when complicated stories aren’t about you. But this story of the white supremacist organization that came to this MN small town was unmistakably and uncomfortably close to my story, to so much that I held and hold dear, to the two white boys I carried in my womb and was raising in my home, to the churches where I preached and pastored.

I drove up to Murdock from Sherrie’s Cafe in Kerkhoven, where I had a BLT for lunch with a couple of pastor friends. I kept not knowing how to refer to the place where I was going. Like we white Midwesterners do when something is guilt-inducing or uncomfortable, when we talked about the Asatru Folk Assembly, who had purchased the former Calvary Lutheran Church, established in Murdock in 1903 as Fridhem Evangelical Lutheran Church, we referred to the Asatru group with blank stares or knowing nods. We didn’t want to call it by name, and I found myself thinking of it as the “white supremacist church.” Of course, a church it was not.

A colleague of mine, Mike Carlson, served as administrative pastor when Calvary was closed. He wrote on Facebook in 2021 that closing the church was “easily the hardest thing I have been a part of.” Initially, according to Carlson, the church was sold to a Christian ministry from the metro area who wanted to create a rural retreat. Those plans never came to fruition, and so the ministry sold the building to a family that was going to make it a home, as often happens to now-closed, small-town churches all across America and Europe. But the family couldn’t make a go of it, and then the building was sold to the Asatru Folk Assembly, despite loud protests and attempted roadblocks from the town of Murdock. Ultimately, the town determined it could not withstand a First Amendment challenge if it blocked the sale to the group.

No one I spoke to in Swift County wanted to talk much about Baldrs Hof. It seemed they’d rather pretend it didn’t exist, that it wasn’t there at all. I understood the impulse. After the town’s determination that it was forced to allow the sale on First Amendment grounds, there wasn’t much they could do, maybe. But I also recognized a tendency, inherent in the “Northern European” white people whom the group wanted to recruit, to erase our memories about the movements that did not directly challenge or kill us.

I noticed this in myself, too. I felt odd, parking next to the former Lutheran Church building, whose cornerstone plaque still graced the side of the white clapboard church. In front was a red swing on a gently swaying oak tree, as if to entice children to come and play.

There was an old-fashioned wooden plow adorned with white, yellow, and orange fake flowers by the side of the church. Some kind of red walkie-talkie with musical note buttons lying next to the sidewalk. A shed, open, with a red gas can and funnel, a nice-looking Craftsman riding lawnmower, along with a push mower, a bag of charcoal, and a green Menards bucket. There were no swastikas, no overt symbols of hate, but as I looked again at the photos I’d taken, I was struck by all the red and black in this seemingly pastoral scene.

I heard from a person in the neighboring town that some people found the white supremacists kind and responsible because they’d “cleaned up the property,” and they’d also given away all the crosses and Christian symbols that were once inside. Asatru itself merely means “belief in the Germanic gods,” and refers to an “Icelandic pagan faith grounded in universal inclusion.” But the AFA co-opted the term and the pre-Christian Norse gods to “describe ethnic and racial exclusivity.”

“I have one person who refuses to believe it’s a hate group,” a local pastor told me. “She says, ‘They’re just such nice people, and they take such good care of the property.’ ”

I couldn’t help but think of bucolic scenes I’d once read about in a description of the Berghof, Hitler’s vacation home in the Obersalzberg of the Bavarian Alps near Berchtesgaden, Bavaria. There he and Eva Braun and the other Nazi officers and wives frolicked in the sun and ate rich food, singing and smiling as the smoke rose up from the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

While I walked around the AFA, I didn’t see anyone else. I did notice that those who drove past, in work trucks and pickup trucks and minivans, didn’t make eye contact with me or wave, unusual for Midwestern small-town politeness. It occurred to me that, with my blonde hair and blue eyes, they likely thought I was a member of the group.

The inability of the locals to openly discuss the AFA or talk about what particularly made it so abhorrent didn’t surprise me. After all, I was born and raised in the German/Scandinavian, Lutheran/Catholic, white culture of Minnesota. The worst someone will say to your face is that something is “interesting,” which may as well mean it’s the worst thing they’ve ever heard. White people here have a hard time saying how we really feel. It’s why we’re so “nice,” and it’s also why white Minnesotans often carry within ourselves a heavy dose of unexamined racism. As the brilliant October sun beat down on the green grass, shining rays through the yellow leaves that had already changed on the nearby birch trees, I realized that this “Hof”— rather than representing something that the white Christian residents of the town wanted to outright destroy — instead maybe represented something abhorrent within ourselves, something we’d rather keep far below the surface.