It must have been the biggest news story to ever come out of the community where I grew up. Perhaps it says something about our spirit of reconciliation that I never heard about it until I was an adult.
A group of my surviving high school class members gathered for an informal reunion back in (I think) 2010. We were at the home of one of my classmates, in the township of Holden, just north of town. I was standing in the yard, looking over at the church a little to the east, and a friend came up beside me and said, “You know there was a big scandal with the pastor in that church, back in pioneer days.”
“B. J. Muus?” I asked. I knew that Pastor Muus, the founder of St. Olaf College, had been the original pastor there.
“Yeah,” he said. “Something about his wife suing him for divorce.”
Later on, I was told that the house where we were meeting that evening had been the home of the local doctor, who’d been accused of having an affair with Mrs. Muus.
After that, I started reading up on the story, which turned out to have been a big deal back in 1880. But I didn’t have the full story until I read Muus vs. Muus: The Scandal That Shook Norwegian America, by Bodil Stenseth. I had had the impression that adultery was at the center of the scandal, but the real bone of contention turned out to be the one that remains the most common cause of marriage breakups today – money.
Bernt Julius Muus (pronounced “Moose”) and Oline Pind were not your average Norwegian immigrants. They did not come to America because of hard economic necessity; they came from privileged families. He felt called to minister to Norwegian Americans in the new country, and Oline felt called to be his helpmate.
They settled on the virgin prairie of Goodhue County, Minnesota, in the tiny settlement of Holden. Bernt, a hard man and a preacher of fiery sermons, worked tirelessly, not only to build his own congregation, but to plant churches all over the upper Midwest. In time he rose to be the first president of the Minnesota District of the conservative Norwegian Synod. Oline worked hard too, keeping the house, raising their children, filling in for her husband in practical matters of the congregation during his frequent absences.
Then, in 1879, she dropped a bombshell. She sued her husband for the money she had inherited from her father, which he had taken into his possession under Norwegian law. But they were in the U.S. now (though both Oline and Bernt remained Norwegian citizens) and she felt she should be able to control her own money as U.S. law permitted.
The matter might not have become a cause célèbre, though, if a document called “the Complaint” hadn’t been appended to the legal text. This document accused Pastor Muus of mental cruelty, neglect, and a stingy refusal to spend money on basic household necessities, to the point of damaging her and their children’s health.
Critics of the Norwegian Synod found this story irresistible. My people, the pietist Haugeans, who considered the Norwegian Synod papist and aristocratic (and were much more open to feminism than the Synod men), saw Bernt Muus as a power-hungry ecclesiastical tyrant. The men of the Lutheran Free Church, whose successors I worked for many years, supported Mrs. Muus after the divorce was finalized. Norwegian-American freethinkers, like Marcus Thrane whose comic opera “Holden” was performed in Chicago, used the case to attack orthodox Christianity itself. And nativist Americans were shocked by the bizarre goings on in an immigrant community which had so far made little effort to assimilate.
I was impressed with Muus vs. Muus. The story was well-told, and the translation very good. I expected a lot of heavy-handed feminist theory, but in fact (though the author’s sympathies are hardly concealed), the book does a pretty good job of being even-handed. I was impressed with the way the Holden congregation – within the strictures of its church rules, which did not allow a woman to address the congregation – went out of its way in many cases to be fair to Mrs. Muus.
I was also interested to see a lot of last names, like Finseth, Langemo, and Huset, that I knew well during my childhood in the area.
The book was marred by a mandatory, hypocritical land acknowledgement embedded in the editor’s afterword. But all in all, I was highly impressed by Muus vs. Muus. I recommend it for that (small, I’ll admit) audience interested in Norwegian-American history, especially church history.