I shall tell you the tale of my adventures last Friday. I was part of a group of members of the Georg Sverdrup Society, and we went to visit a seminary not our own.

I think I won’t mention the name of this seminary, though there’ll be enough clues to work it out, if anybody cares to. It is an impressive cluster of buildings on an impressive campus, with a  history going back to the 1870s. However, the church body it serves, which I generally refer to here as the Very Large Lutheran Church Body That Shall Remain Nameless, finds itself now unable to support the institution’s real estate, so the property is being sold. The seminary will continue, but in more modest quarters.

Because of this approaching change, our society president arranged a visit. It would allow us to view the buildings, the library (now being packed up) and the archives (soon to be packed up). We got to see a number of interesting items on display. Below is a copy of Martin Luther’s death mask, with matching hands (his right one swollen and cramped from much writing). Luther was a man who liked his carbohydrates:

There was also the legendary bust of Hans Nielsen Hauge, the Norwegian lay evangelist about whom I’ve written a lot on this blog. I had the pleasure of informing those present that this bust is not actually a portrait, but the product of an artist’s imagination, originally carved in wood for a ship’s figurehead.

Our guide was very cordial, so nobody mentioned the well-attested fact that seminary students have a tradition of holding a beer bash on Hauge’s birthday, with the bust present, in order to demonstrate their contempt for the man and his movement.

We also got to visit Old Muskego Church:

Old Muskego Church is often called the first Norwegian Lutheran church building in America. This is not true – I, for one, favor the Haugean church in Fox River, Illinois. But Old Muskego, which was moved here in 1904, is the oldest surviving one. A new location will have to be found for it. All our guide would tell us was that they were in negotiations about the matter. I have my suspicions, and I wish the project well. The old place deserves preservation.

We sang the old Scandinavian hymn, “Children of the Heav’nly Father” in harmony before we left.

Afterward we wove our way through circuitous highway repairs to Lakewood Cemetery, traditional resting place of Minneapolis’ great and good. There we visited the graves of Professors Georg Sverdrup and Sven Oftedal, the founders of the Lutheran Free Church. Our guys.

This outing got me thinking about our tradition, the Haugean movement, and its place in history.

I reviewed a biography of David Crockett recently, and I pondered similarities – believe it or not – between the two men.

The comparison is almost laughable, I’ll admit. Hauge was intensely pious and peaceful in his living, influenced to some extent by the Quakers. Crockett was a hard-living, hard-drinking, and a fighter. He went through a period in his life when he tried to clean up his act — certainly to please his religious wife, but also possibly under the influence of Thomas Chilton, his fellow congressman and Washington roommate, who was also a Baptist preacher and who helped him edit his autobiography. But the marriage cooled, as did his piety.

What I mean by similarities is the men’s place in cultural history. The fame of each arose out of the new literate class that was arising then. For the first time in history, there was a large number of lower class citizens around who could read. Those people read the classics, but they also wanted books about – and by – people like them. People they could identify with, through whom they could dream.

On the spiritual side in America, Crockett might have a counterpart in Charles G. Finney, the evangelist.

In Norway, Hauge’s Christian celebrity and book sales could be set beside those of a fellow named Gjest Baardsen, a criminal who wrote his life’s story while in prison. He presented himself as a victim of injustice and a sort of Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor (neither claim was true). But people snapped his book up. There was even a famous movie, many years after his death.

All these things appalled the sophisticated classes. They were offended that poor people were reading cheap literature, wasting time and money on “trash.”

But you know, things got better. The cheap literature became dime novels. Dime novels became pulp magazines. Pulp magazines produced the hard-boiled mystery, science fiction, and fantasy – blossoming on occasion into literature that even the sophisticated classes admire today.

I’m told literacy is on the decline again. I wonder where that will lead. Maybe the new digital media will blossom too, in ways just as surprising and positive.

Or maybe not. Personally, I got lost following Google Maps, trying to find Lakewood Cemetery.