MARCH 10, 2021 – Where I grew up, sometimes you’d run into a kid who went to Mt. Olivet Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, hidden on our side of town; the Baptist Church, standing across from Monty’s Pure Oil at Main and Ferry; the Congregational Church, sitting modestly behind Anoka Junior High School; the understated Methodist Church near the Carnegie Library; the small, granite Wesleyan Church near my elementary school—a church so impenetrable in appearance, I thought it had no interior—or the forbidding “Saturday” Seventh Day Adventist Church on Ferry Street near Matheny’s corner store. But most kids I knew belonged to one of the two main churches in town—on Fourth Avenue, Zion Lutheran with its sprawling parking lot or on Jackson Street, St. Stephen’s Catholic Church, which boasted a steeple you could see from the observation deck atop the Foshay Tower in Minneapolis, a million miles away.
Then there was “our” church; more precisely, our mother’s church, since our dad never attended until he did for a while—then didn’t after a new priest’s sermons took a hard left. Trinity Episcopal Church, built in 1858—the year Minnesota joined the Union—was in the most tired part of town. In 1965 “we” built a new church across from the happening place of George Green Park. Inside and out, the structure was uglier than . . . sin. Without a hint of irony, Mother told us that the church had “gotten a steal” on architectural fees. (The firm specialized in supermarkets.) Doubtless every church has its share of eccentrics, but ours attracted more than its fair share—Mother being among them. She, after all, was from New Jersey.
My impression of our sectarian weirdness was confirmed at school when one day the teacher asked each of us fourth-graders to identify our “religion.” By “religion,” of course, she meant which Christian denomination. None of us had ever heard of—let alone “belonged to”—something as alien as Islam, Judaism (save for Bible stories and something about World War II), Hinduism, or Buddhism.
I’ll never forget how kids answered, down one row and up the next: “Lutheran,” “Lutheran,” “Luther
an,” “Catholic,” “Lutheran,” “Catholic,” “Catholic,” “Lutheran,” “Baptist,” “Lutheran” . . . and so on.
Then came my turn. “Episcopalian,” I said. The girl in front of me whipped around and in a very out-loud voice said, “What’s that?!”
I shrank in embarrassment. I knew my mom was odd, but the girl’s reaction told me that mother’s whole “religion” was weird. I felt my face turn crimson. Why couldn’t my family be “Lutheran” or “Catholic”—though I had my doubts about the latter, where, a Catholic friend told me, you had to “talk Latin.”
As I reflect on my hometown “religions,” I’m amused by the diversity that surrounded me. Only in a small town of the Upper Midwest could a person of the 1950s and 1960s have had so many “belief systems” from which to choose.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
