The Role of Religion in the Family

by Don Y

It is evident that religion came into the family going back at least to NTY’s traveling about Norway speaking at local temperance halls. At that time the pietism of the people was reacting to the rationalism imposed by the Danes during their reign, this until early in the 19^th century.

The emigration of NTY and Bestemor followed NTY’s call to preach to the Norwegian pioneers in America. Their family was raised in a Christian environment at the center of a growth in Norwegian Lutheranism in which NTY played a formative role. It was therefore no surprise that, in Bestemor’s care, three of her sons took up the ministry and a daughter married a minister. Going further, four of her grandchildren became ministers.

NTY’s younger brother Johannes followed him to the same Minnesota locale three years later and, shortly thereafter, was ordained as a minister. In time he had achieved a prominent position in the seminary. He and his wife, Kristi had twelve children of whom four went into the ministry. That the youngest of their children was born 19 years after Bestemor’s first has perennially raised the question as to which side of the family a person “belongs”, complicated by the non-alignment of the generations.

Beginning in 1880 the Norwegian Church entered a period of divergent views centering on free will – did man participate in his own salvation or was it granted by God to the chosen few. Much of the unpleasant “Nade Valystrid” period came to a close with the merger of the two largest of differing Synods in 1917. Not everyone fit comfortably into the United Church and, notably, a “Little Synod” split off from it; the name reflected it’s size, and it stood out for the (lack of) success of the strict conservative view it espoused. It is noteworthy here in that two of Berstemor’s grandchildren “went over” to the Little Synod, and one of Johannes’s children took a major role in the formation of it’s affiliated college.