A Presbyterian pastor linked to the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS) via various aligned or affiliated organizations also has a history of associations with the neo-Confederate movement, including speaking dates for prominent neo-Confederate groups, and public defenses of the Confederacy and Confederate monuments.
One group whose conference Colonel John Eidsmoe addressed, the Council for Concerned Citizens (CCC), was credited by racist mass murderer Dylann Roof for contributing to the radicalization of his views on race, which culminated in his deadly attack on Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015.
The LCMS is the second-largest Lutheran body in the United States after the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). The Pew Research Center’s most recent religious landscape study estimates that about 1% of the US population, or about 2.6 million people identify with the Synod, putting the denomination at approximately half the size of the ELCA.
The revelations about Eidsmoe, whose links to neo-Confederate organizations have previously ignited scandal for high profile Republican politicians, are just the most recent in a series of connections between LCMS and far-right and white supremacist individuals which have roiled the congregation since 2023.
In a telephone call, Eidsmoe confirmed that he was an ordained Lutheran minister currently serving a Presbyterian congregation in Alabama. Asked if he was a neo-Confederate, Eidsmoe said “no, I would not,” however: “I believe that there are some good values in southern culture, and I believe that the South had a constitutional right to secede.”
Eidsmoe also denied any direct links to LCMS, saying: “I wouldn’t say there’s really any relationship with the Missouri Synod. I did speak once for Lutheran Classical College but only as a guest speaker and I’m on the board of Lutherans for Life, which is not a Missouri Synod organization it’s pan-Lutheran.”
When the Guardian pointed out that Lutherans for Life is a Registered Service Organization of LCMS, he said: “Well yes, but I mean a lot of organizations that are not Missouri Synod are nevertheless licensed in that way.”
In response to an email requesting comment, the Rev Roy S Askins, LCMS managing director of editorial and theological content, wrote: “Col. John Eidsmoe is not an LCMS pastor nor a member of any LCMS congregation.”
He did not respond to a further request to clarify Eidsmoe’s involvement in LCMS-aligned organizations.
Hours after the request was sent, LCMS president Matthew Harrison posted a long message to Facebook which in part read: “A few on our far edges say untoward things about race, failing to take into account the beautiful message of the N.T. that “God is no respecter of persons.” (Acts 10) And that repeatedly in the N.T. we see lists of early Christians which include multiple ethnicities from around the Mediterranean world.”
Joshua Salzberg is a member of an LCMS church, and co-founder of Lutherans for Racial Justice, which has been critical of the congregation’s approach to racial issues, and the presence of far-right figures connected to LCMS.
Salzburg said: “When neo-Confederate figures go unchecked in LCMS spaces, it opens the door for more far right voices to gain influence.
Salzberg added: “My hope is that there would be at least as much energy for reckoning with Neo-confederate views that contradict the teachings of The LCMS as there is for other views that brush up against the Synod’s doctrine.”.
Jeff Tischauser, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), said of the CCC: “While the group’s influence is waning, and while its influence even within the white power movement is minimal, the CCC can still attract violent racists who the group further radicalizes, as shown with Dylann Roof. So just because it’s fractured and the influence isn’t there doesn’t mean that it’s not dangerous because of the content that it produces.”
Eidsmoe’s LCMS connections
Eidsmoe, a retired colonel of both the USAF and the Mississippi state guard according to his online biographies, is an ordained pastor who currently serves a Presbyterian church in Notasulga, Alabama.
But Eidsmoe is or has been affiliated with several organizations which are directly affiliated with the LCMS, or who have sought affiliation from the organization.
According to the website of anti-abortion group Lutherans for Life, which is a Recognized Service Organization (RSO) of LCMS, Eidsmoe is a board member. The earliest Internet Archive snapshot of his biography page is from 2020, indicating that he has been on the board for at least five years.
According to the LCMS website, RSOs are “not-for-profit organizations that are independent” of LCMS, but “operate ministry programs that foster the mission and ministry of the church”. RSO affiliation is subject to LCMS approval.
Just weeks ago, Eidsmoe spoke at Luther Classical College’s Christian Culture Conference at the college’s campus in Casper, Wyoming. That college was founded by LCMS clergy and laity. It is not formally associated with LCMS, but it did make a rejected application to become a Recognized Service Organization.
Eidsmoe was also listed in 2018-2019 as an adjunct professor of pastoral theology at the Institute of Lutheran Theology – he is listed in the 2022 academic catalog – whose founders describe it as “an unprecedented venture within the LCMS”. Despite this claim, the LCMS warned its members in May against enrolling in an “unauthorized” online pastoral formation course.
Eidsmoe has Lutheran links beyond the LCMS. He is also listed as a past conference speaker by the Center for Apologetics and Worldviews (CAW). CAW is not directly affiliated with LCMS but with the Evangelical Lutheran Synod, a separate, much smaller Lutheran denomination that shares similar conservative commitments to LCMS.
Neo-Confederate connections
Along with LCMS links, Eidsmoe also has long-standing links to the neo-Confederate movement, which describes a variety of organizations and activists who at best offer revisionist accounts of the south’s efforts to preserve slavery by seceding from the US, and at worst argue for the restoration or secession of a segregated, white supremacist Confederacy.
These connections have drawn national coverage in the past due to Eidsmoe’s connections to high-profile Republican politicians including Roy Moore and Michele Bachmann.
According to the organization’s website, Eidsmoe still serves as senior counsel at the Foundation for Moral Law, founded by failed senate candidate Roy Moore.
Moore’s chaotic bid to become senator for Alabama after previous incumbent Jeff Sessions entered the first Trump administration failed amid accusations that he had sexually abused a 14 year-old girl when he was a 32 year-old prosecutor in the late 1970s. Moore denied those allegations, but lost the special election.
But his association with Eidsmoe also drew critical reporting at that time.
During his run, CNN reported on a “Secession Day” event held at the premises of the Moore’s Moral Law Foundation in which Eidsmoe was a prominent participant.
According to CNN, video of the event showed “Alabama’s 1861 secession flag and a banner ‘in memory of the men in gray’ who fought to maintain ‘the principles of the Constitution’ in the Civil War.”
The report continued: “Among those in the video was John Eidsmoe, who was hired to join the foundation’s legal team in 2008 and is still listed on its website as the senior counsel and resident scholar.”
Earlier, during the rise of the Tea Party movement, associations with Eidsmoe troubled both Moore, who made a run as a Tea Party candidate for Alabama governor in 2010, and Michele Bachmann, who was the most visible Tea Party affiliate in Congress where she served between 2007 and 2015.
In 2010, Eidsmoe pulled out from speaking at a Tea Party event in Wausau, Wisconsin, after reporters unearthed his record of his previous speeches hosted by the neo-Confederate organizations the League of the South and the Council of Concerned Citizens.
The League of the South, founded in 1994, advocates for a return to white supremacist rule in a secessionist south. The CCC is a white nationalist group formed in 1985, which according to the Southern Poverty Law Center is a descendant of the white citizens councils that were formed to resist school desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s.
The two organizations have made common cause in protests against the removal of Confederate monuments. For the League of the South this culminated in their participation in 2017’s deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The CCC’s propaganda about race and crime informed Dylann Roof’s radicalization. In 2011, Eidsmoe was cited in media reports as a formative influence on Republican politician Michele Bachmann, for whom she worked as a research assistant while she was a student and he a professor at the fundamentalist Oral Roberts University. He was described as Bachmann’s “law school mentor”. Reportedly, Eidsmoe influenced Bachmann’s belief that “American law should be based on the Bible.”
These national scandals did not dissuade Eidsmoe of his radical rightwing beliefs.
In 2019, he penned a lengthy essay for the neo-Confederate Abbeville Institute, in which he ran through a number of familiar revisionist talking points on the US civil war, claiming that slavery was not the main or only reason for secession, praised confederate president Jefferson Davis and pro-slavery politician and writer John C Calhoun.
He wrote: “We object to judging the South on slavery alone, when there was so much good about the South as well. And those good things are what soldiers fought and died for.”
The central argument of the essay was against the removal of Confederate statues from public places, writing at one point: “Behind the drive to remove flags and monuments is a drive to re-write history itself, as a prerequisite to fashioning a new America that bears no resemblance to the constitutional republic our Founding Fathers designed.”
LCMS controversies
The Eidsmoe connection is just the most recent intrusion of far-right politics into a denomination that has historically held politics at arms length.
Just last week, the Alabama Political Reporter revealed that an LCMS church, the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Ozark Alabama, has allowed the neo-Confederate group the Southern Cultural Center (SCC) to hold monthly meetings at their facilities for members in that region.
In August, the SCC Ozark meeting hosted Eric Orwoll as a guest speaker. Orwoll is the driving force behind the effort to establish Return to the Land, a whites-only housing development in Arkansas.
Previously, SCC guest speakers have reportedly included neo-Confederate pastor John Weaver and the white nationalist founder of American Renaissance, Jared Taylor.
Historically, the LCMS has maintained a doctrinally and scripturally more conservative position than the mainline ELCA, but in contrast to some other evangelical groups they have largely steered clear of involvement in partisan politics or religiously-inflected culture wars.
In recent years, however, LCMS has been repeatedly roiled by controversies driven by members of the denomination with connections to far-right groups.
In 2023, the denomination drew national attention after it became a focus of far-right organizing.
First, white nationalist Corey Mahler targeted the LCMS in his attempts to lead an “influx of hardline young men” into LCMS churches, reportedly promising: “The Millennials who will replace the feckless, spineless, degenerate boomers will be sure to settle accounts and amend the errors of the past century” and that “very soon, we will expel the liberals”.
Mahler had been identified by antifascist researchers Machaira Action as a leading light in what they called a “Lutefash” tendency in the Lutheran Church.
Mahler was excommunicated from his Lutheran church in Knoxville, Tennessee, that year.
Ryan Turnipseed, was also identified by Machaira Action as a member of the “Lutefash” tendency. He was excommunicated in May 2024 by First Lutheran church in his home city of Ponca City, Oklahoma, after a viral 2023 Twitter thread criticizing the LCMS’s new catechism, alleging that it incorporated too many “woke” liberal positions. The move had briefly made him a cause celebre for the online far right.
Soon after, the president of the Lutheran church-Missouri synod called for the excommunication of those “propagating radical and unchristian ‘alt-right’ views”.
However, weeks after Turnipseed’s excommunication, the LCMS church Immanuel Lutheran of Wichita, Kansas, undermined the ban by accepting Turnipseed into membership.
In July, the Guardian reported that Turnipseed is a leading member of the antisemitic, Christian Nationalist, men-only Old Glory Club, whose network of nationwide lodges is designed to provide in-person meetups and conferences for far-right activists.
Salzberger, the racial justice activist, wrote: “As a grassroots organization, Lutherans for Racial Justice hopes to help educate the church on these topics, so that we’re better prepared to recognize white supremacist ideology in all its forms.”
