Confirmation and Religious Questioning

In common with all 14-year-old adolescents whose parents were members of the Zion Evangelical Lutheran church of Gowrie, I was required to take the Confirmation training class during the time of my freshman year of high school. And then to participate in the rite of confirmation in the spring of that school term. In reviewing in my mind now what my reasoned reaction to this requirement then, I have the curious feeling that regardless of what my conclusions or feelings were at the time, it was inevitable that I would in time realize the shortcomings, inconsistencies, irrelevancies and mistakes of Lutheran theology as presented. And that I would drift away completely not only from Lutheran belief but form Christianity itself.



Confirmation photo, 1935, from left to right: Merlin Johnson, Carl Strand, Everette Johnson (seated), Arthur Holmer

This was of course quite different from what occurred at the time — perhaps the only reservation in my mind was the wonderment, and perhaps slight disquiet, at the extreme reaction of the minister when one of the confirmands asked a question about evolution. Even then in my mind opposition to this theory was passé and to have it actively opposed by a minister on theological grounds inevitably laid the seed of future questioning in my mind. Though at the time the development of a more serious questioning attitude was still latent. During my high school and college days I participated willy-nilly or by choice in various religious and semi-social activities either in the Gowrie church or in the Lutheran church in Iowa City that I attended.

It wasn’t until I started to work for Shell that the next significant alternation in my state of thinking occurred. At that time one of my Shell colleagues brought to my attention the subjects of philosophy and Biblical criticism (both old and new testaments) and my reading on these subjects raised severe questions about the teaching I had received as a child and a young adult. During the time I was working for Shell at Wilmington and Dominguez and living in San Pedro I was quite active in the small Lutheran church in San Pedro. Partly this was the result of habit and partly the friendly character of the minister and his wife. They remained in San Pedro until shortly after the war was over and then transferred the Midwest. Over the years I lost track of them. The replacement minister at the San Pedro church was a much less congenial person and I gradually became less involved in church activities.

Several years ago, my brother Verner was at some church convention in Kansas and by chance encountered the minister that I had known in San Pedro when I was first in California. When this minister left San Pedro at the conclusion of the war he went to a congregation in Manhattan, Kansas, which I think was in the central part of the state. Somehow my name came up in the conversation and as a result of Verner’s informing me of the contact, there was a brief exchange of letters and Christmas cards between me and pastor Wellington but it soon ceased. His name was Maynard but I can’t recall his wife’s name.