The Redline: How the ELCA Marriage Vote Failed

They did not delete the old teaching. They kept it on the page — and voted to strip it of its authority.

The Church and the Christian Church • Part Two: The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America • By the Virginia Christian Alliance Editorial Board

The Big Three:

On the Assembly floor, a Virginia bishop moved to have the church affirm marriage as a “normative, lifelong covenant between a man and a woman.” It was defeated, 432–566.
Moments later, the same Assembly adopted language admitting that its new position “differs from the historic Christian tradition and the Lutheran Confessions” — and adopted it anyway, 677–276.
The record shows a church that did not act in ignorance of Scripture’s teaching. It named that teaching, refused to affirm it, and departed from it with its eyes open.

What a Redline Is

In the first part of this arc, we read the receipts: the votes, the stripped threshold, the record of what the ELCA did in August 2009. Here we do something narrower and, in its way, more revealing. We lay the old teaching beside the new and mark, line by line, exactly what changed. This is the redline — the editor’s mark that shows a deletion, a substitution, a word struck and a word added in its place.

Most institutional drift hides in summary. It is described afterward in gentle language — “the church grew,” “our understanding developed,” “we came to a fuller view.” The redline resists that softening because it works from the actual text. It does not ask what the change felt like or how it was later explained. It asks what words were on the page before, what words are on the page now, and who struck which. In the ELCA’s case, the church preserved the whole proceeding in its own minutes, down to the strikethrough. We need invent nothing. We need only read what was crossed out.

The Amendment That Was Refused

On Friday, August 21, 2009, in the fifth plenary session, the Assembly worked through thirteen proposed amendments to the social statement. The most consequential was offered by the Rev. James F. Mauney, bishop of the Virginia Synod. It asked the church to state plainly that “the historic Christian tradition and the Lutheran Confessions have taught and recognized marriage as a normative, lifelong covenant between a man and a woman, reflecting Mark 10:6–9.” It went on to connect marriage to the blessing of children — the joy and responsibility of raising them in the faith.

This was not novel doctrine. It was the plain, historic Christian reading of Scripture, offered by a bishop who wanted the church’s own statement to say it out loud. The debate that followed sharpened it further: a second bishop moved to change “have taught and recognized” to the present tense — “teach and recognize” — so the statement would affirm this not as a museum piece but as the church’s living teaching. That refinement carried, 627–356. The amendment, now strengthened, went to a final vote.

It was defeated, 432 to 566. By a margin of 134 votes, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America declined to affirm, as its own teaching, that marriage is a lifelong covenant between a man and a woman. The historic reading of Scripture was placed before the house, debated, sharpened, and voted down.

The Amendment That Passed

What the Assembly refused to affirm in Amendment A3, it was willing to acknowledge in a different form moments later. A further amendment, offered by the Rev. Kurt F. Kusserow, bishop of the Southwestern Pennsylvania Synod, reworked a later passage of the statement. Where the draft had read “It must be noted that some” people conclude that marriage may describe same-gender relationships, Kusserow struck that phrase and substituted a fuller admission: “Recognizing that this conclusion differs from the historic Christian tradition and the Lutheran Confessions, some people, though not all… conclude that marriage” applies to same-gender couples as well.

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Read the two votes together, because their nearness is the whole point. The Assembly would not say that Scripture and the Confessions teach marriage is between a man and a woman — that failed, 432–566. But it would say that its new, affirming conclusion differs from what Scripture and the Confessions teach — that passed, 677–276. The church declined to affirm the historic teaching as true, yet affirmed that it was departing from it. This is not the language of a body that misunderstood Scripture. It is the language of a body that understood Scripture clearly enough to name it, and walked away from it on purpose.

The Teaching That Was Replaced

To see the full depth of the redline, it helps to read what the ELCA’s own predecessor churches had taught — because a third amendment, offered by the Rev. Michael E. Johnson of the Western North Dakota Synod, tried to restore exactly that language. It proposed to strike the statement’s new framework and reinstate the words of Sex, Marriage, and Family (Lutheran Church in America, 1970) and Human Sexuality and Sexual Behavior (American Lutheran Church, 1980).

Those older statements had said it plainly: homosexual behavior “is viewed biblically as a departure from the heterosexual structure of God’s creation,” and the church “rejects the contention that homosexual behavior is simply another form of sexual behavior equally valid with the dominant male/female pattern.” They paired that clarity with genuine pastoral care — naming the need for grace, fellowship, and justice for all, and refusing to rank this sin above idolatry, pride, or gossip. This was the teaching the ELCA inherited. Johnson’s amendment asked the church to keep it. The committee had recommended against adoption, and the debate ran long before it was set aside — but its very presence in the record proves the point: the church knew precisely what it was replacing, and chose to replace it.

The Strongest Case for the Change

Honesty requires that the affirming side be given its best voice, not its weakest. On the floor, that voice belonged to R. Guy Erwin of the Southwest California Synod, who would soon become the ELCA’s first openly gay bishop. He did not argue that the church was ignoring Luther. He argued that it was fulfilling him. “Luther himself… overturned centuries of powerful Christian tradition,” Erwin said, “by insisting that clergy have the right to marry, by refusing to value celibacy… Luther was the greatest sexual revolutionary in Christian history, and we carry forward his legacy even now.”

This is the strongest form of the case, and it deserves to be heard at full strength: the ELCA was not abandoning its Reformation heritage but extending it — freeing another group to marry, as Luther freed the clergy. If that argument holds, the redline is not a departure at all but a continuation. Everything in this series turns on whether it holds. We will answer it fully in Part Three, where Scripture and Luther’s own words are allowed to speak. Here we note only what it concedes: even its ablest defender did not claim the historic reading was wrong about the text. He claimed the church was right to move beyond it. That is a redline by admission, not by dispute.

What the Line Reads

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness” (Isaiah 5:20, ESV). The gravest turn is not open defiance of the Word. It is the renaming of a departure as a development, so that the wall may lean while everyone agrees it stands straight. The ELCA did not quite do that. In Amendment A4 it did something almost more sobering: it admitted the lean, recorded it in its own minutes, and adopted the leaning wall as its standard.

Scripture does not leave the historic teaching to inference. Jesus Himself, answering a question about marriage and divorce, returned to the beginning: “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?” (Matthew 19:4–5, ESV). This is the very passage Bishop Mauney’s amendment cited — Mark’s parallel account — and it is the passage the Assembly declined to affirm as its teaching. The Word did not change between 1980 and 2009. Only the vote did.

The Only Door

The redline is not our editorializing. It is the ELCA’s own hand, its own strikethrough, preserved in its own record. We have not measured any person’s heart, which belongs to God alone. We have laid the old text beside the new and marked what was struck — and what was struck was the plain reading of Christ’s own words about marriage.

A redline can be read two ways: as the record of a fall, or as the map back. Every deletion marks a place where the old text still stands in the mind of God, waiting to be restored. No argument on this page can restore it; only the Holy Spirit convicts, and only the Holy Spirit rewrites a heart. We hold up the line not to condemn but to show the way back to what was crossed out — and to the one door that reopens it, whose name is repentance. It stood open in 2009. It stands open now.

Next in the series: Part Three — the Verdict of Scripture, where “bound conscience” is given its fullest hearing, and then answered from the Word it claims.

For Further Study