The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) is a mainline Protestant denomination headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. The ELCA officially came into existence on January 1, 1988, by the merging of three churches. As of December 31, 2009, it had 4,543,037 baptized members, with 2,527,941 of them counted as active participants in their congregations. It is the seventh-largest religious body and the largest Lutheran denomination in the United States. The next two largest Lutheran denominations are the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (with approximately 2.41 million members) and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (with approximately 390,000 members). There are also many smaller Lutheran church bodies in the United States.
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“Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“Jesus: Senor, the widow Gomez delivered a son this morning, a boy.
Guthrie McCabe: Bully for the widow Gomez.
Jesus: But Senor, it has been more than a year ago since Senor Antonio Gomez has been buried in the church house.
McCabe: Well, there’s some men y’a just can’t trust to stay where you put ‘em.”
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“I do not share the gloomy thought that Negroes in America are doomed to be stomped out bodaciously, nor even shackled to the bottom of things. Of course some of them will be tromped out, and some will always be at the bottom, keeping company with other bottom-folks.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)