Minnesota

Scandinavian Lutheran immigration made Minnesota one of the most Lutheran states in the country in the second half of the nineteenth century, but the Norwegian immigrants who built much of that identity did not arrive as a single unified church, they split almost immediately into competing synods. The Norwegian Synod, formally organized and theologically conservative, clashed for decades with Hauge's Synod, a lower church body following the lay revivalist Hans Nielsen Hauge's pietist emphasis on personal conversion over formal liturgy and educated clergy, and with the United Norwegian Lutheran Church, itself an earlier merger of smaller factions. The disputes ran deep enough that thirteen pastors refused to join the eventual reunification, but in 1917 the three main bodies merged into the Norwegian Lutheran Church in America, an institutional consolidation Norwegian American Lutherans in Minnesota had spent decades resisting before finally accepting it, and the colleges each faction had built to train its own clergy, including St. Olaf and Augustana, survived the merger even as their founding synods did not.

Ojibwe communities in the state's north maintain Midewiwin and other ceremonial traditions alongside the reservation system, and Somali refugee resettlement since the 1990s has made Minneapolis home to one of the largest Muslim communities in the Midwest. Mainline Protestant identification leads the state today at twenty two percent of adults, per Pew's 2023-24 study, the same broad tradition category the 1917 merger eventually fed into.