A Crossing Point, a Seminary, and a Desegregation Order

After the Latter-day Saints were driven out of Nauvoo in 1846, thousands moved through Saint Louis rather than straight across the plains, working in the city for a season or a winter to earn outfitting money, and a branch of the church operated there for years. The city was a staging point for the migration rather than a destination, which is why it appears in Latter-day Saint history without appearing on its map of holy places.

German immigration made it something else as well. Saxon Lutherans who had emigrated to keep a confessional Lutheranism they felt was being dissolved at home settled in Missouri, and the synod they helped form in 1847 built its seminary and its publishing house in Saint Louis. That body, the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, has been the conservative pole of American Lutheranism ever since, and in 1974 it tore itself apart over the authority of scripture when most of the faculty and students walked out of Concordia Seminary and set up a seminary in exile, a rupture whose consequences reshaped Lutheranism in the United States.

The city's Catholic archdiocese made a decision of a different kind in 1947, when Archbishop Ritter ordered the desegregation of its schools ahead of any court or legislature and told organised objectors that opposition would carry the penalty of excommunication. The order held. Black Protestant congregations in the metropolitan area have carried much of the city's civil rights organising since, including during the protests in Ferguson in 2014.