THE ROLE OF THE LUTHERAN CHURCH
Throughout the accounts of John List’s life — both the Westfield years and the fugitive years — the Lutheran church appears as a central institution.
He had been raised Lutheran. He attended the Family Redeemer Lutheran Church in Westfield, taught Sunday school there, participated in its community life in visible and apparently committed ways. His letters about the murders invoked Lutheran theology. He addressed the most important letter to the Lutheran pastor.
In Colorado, he joined a Lutheran church. In Virginia, it was through a Lutheran church community that he met Delores Miller, who became his second wife.
The church was not incidental to John List’s story. It was structural to it — to the identity he presented, to the explanations he offered for his actions, and to the communities in which he embedded himself in flight.
This is worth noting clearly: the Lutheran church, as an institution, did not produce what John List did. The theology he invoked to explain the killings was his interpretation, not a mainstream expression of Lutheran belief. The pastors and congregations he was part of in Westfield and later in Colorado and Virginia were communities of ordinary people doing ordinary religious things, and they had no reason to expect that someone in their midst had done what List had done.
The church community was, in a sense, one of the things that made Robert Clark invisible: a churchgoing accountant who attended services regularly was exactly the kind of person who did not attract suspicion. The church was a marker of normality, of integration into community life, of the kind of respectable ordinariness that provided cover.
This, too, is worth noting: institutions of trust and community — churches, civic organizations, professional associations — can be used by people who want to project respectability without actually being what the institution represents. The people in those institutions are not responsible for the uses to which a calculating person puts their trust. The Family Redeemer Lutheran Church in Westfield did not make John List; he used the church’s reputation for his own purposes. The same was true in Denver and in Virginia.