This project will focus on a single religious group; namely, on the lives and attitudes of lay Lutheran women and men in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century; how ordinary Lutherans understood their lives and their faith, how they viewed the world, and how they adapted to the rapidly changing world around them. These immigrant-based religious denominations were moving quickly toward closer integration with mainstream American culture, and this study will document the ways in which these lay people understood their world, related to it, constructed their identities, and changed over this period of time. Historically we tend to know about the religious, cultural, and social attitudes of those who were the leaders and the opinion shapers within American Protestantism, usually the ordained clergy and educated teachers. We know much less about the attitudes of the large mass of lay people, and how they experienced their worlds. Did they view their religious, cultural, and social lives in ways that were similar to those of their religious leaders, and if there were divergences between the mass of lay people and their leaders, where did such divergences occur, and why? Where were lay people getting the ideas that shaped their attitudes, and how did they express them? And what were the possible effects of such convergences and divergences, both on the history of Christianity in America, as well as on the congregations and denominations today?