‘The Church Hasn’t Changed. But People Have Changed.’

The Iditarod arch has greeted Iditarod Trail race finishers for the past quarter-century. It collapsed the week before my arrival in Nome, Alaska. Wood rot, according to the local paper. Surveying the town center, it is tempting to see the collapse as a metaphor for an isolated northwestern Alaska town facing the cumulative impacts of outmigration, declining birth rates, and climate change. Dilapidated, single-story wooden homes with cluttered lawns scatter the snow-covered landscape (it was 20 degrees Fahrenheit when I visited in early May). Some wooden facades still resemble Old West saloons, suggesting Nome’s origins as a 19th century Gold Rush town, as if Tombstone had been transposed just 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Its face set toward the frozen Bering Sea, Nome felt unwelcoming when I arrived, out of season from the hustle and bustle of the famous Iditarod race.

Appearances can be deceiving, though.

If Nome seemed forbidding to me as an outsider from the Lower 48, its denizens and regular visitors were extremely welcoming. The next day, I met with Amanda Van Vliet-Snyder outside of Our Savior’s Lutheran Church, where she is the pastor. Originally from California, she moved there six years ago with her husband, an Alaska Native from a small village 200 miles away, north of the Arctic Circle. Exchanging texts with Van Vliet-Snyder before my flight from Anchorage, I learned that her husband, Jordan Snyder, was also on my small commuter plane. When I found him in the waiting area, he told me he was headed home from a family member’s graduation. As we were speaking, the graduate in question passed behind us on a moving walkway, and the cousins exchanged friendly, casual greetings. He told me this kind of encounter is common, since in Alaska flying is a fact of life. Nome is only reachable from other parts of Alaska via plane, which cultivates a friendly atmosphere between staff and regulars at Nome’s tiny airport, and makes you realize the TV show Northern Exposure was probably closer to life than many viewers may have appreciated. Jordan drove me to my hotel, giving me an informal tour of Nome’s landscape and local characters on the short drive. Despite its unique history and atmospheric surroundings, in many ways, Nome is any other small town.

But the remoteness is still an issue for many. “A lot of congregations are just feeling, I think, kind of frustrated that there’s no pastors that want to stick around,” said Van Vliet-Snyder, “because it’s not really an easy place to live.” She pastors a small congregation, and a big part of her job consists of traveling to the remote places, like the fishing island of Shishmaref, that lack pastors of their own. It’s challenging work, complicated by a larger dwindling of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) nationwide. The situation is a far cry from the denomination’s heyday in Nome, although a Lutheran legacy remains in two visible Nome institutions: the Lutheran Church and Christian radio station KICY.

When the United States purchased the Alaska Territory from Russia in 1867, the Department of the Interior made Sheldon Jackson the general agent for education for the new acquisition. Although a Presbyterian minister, Jackson became responsible for Nome’s historically Lutheran character, since his portfolio was to establish schools in Alaska via contracts with missionary organizations.

The Lutherans were one of several Christian denominations tapped by Jackson to bring Christianity and traditional American values to Alaska Natives. “Carved up” is an often-used phrase to describe Jackson’s attempted cultural overhaul of the territory, but it’s hard to think of anything more apt. A map from Jackson’s tenure, included in a congressional report from Alaska on his reindeer scheme (of which, more to come), illustrated how different denominations had different areas of responsibility. The Swedish Lutherans had Nome, with Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, and Swedish Evangelicals operating in the territory right next door. The Episcopalians were even farther north, and the Moravians a few hundred miles to the south in the Yukon Delta.

Since the relationship between religious indoctrination and public education was more porous back then than it is today, it is perhaps unsurprising that a general agent for education would concern himself with this sort of thing. What may be less intelligible is why this information was included in a congressional reindeer report, or what a congressional reindeer report was supposed to be.

Evidently operating under a capacious interpretation of the modifier “general” in the title “general agent for education,” Jackson became concerned in the 1890s about what he perceived as a looming starvation crisis among the Native Inupiat people of northwestern Alaska. He laid the blame at the feet of capitalism, saying that 50 years of American whaling and caribou hunting had greatly diminished traditional Indigenous whale and caribou hunting. Jackson contrasted this with the “robust” Indigenous Siberians, who subsisted on reindeer, and set about developing reindeer as a substitute herd for the Indigenous Alaskans to hunt. Although he was right that the whale population was moribund after half a century, some historians are skeptical that it constituted a crisis for the Indigenous peoples, who had begun trading with the whalers to augment their traditional diets.

Through a combination of private philanthropy and congressional appropriations, Jackson was able to bring in reindeer from Siberia and Scandinavia over the course of the decade. Jackson established Teller Reindeer Station first, less than 80 miles from Nome today. An initial attempt to recruit Siberian Chukchi people to teach Alaskan Inupiaq the ropes of reindeer herding was abandoned, due to the Chukchi practice of using their own urine to guide the reindeer.

Reasoning that the climate was probably pretty similar in Scandinavia, Jackson inaugurated an 1893 ad blitz in U.S. Scandinavian newspapers in the Lower 48. It resulted in 16 Sami reindeer herders traveling from Norway, across the Atlantic and the continental United States, to serve as reindeer herding consultants at the Teller Reindeer Station. The Sami are a nomadic, Indigenous Scandinavian ethnic group. True to form, Jackson was sure to include in their three-year contracts a stipulation that they must be Christians in good standing.

Although the Christianization of the Sami began as early as the 11th century, 18th-century Lutheran missionaries represented the first effort targeted specifically at converting Sami populations, who retained both Indigenous and pre-Reformation Catholic traditions well past the 16th century. When Jackson’s initiative reached the Sami who were to go to Alaska, their community was under the influence of a movement called Laestadianism. This Lutheran revivalist movement, named for Lars Levi Laestadius, the Swedish Sami clergyman who inspired it, took hold among northern Norwegian Sami during the second half of the 19th century.

In a parallel development, an offshoot of the Lutheran national Church of Sweden, the Evangelical Covent Church (ECC), also took root in Nome around the same time. In 1889, a missionary for what was then called the Mission Covenant Church named Alex Karlsson arrived in Unalakleet, Alaska, around 150 miles southeast of Nome. The Mission Covenant Church was a popular trans-Atlantic denomination both among Swedish emigrees to the U.S. and back in Sweden in the 19th century. The church took root in Sweden throughout the 18th century as a reaction to what members saw as an excessively legalistic and cerebral approach to religion. By contrast, the Mission Covenant Church was Pietistic. As a movement, Pietism saw itself as a contrast to cold, logical religion, and was more evangelical, focusing on personal experience, self-improvement, and charitable outreach.

When he arrived in Unalakleet, Karlsson had already done a stint in Central Moscow Prison after a failed attempt to convert Russia. His presence in the Native Alaskan village on the Bering Sea was the consequence, a second foray into bringing Pietism to Russia, this time working westward beginning with Indigenous Siberians. But Karlsson soon switched his focus to Indigenous Alaskans after hearing there was a need for missionaries there.

He had a rocky start, but Karlsson soon managed to establish a school for Native children (“the children all got new names and clean clothes and promised to wash their faces each morning,” Karlsson wrote in his journal on the first day of class). He was joined by more missionaries two years later, who helped establish a children’s home, and Karlsson started to garner financial support from Mission Covenant Church leaders in the United States.

Karlsson’s missionary still faced challenges: financial challenges in the form of a depression in the Lower 48, theological challenges from the long-present Russian Orthodox Church, and moral challenges from the Gold Rush boom in Nome. Since the discovery of gold in the late 1890s, the population of 200 had ballooned by a factor of 100 by 1901. No less a personage than Wyatt Earp soon established a saloon in Nome to accompany the various other bars and brothels that had sprung up there to serve the new clientele.

All the same, Karlsson’s efforts bore fruit. “In 1890, there probably was not a single Christian Inupiaq Eskimo,” according to a 1994 essay by anthropologist Ernest S. Burch Jr. “Twenty years later, there was scarcely an Inupiaq who was not a Christian.”

Karlsson’s missionary work continued and expanded after his death in 1910, as his successors preached to the villages surrounding Unalakleet. A few such missionary successors established KICY’s prototype during WWII. Two ECC missionary couples were taking a holiday break in Nome, resting from their work of flying a Fairchild Model 24 monoplane around to minister to remote Alaskan villages. While in Nome, they had an idea: a live Christmas Eve carol broadcast. They pitched their show to the town’s Armed Forces 400-watt radio station, which the military established there during the war to facilitate wartime communication in Alaska. The missionaries received an enthusiastic yes.

The station received thank-you letters from the surrounding villages, and a Christmas tradition began. An ECC missionary later put together the Nome Ministerial Association in 1945, giving other Nome ministers a chance at the mic for what were now weekly half-hour Sunday devotional broadcasts. Momentum for an independent radio station built throughout the postwar years, an initiative led by ECC clergy and laity. The equipment, expertise, and FCC license slowly fell into place. In 1960, the year after Alaska attained statehood, Nome Covenant Church held a dedication service for its new studio. KICY was officially in business.

While KICY reached the original Covenant missions that Karlsson and his successors had established, their signal also reached hundred miles away. Indeed, the U.S. government received a letter from the Soviet government complaining about KICY, which indicated to the ECC missionaries that they had finally attained Karlsson’s dream of evangelizing Russia.

But devotional programming was only one part of KICY’s mission. At the time it was founded, many villages still lacked private home phones; it was not uncommon for a village to have one public phone for everyone. A nightly program called the Ptarmigan Telegraph became a vital communication link. According to the book on KICY’s history of the same name, “The Ptarmigan Telegraph (pronounced ‘tarmigan’) invited listeners to call or write in messages for family members, work colleagues, or distant relatives. These brief comments would then be read on the air so that the intended recipient would hear and respond in an appropriate manner.” The news and weather updates meant that, according to author Greg Asimakoupoulos, “[f]or the first time, listeners had up-to-the-minute forecasts and warnings of approaching storms, severe temperature drops, and low-pressure fronts moving in from the Bering Sea.” In a place scattered with remote villages where transportation was a challenge, such information could mean the difference between life and death.

Before the Ptarmigan Telegraph, there were pamphlets.

A 15th-century technological revolution, Johannes Guttenberg’s printing press allowed Martin Luther to effectively spread his message of religious reform across Europe at a time when critiques of the Catholic Church were already appearing throughout Europe. In 1502, when the printing press showed up in Wittenburg, the university town where Luther lived and taught, the conditions were set for Luther’s message of reform to spread quickly. In his book Brand Luther, historian Andrew Pettegree argues that Luther proved a natural and canny operator in the era of emerging mass communication. He describes Luther’s Sermon on Indulgence and Grace, his “first serious foray into vernacular writing,” as an example of the reformer’s “intuitive genius.” In it, Luther condensed the 95 theses against the Catholic Church’s practice of indulgences, which he originally wrote in Latin and famously nailed to the door of Worms Cathedral on Oct. 31, 1517, into “20 short paragraphs” in German. “None is more than three of four sentences long,” Pettegree writes, “The sentences are short and direct. The whole work is a mere fifteen hundred words. It fits perfectly into an eight-page pamphlet.”

“Luther,” wrote Pettegree, “had produced a sermon that could be read, or read aloud, in 10 minutes, and still engaged the heart of the question.”

This was an approach flush with Luther’s theology, which preached empowering the individual believer, and making the scriptures accessible to every Christian so they could make up their own mind. Luther took seriously the Christian belief that the baptized are incorporated into Christ’s divine role as “the great high priest who has passed through the Heavens,” as the author of the Letter to the Hebrews describes him in the Christian Bible. Luther worked to collapse many of the strict social distinctions between clergy and laity that were rigidly held in the hierarchical Catholic Church, a belief that is often referred to as “the priesthood of all believers,” although Luther never used the phrase himself.

This legacy is traceable in the Evangelical Covenant Church today, which upholds the idea of the church “as a fellowship of believers” and of “a shared calling of laity and clergy.”

But the ELCA still has clergy, and a tech evolution in rural Alaska 2023 has complicated their mission. That’s when Starlink first appeared in the state and in 2021, Alaska’s largest telecommunications company brought fiber internet to Nome. Until recently, provider caps on data usage were common in rural Alaska. As broadband access has increased and data limits have decreased, Van Vliet-Snyder told me how technology has created challenges as she works to bring up the next generation in the faith.

She said that she had had to cancel the church’s summer camp this year, which she estimated has been running for about 60 years, when the church recognized Nome’s young people were underoccupied in the summer. The church purchased some land near Salmon Lake, Alaska, to start a youth camp. “Gorgeous place,” Van Vliet-Snyder said, where she had led a junior high camp and a high school church camp the previous summer.

She brought the weeklong junior high and high school church camps back in 2023, after COVID suspended them in 2020. But something was different. At one time, the church had attracted kids and pastors from around the Seward Peninsula. But Van Vliet-Snyder said that she partnered with only one other pastor for the revived camp, and he in turn could wrangle just two adult chaperones. She ended up calling her own husband in a panic to take time off work and come lend a hand with the logistics of feeding and entertaining the campers. “The thing was, the kids didn’t want to be there,” she said. “The kids that were from villages that have technology were so bored. Because our camp has no electricity, no running water, no cell, you know, no data, no Wi-Fi.”

A proposed Alaskan baseball game deteriorated into a fight for the limited outlets to plug in their devices. “They all refused to get out of the car,” Van Vliet-Snyder said. “They all had their devices loaded up, and they all downloaded stuff that they can do online.” A trip to some nearby hot springs didn’t yield much more interest. By contrast, she said, the kids without electronics “were having a grand old time.”

Van Vliet-Snyder points to some ways improved technological access provides ministry opportunities aimed at the kind of older Alaska Natives who constitute the majority of her congregation. In Alaska, the Indigenous tribes are incorporated as for-profit organizations. The Kawerak corporation in Nome has a program called Project REMOTE, which supplies adult learners with free Starlink kits and laptops to take online classes. Just like the Ptarmigan Telegram, it provides interpersonal connection for Alaskans living in a climate where travel is still difficult in certain times of the year.

Once, Van Vliet-Snyder was invited to join the Kawerak elders participating in Project REMOTE for their monthly Zoom meeting, to lead a devotional. Afterward, the discussion was opened up for prayer requests. “Everybody just shared,” she said, “like, what’s going on.”

That said, there is still a place for radio in and around Nome, and Van Vliet-Snyder collaborates closely with KICY.

When we met outside her church on that brisk May afternoon, she had recently returned from a trip to the small fishing island of Shishmaref. “Shish” as it’s known for short, is not part of Van Vliet-Snyder’s congregation. But it currently lacks a pastor, and like many Native Alaskans in the area, the island is traditionally Lutheran, so she goes from time to time. Most recently, it was for the meeting of the ELCA’s Seward Peninsula Lutheran Ministry, a convening for six far-flung churches in the region who are assisted by an endowment fund established in the 1990s.

She took KICY recording equipment to broadcast the proceedings each evening. “I wouldn’t say it’s a big thing,” said Van Vliet-Snyder of radio in Nome, “I’d say it’s a big thing as far as faith and church.”

KICY General Manager Patty Burchell sees it differently. “Radio is still king here,” she said. “For six weeks of the summer, people are out at their fishing camps. So the culture here is still very much subsistence.” Shipping costs drive up prices in rural Alaska, and according to the state’s labor statistics, unemployment in the Nome census area in July 2023 was 6.8%, almost twice the national average. Because locals in the region still augment their groceries with seasonal fishing, moose hunting, and even berry picking, they still rely on radio when they go out. Internet is “spotty” (a truth I can personally verify), and a 2023 Federal Communications Commission report stated that Alaska ranked 55th out of 56 states and territories in broadband availability coverage for fixed and mobile service, even after a 2016 FCC program to expand broadband access over 10 years. And while more people in and around Nome are adopting Starlink, it can be expensive to get started. According to a 2023 Nielsen study, Alaska remains one of the top AM-listening states in the nation, ranking seventh for its percentage of AM radio listening.

Although Burchell said there is a radio “on the table in every home,” KICY also broadcasts online, as well as over AM and FM channels. It is one of two radio stations in Nome (the other, KNOM, is affiliated with Catholic missionary work), and it operates out of a small, unassuming building, not far from the World’s Largest Gold Pan at the center of town.

KICY is no longer staffed by career missionaries as it was at its founding. Today, the station is operated by part-time staff and by volunteer missionaries who raise their own support to come work there, usually for one year. Covering the Iditarod race is a big part of their job, but so is Native-language programming featuring locally produced Native singing, and a Russian-language program that reaches Siberia.

The (almost) Arctic morning sun streamed through the studio windows when I struck up a conversation with Stuart Joseph, one of KICY’s one-year volunteers. Joseph is an ECC member, and he learned about the opportunity when his parents attended a church tour that Burchell does to recruit new KICY volunteer staff (a fresh-caught Nome salmon dinner is part of the sales pitch). But Burchell said being ECC isn’t a requirement. A part-time Methodist pastor also has a show (“I don’t care where you go to church as long as your plugged in somewhere,” she said). Both Burchell and Van Vliet-Snyder describe a culture of ecumenical cooperation in Nome: Our Savior has the only casket stand in town, so the other churches call them up when there’s a funeral, Van Vliet-Snyder said.

Coming from an hour south of Sacramento, Joseph said Nome was a culture shock, but not wholly unexpected, since Burchell had provided him a reading list to prepare.

Working at the station, Joseph said he has enjoyed learning the breadth and depth of the Christian music landscape. Prior to working at KICY, he didn’t even think he liked contemporary Christian music. Instead of the limited, pop-influenced offerings that dominate U.S. Christian contemporary radio behemoth KLOVE, KICY’s rotation is a little more catholic (with a small c). “We go into the harder edge on the FM,” Burchell said, where they play Christian metal and alternative.

KICY DJs are treated like “royalty” when they go out to villages, said Burchell, who has enjoyed watching Joseph “develop his voice” as a radio personality. But local fame, broadened musical tastes, and Burchell’s insistence that she’d love him to stick around notwithstanding, Joseph was still planning to return to California the following month, when his year in Nome was over.

His family is back in California, he explained, and he is eager to further broaden the theological horizons that his time in Alaska had already expanded through his exposure to new Christian content.

But Joseph is not that different from other young adults from the Lower 48. A conference on outmigration from the state at University of Alaska Anchorage concluded that the state’s demographic problem isn’t young people leaving the state, but that the ones who leave aren’t adequately replaced by new arrivals in their 20s and 30s. Research chief at the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development Dan Robinson said that for the past 12 years, more people have left Alaska than moved in, something he said was unprecedented.

Some of the demographic change is due to college-age Alaskans opting to attend college in the Lower 48. But Robinson thinks there are other factors keeping young people from moving to Alaska—a reduced military population at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, for one thing. The other factor is less quantifiable—“Alaska is an adventurous kind of place,” Robinson said. It would appear that the call of the wild that has long beckoned young people north no longer holds the same allure.

In Nome, local residents feel like they are being passed by. Even as climate change enables more shipping vessels to traverse the Northwest Passage without ice slowing them down, the ships are mostly too big to dock in Nome’s shallower waters. Fewer Alaskan cruises than expected passed by in 2022. “It’s interesting because sometimes the cruise ship visitors just sort of come to the threshold and peer in like you’re some sort of a curiosity or almost like you’re on exhibit,” said the owner of Pingo Bakery, one of Nome’s few dining establishments. In a February 2023 Alaska public media interview, she complained of difficulty hiring new staff for her restaurant, which seats 12.

“We just need more people for the harvest,” Van Vliet-Snyder said, referring to a quote from Jesus in the New Testament books of Mark and Luke, in which he tells his apostles that the “harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few,” meaning the work of evangelization.

But she acknowledges it is also a difficult way of life. If her dog gets sick and needs medical attention between the regularly scheduled veterinarian visits to Nome, she needs to buy them both a plane ticket and fly to Anchorage.

Although Nome has always been remote, Van Vliet-Snyder insists something is different.

“The church hasn’t changed. The church is trying to do its business as usual,” Van Fliet-Snyder said, “But people have changed. And I think COVID did a lot of the changing.”

For the older members of Van Vliet-Snyder’s congregation, the church remains a constant.

The Seward Peninsula Indigenous culture “just loves music, loves singing,” said Burchell, “And from the early days translated hymns into their language, as well as created their own music, sacred music.” Even today, she said musical get-togethers still happen in the spring, “when a village will invite the three or four surrounding villages and anybody else who wants to come, to come in for a weekend of teaching, Bible teaching, and testimony, and song.” These gatherings occur in late winter and early spring, when longer days and a hard snowpack makes snowmobile travel over the hundreds of miles between villages doable. In the summer, there are no roads, and around the Norton Sound, there are no rivers to facilitate travel. Burchell said KICY sends representatives to record the testimonies and music for later broadcast, and a remote unit to broadcast the evening services live.

The hymns, many of which are translated into Native languages, have a unique sound all their own. Burchell describes it as reminiscent of Southern gospel with a “distinct flavor.” Southern gospel is popular and in heavy rotation at KICY, she said. But Van Vliet-Snyder said there is little in the way of syncretic pre-Christian practice mixed with Christian worship at her church.

It is a legacy of Sheldon Jackson’s twin senses of cultural supremacy and agrarian paternalism. Unlike the Russian Orthodox Church’s earlier presence in Alaska, which was a more-or-less organic process that embraced cultural syncretism, the Lutheranization of the Seward Peninsula had a more compulsory edge. Van Vliet-Snyder’s husband told me that his own last name, Snyder, was given to his Native Alaskan forbears by missionaries.

Van Vliet-Snyder was raised in the ECC before she became a Lutheran pastor. She was attracted to the denomination’s more progressive values. Although the ELCA is a progressive denomination that affirms LGBTQ congregation members, Van Vliet-Snyder said that younger Indigenous people are not finding that acceptance at church in Alaska, where older congregation members retain the more conservative attitudes of the white missionaries who evangelized their parents and grandparents. “They came in and they were taking away every bit of their culture, taking away their language, taking away their music, their drumming, their dancing,” she said, “taking away their spirituality.”

The Lutheran missionaries filled the vacuum with a white, European-influenced pattern for “what it looked like to be a follower of Jesus,” Van Vliet-Snyder said. Subsequent generations internalized this message, and so while translated songs are fine, she said, “they will not dance at church.”

Her challenge, however, is not to present herself as a new kind of progressive white savior, a 21st-century Sheldon Jackson trying to reform the Indigenous people according to her own view of what right looks like.

“Who am I to come in and say, ‘Let’s look at your Native values, and then look at what the missionaries were teaching you back then, and then look at how they came in and completely changed the way you think’”? said Van Vliet-Snyder. “How can I be a learner? How can I not be seen as, ‘There’s just another white person who’s going to come and tell us about her white Jesus.’”

She says her congregation post-COVID is only about 40 people, and “the next generation of kids, they’re like, ‘eh, whatever.’” But she said it’s still the place Native Alaskans turn for funerals or in an emergency, and Our Savior’s Lutheran Church is a popular place of worship for local Native Alaskans on Christmas Eve. “They still see that as their church,” said Van Vliet-Snyder, “even if we don’t see them every week.”