The case sent shock waves through the U.S. Norwegian-Lutheran community when Oline Muus, wife of respected Lutheran pastor Bernt Muus, sued her husband in 1879 for withholding a $4,000 inheritance from her father.

The couple had arrived in Minnesota’s Goodhue County in 1859 and both were admired in the Norwegian conferences, which were going through turmoil about doctrine as well as confronting societal changes such as the call for women’s rights. Pastor Muus served in the highest echelons of the Norwegian church in America as bishop of the Minnesota District of the Norwegian Synod.

Pastor Muus represented all that Americans distrusted about Norwegian immigrants, who they saw as not willing to integrate into the larger society. The conservative branch of the Norwegian church did not believe in public schools, preferring to build private ones where teaching was in Norwegian. Coming from a country where Lutheranism was the state religion, these pastors wanted to establish religious courts, a concept unheard of in America. And the church members were seen as giving too much power to the clergy.

The Muus’ marriage was not happy. Pastor Muus was away from home, including one entire year, on church business and was a founder of St. Olaf College in Northfield. Meanwhile, his educated wife, who came from a well-to-do family, was responsible for their home and farm, the children, and her duties as wife of the congregation’s leader.

When Pastor Muus was home he was the absolute boss, denying his wife medical care when she broke her leg and refusing to give her communion for what she considered trivial matters. Oline sued her husband for her inheritance after she learned her father’s estate had been settled years earlier. Pastor Muus insisted he could do as he pleased with his wife’s money. That wasn’t true under American law, which held that a woman had a right to her property. Although the couple lived together (without speaking) this he-said-she-said case dragged on for years, with Oline forbidden to speak when her marriage problems went before the congregation. This fight between husband and wife confounded and disturbed the highly placed governing pastors who wished it would all go away. It didn’t help that the case was covered extensively by newspapers in Norwegian and English.

The Minnesota Supreme Court eventually sided with Oline, but she was shunned by the congregations in which she had been a valuable and respected member. The civil courts awarded her a limited divorce (still married but not cohabiting with her husband) and she lived until 1922. Pastor Muus returned to Norway, where he died in 1900.

Written by Norwegian historian Bodil Stenseth, “Muus vs. Muus” is co-published by Minnesota Historical Society Press with the Norwegian-American Historical Association on the occasion of St. Olaf College’s sesquicentennial. Editor Kari Lie Dorer holds the King Olav V Endowed Chair of Scandinavian-American Studies at St. Olaf and is president of Norwegian Researcher and Teachers Association of North America. Translator Torild Homstad is a retired Norwegian teacher and administrator for the International Summer School at the University of Oslo. A resident of Northfield, she holds a doctorate from the University of Minnesota.

Dorer will discuss the book, subtitled “The Scandal That Shook Norwegian America” at 6 p.m. Monday at Next Chapter Booksellers, 38 S. Snelling Ave., St. Paul.

— Mary Ann Grossmann