A version of this article first appeared on Allen Stanton’s Substack, Reclaiming Rural.
My most famous piece of writing is a controversial essay entitled, “Why I Hate Wendell Berry.” It’s obvious why it was controversial. I do not love the title, and I did not select it. It was effective clickbait, though, which meant far more people read it than I thought.
For those who read past the title—and many people did not—I think it is obvious that I do not hate Wendell Berry. I never did. I reach for his essays with regularity. I find wisdom in his work.
Reflecting on Wendell Berry’s death makes clear that Wendell Berry lived a life that was remarkably aligned with his proclaimed values. His life was agrarian and ecological. It was communal. If you wanted to write him, you had to mail a letter to his post office. He plowed his fields with horses into his old age.
That he did those things against the backdrop of fame is remarkable. He is, without a doubt, one of the most compelling theologians of our generation. Where other potential theological heroes— John Howard Yoder comes to mind—fall well short, Wendell Berry was consistent. For those reasons, I admire him.
Even still, I do not count myself among his disciples.
Wendell Berry, I think, speaks to a few different facets of my experience in rural spaces. I grew up in a rural community, and I am a pastor whose primary calling is to serve rural congregations and write about rural theology. Those voices are not equal, and it is not always the same message.
The first is how I understand the moral community of rural places. I can recognize Jayber Crow’s struggle to live within Port Royal, to become part of the community. Being located within a particular community is something that I frequently wrestle with. What does it mean to balance the interests of your local community and your own ambitions? More than that, what is the balance between an ambition that cultivates flourishing—both your own and the community’s—and an ambition that destroys?
The people that help me in those conversations are, more often than not, people that have been greatly influenced by Wendell Berry. The writer Brad Roth, whom I count as a friend, constantly and indirectly challenges my notions of vitality and success. In his book Flyover Church, Roth introduces rural communities as places that are “known and knowable” (13). But I will confess that there are times that I do not want to be known, and there are times where my knowledge about someone else creates its own problems.
The challenges of knowability are the very point, Wendell Berry (and Roth) remind us. It is not enough to give the illusion of being known. The beauty is not in the glistening facade. It’s in the texture, bumpy and cragged though it may be.
Much of this, I think, is almost an inside conversation to those of us who love and adore rural communities. Over the weekend, a friend shared that Wendell Berry helped him learn to talk about his rural roots. Wendell Berry gave us permission to be unapologetically rural.
The broader culture has an odd disdain for rural communities, frequently asking them to apologize for some projected idea about who those communities are and what they stand for. At some points, that disdain is light and preferential. Other times, it is blatant and harmful. Wendell Berry strikes such a nerve amongst us in rural places because he gave us permission to be unapologetically rural. While Wendell Berry is not content to let us rest in our faults, he is willing to let rural places be who they are, and in doing so, strive to be something better. It is a message that, I think, is necessary for rural communities to continue to have amongst ourselves.
But here is where I find my limits with Wendell Berry, or at least the idea of a Wendell Berry. I wrote that essay after, for the umpteenth time, someone from a large and urban church quoted Wendell Berry in my general direction. At a conference, in an Uber, over coffee—I frequently found myself on the receiving end of Berry-isms.
In those conversations, there was a projection of what service in a rural community meant. It was going to be temporary, someone would say as an affirmation (is that an affirmation?). And if it wasn’t temporary, it was beautiful. It struck me that the people quoting Berry to me had very little understanding of the rural communities that they called beautiful.
Most people who live in rural communities, for instance, are not farmers. Agrarianism is prevalent, because it is visible and expansive. But it is often the case that being rural can be quite disconnected from being agrarian. Berry, of course, knows this. That is why, time after time, he advocates for a return to an ecological agrarianism. The factory that provides jobs also poisons the community. Even agriculture sometimes fails to reflect the agrarian commitment to place. Both the unlined coal ash pits from Duke Energy and the pig lagoons in Rosehill are of the same ilk. They are the result of an industrial economy that has lost its commitment to place and community. And, as a result, they produce harm for both the land and the people.
But when the people citing Wendell Berry to me talked to me about the beauty of rural communities that they saw in Wendell Berry, they seemed to dismiss the deeper concerns that Wendell Berry raised. I would hear about the necessity of eating organic chicken. I heard nothing about the plight of chicken farmers who suffer from an overtly extractive industry.
The picture that I saw being projected of rural places was one that was vastly different than the one in which I grew up and in which I lived. In projecting an idyllic version of a community, people end up commodifying rural places. Or, as I wrote in 2018:
Too often, people use Berry in a way that commodifies rurality. Rural places become picturesque landscapes where life is simple, communal and agrarian. Rural places can be enjoyed at a distance but aren’t places in which to serve, live and work.
That commodification creates a sort of rural-tourism: come see something virtuous and good! It also gives people an excuse to disengage from rural communities. Why would we tamper with something so virtuous? Better to watch at a distance.
But that picturesque notion of rural America, I have come to believe, gives yet another opportunity for those who do not live or work or love rural places to further denigrate them. When rural communities do not match up with that picture of the idyllic, virtuous community, the Wendell Berry quotes are laced with an acidity. That rural communities do not always resemble the ideals of Port William becomes another indictment in the long litany of problems that rural communities are incapable of acting in their self-interest.
It is telling to me that, as I look back at the many messages I got from my original essay, the harshest ones were not from people in rural communities, neither were they from farmers. They were from people in suburban and urban places, who had no meaningful connection to a rural community. It was also telling that they frequently collapsed “agrarian” into “rural.” Even in the complaints, there was a willingness to force the projection of the agrarian ideal.
In the end, I am not a Wendell Berry disciple largely through no fault of Wendell Berry at all. In fact, the conversations that Wendell Berry raises are necessary. Rural communities, in the span of 60 years, have shifted from agrarian-centered to industrial. They are places of ecotourism, mining, and manufacturing. They are places of gentrification and wealth. They are places of poverty.
Wendell Berry offered a language for us who have lived that shifting reality to attempt to understand something about ourselves, to name something beautiful, to recognize something hard, and to push towards a community that can be better. I read Wendell Berry, now, as a rejoinder to not forget to be rural. Being rural, even as I no longer live in a rural place, is a core aspect of my identity. That I can say that, I think, is a testament to Wendell Berry’s work, even if I have largely drawn that by my connection to rural Wendell Berry acolytes.
Yet, the works of Wendell Berry have been weaponized by well-meaning people who wish to take up the virtue of rurality without the life of rurality. That is a grave disservice to Berry and his legacy. It is one that yearns for community and virtue without wanting to do the hard work of being in community or cultivating virtue. It is one that separates the ecological implications from the personal relationships that Berry insists are inseparable. It is a sort of false reverence that undermines what was worth revering in the first place. Or, as I quote my friend in the original essay:
“Even when they quote him reverently, the whole world hates Wendell Berry, because so few actually live the way he calls for.”
If we are to honor the legacy of Wendell Berry, I think it should start with the recognition that there is something good about rural communities, and it is a compilation of the textures that create a real place. It is a living texture. It is coarse; it is gentle; it is beautiful; it is unnerving. Our culture, with our headquarters in suburban efficiency and intelligence, will be tempted to poke that living texture. We will claim that we are helping it along, teaching it to be better, helping it to grow. In the end though, the pokes and prods and experiments only serve to hurt.
I am not a disciple of Wendell Berry because I am concerned that his legacy will be further used to commodify and denigrate rural spaces, that rural places will continue to be measured against an ideal that Berry himself did not purport. I am worried that we will separate those inseparable categories—the ecological, the communal, the theological—in ways that distort the life and work of Wendell Berry. And I am fearful that all of that will be, in the end, harmful to the rural places that Wendell Berry loved and supported.
I want to be wrong.
The post The Dangers of an Ideal: Wrestling with Wendell Berry’s Legacy appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
