6/18/2007: Wendell Berry: Alarmist or Prophet?

I recently relented and finally picked up a copy of “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community,” a collection of essays by Kentucky farmer/essayist Wendell Berry.

One of the communities I visited last summer showed a lot of respect for Berry and his general philosophy. They respected his attention to issues of environment and creation, all-sides Christian approach, and desire to “live locally.”

Berry is an avid enthusiast of the local life. As a farmer, he believes in reestablishing the ties that connect people to production—connect people to where their food and products originate—and where their waste ends up. In this way, if all of a community understood and practiced an understanding of being tied to a local place—our “environmental (he finds the term itself absurd, too global in scope)” would be greatly improved. He largely believes Christians cannot, in good faith, participate in the “industrial economy”—but that it is also very dangerous to ignore this idea of economy, believing faith to only be about the thought life or beliefs.

His desire to focus on the local life and connecting people to production sometimes leads me to believe he’s just asking for the “good old days” when communities were not corrupted, people lived and farmed on family land, and families were intact. Possibly he is a bit extreme in believing reestablishing ties to nature would un-do so much of this wrong. Of course, I don’t believe his philosophy is that simple.

However, I am wary of what appear to be “one-dimensional”—just personal solutions to problems. If we all change the way we run our household economies—if we all change the way we approach enemies—that that will solve these larger problems (I would say global, but the man also rejects the notion of thinking globally as absurd).

It’s oddly the same question and suspicion I have about the community I visited. They believed strongly in secession from the economy and creation of sustainable local economies of Christians living out on the margins, separate from life. Am a disbelieving God by thinking this is simply impractical? Or wondering why they cannot look at changing laws?

It is questions like these that make me wary of the Christian Anarchists. However, there is something largely enticing and romantic about this notion of rejecting all other influences except God and radically separating out—even if it is on an urban corner. Maybe it feels pure—closer to what might be the way of God.

A BERRY QUOTE: “The complicity of Christian priests, preachers, and missionaries in the cultural destruction and the economic exploitation of the primary peoples of the Western Hemisphere, as of traditional cultures around the world, is notorious. Throughout the five hundred years since Columbus’s first landfall in the Bahamas, the evangelist has walked beside the conqueror and the merchant, too often blandly assuming that their causes were the same. Christian organizations, to this day, remain largely indifferent to the rape and plunder of the world and of its traditional cultures. It is hardly too much to say that most Christian organizations are as happily indifferent to the ecological, cultural, and religious implications of industrial economics as are most industrial organizations. The certified Christian seems just as likely as anyone else to join the military-industrial conspiracy to murder Creation.”