Agrarian Theology after Berry
The tradition of agrarian theology that I seek to
dialogue with in my research and in this blog owes much to the writing of Wendell Berry and his interpreters. Agrarianism, in its North American
register, is inescapably bound up in the structures of settler colonialism that
has been incredibly displacing to the indigenous peoples who have called these
lands home from time immemorial.[1] This form of agrarianism
has had such a displacing edge specifically because it has been driven by the
settler demand for new land. The agrarianism that shaped my own life in Western
Canada was largely created by a race between new immigrants and American
ex-pats who were hungry to swallow up land as quickly as the Canadian government
could sign treaties with the remaining indigenous nations that centuries of war,
famine, and disease had not already extinguished.[2]
With this settler-colonialist edge, agrarian thought,
particularly as it has been popularized in Berry’s writings, needs to be subjected
to critique, especially insofar as it intersects with issues of race. This is
especially true of Berry, as he stands as at least a partial inheritor of the Southern
Agrarians and the structures of white supremacy entailed therein.[3] Berry himself is quite
cognizant of this inheritance, and the deep ambiguity on topics of race that it
entails as he admits in his book The Hidden Wound.[4] In this book, Berry
struggles to come to terms with the deep silence in his life and work around
the pervasiveness of white supremacy that determines his world. This silence,
it has been suggested, is the result of Berry’s nostalgia.[5] He longs for an agrarian
America that never was, and this anti-modern nostalgia continues the project of
non-white erasure that the land-hungry settler-colonialist logic of agrarianism
demands.[6] In contrast to Berry, J.
D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy is held up as a more clear-eyed view of the
dysfunction of rural Kentucky.[7]
The championing of Vance’s view over Berry’s in the Trump
years brings to mind a comment made by another southern writer, Flannery O’Connor.
When we look at a good
deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this
quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as
grotesque. Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is
going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in
which case it is going to be called realistic.
While
Vance’s memoir is no fiction, its success rests precisely in its channeling of
the motif of Southern grotesque, offering a convenient explanation to the coastal
elites of what has been dubbed “Trumpalachia,” in order to soothe the trauma of
the 2016 election.[8] Yet this external imposition of the
grotesque onto the region has been refused by its inhabitants, most notably in the
recent book, Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy. The
refusal of the grotesque is precisely what should be seen at work in Wendell
Berry’s own work, as Jeffrey Bilbro has argued, Berry’s use of memory is
Augustinian in its form.[9] Berry commonly uses the narrative
perspective of the recollecting narrator to give a sense of holism to the
lives, events, and places he is exploring.[10] Bilbro observes that this
technique allows Berry’s characters to look back upon the pain and ugliness in
their lives and the causes of those things, and know them in love, which is
precisely the conclusion Augustine comes to in Book X of his Confessions.[11] While Vance presents a
view of Appalachia that leaves the ugliness and the grotesque on full display,
Berry offers up his homeland mediated by love. What has been dismissed as
nostalgia, blindness, or a “dusky, warming light,” is, in the end a way of
knowing a place that springs from the deepest of Christian epistemological impulses
– that right knowledge is always characterized by love.
[1]
It has been argued that within a century of contact, 90% of the approximately
60.5 million indigenous peoples who lived on the continents now known as North
and South America died. See Alexander Koch et al., “Earth System Impacts
of the European Arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492,” Quaternary
Science Reviews 207 (March 1, 2019): 13–36,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2018.12.004.
[2]
Paul F. Sharp, Agrarian Revolt in Western
Canada (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, n.d.), 1–20.
[3]
Twelve Southerners and Louis D. Jr. Rubin, I’ll
Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, 2nd edition (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978).
[5]
Tamara Hill Murphy, “The Hole in Wendell
Berry’s Gospel,” Plough, January 3, 2017,
https://www.plough.com/en/topics/faith/discipleship/the-hole-in-wendell-berrys-gospel;
Rod Dreher, “What Wendell Berry Gets Wrong,” The American Conservative,
December 28, 2016,
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/what-wendell-berry-gets-wrong/.
[6]
George Scialabba, “Back to the Land,” The
Baffler, January 7, 2020,
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/back-to-the-land-scialabba.
[7]
J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of
a Family and Culture in Crisis, Reprint edition (Harper Paperbacks, 2018).
[8]
Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll, eds.,
Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, (West
Virginia University Press, 2019).
[9]
Jeffrey Bilbro, “The Ecology of Memory:
Augustine, Eliot, and the Form of Wendell Berry’s Fiction,” Christianity
& Literature 65, no. 3 (June 2016), 327–28.
[10]
Bilbro, 327.
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