Film documentaries promote rural theology and media ministry

The 1862 Homestead Act, passed in the midst of the US Civil War, brought thousands of settlers of European descent to the Great Plains. Early homesteaders claimed 160 acre plots of farmland, endured great hardship and – if fortunate – slowly prospered. Although many were attracted to the prospect of being their ‘own bosses’, the reality of farming was (and continues to be) unrelenting day-to-day dependence on the unpredictable and uncontrollable, from weather patterns to market fluctuations. As one observer has noted, for rural people ‘survival’ is regarded as ‘success’, not ‘as the ‘bottom tier’ of a pyramid of ambitious goals, plans and intentions ... [but] as the pinnacle of a pyramid whose base is not-surviving.’1 For those who persevered, rooted in one place over successive generations, their primary identity – their psychic and social location – came to be associated with specific physical location, the(ir) land.

Because of the perpetual prospect of not-surviving, and what farm family displacement signifies economically, socially, and culturally, the rural US has been more or less continuously positioned as a zone of ‘crisis’ in the national discourse for nearly a century.2 Talk of a ‘rural problem’ began as early as the Roosevelt Administration’s National Commission on Country Life of 1909, well within the lifetimes of the first homesteaders. Industrial capitalism, urbanization, modernism, mass media and now globalization have brought vast changes to the region, acknowledged by all to be accelerating and experienced by many as devastating.

Modernism’s ‘progressivist’ ideology caused small towns to ‘pop their boundaries’, encouraging consolidation of churches, schools, and farms so as to achieve efficiencies of scale. With increased scale came the necessity of adopting industrial technology to manage larger operations. Although technological developments such as rural electrification mitigated drudgery, some farmers embraced change without fully acknowledging the long-term implications: essayist Wendell Berry notes acerbically, ‘it might be argued that the great breakthrough of industrial agriculture occurred when most farmers became convinced that it would be better to own a neighbour’s farm than to have a neighbour.’3

Against the Jeffersonian vision of farming as divinely ordained vocation, industrial capitalism treated it as an occupation not unlike semi-skilled factory labour, a manufacturer of food rather than a way of life – the term ‘agribusiness’ was coined in the 1950s. It is likewise ‘rational’ business and public policy practice to situate that which is ‘unwanted’ by society in sparsely populated rural areas, in many cases contaminating the land itself: ‘Be it trash, prisons, missile sites, or nuclear waste, urban areas depend on rural lands to store that which is dangerous, noxious, or just plain offensive.’4 Commercial mass media pervasively devalues the local and heterogeneous, even ridiculing rural culture in entertainments such as the ‘Beverly Hillbillies’ (lately proposed for revival as a CBS ‘reality’ series). Finally, globalization as an ideology has come to challenge the very notion of the ‘local,’ de-coupling community from place, striking at the very heart of rural life:

‘Many Americans no longer believe in place. We live so much in a placeless web of electronic impulses that the ground beneath our feet seems to have lost its substance. If we venture out into the three-dimensional world, it is as commuters carried along a kind of electronic circuit ourselves, from node to node, terminal to terminal. Place appears to have very little power over us. It is compliant, recessive, always there but rarely visible. We do not need it.’5

Ironically, as real farmers have been dispossessed and real farm communities ruined, the romantic ideal of the rural life and the family farm retains its full symbolic force in the national psyche: ‘Rural America has the special advantage of being the place where most of us don’t live anymore, which frees us to reconstruct it in our imagination.’6 Indeed, an artificial shopping-friendly sort of ‘rurality’ has itself become commodified by the tourist economy, particularly in areas with picturesque scenery and quaint local customs, whether Amish country or dude ranch.7

Sentimental, distorted, and often not a little condescending, the popular mythification of rural America portrays farmers as vestiges of a simpler, purer time, designating them as spiritual carriers of a larger national loss. In effect, it puts the farmer ‘in his place’, which, rather than geographic, is temporal: family farmers ‘belong’ in the past. A continuing thread of American discourse has been an insistence on the regrettable inevitability of the ‘vanishing’ family farmer (not unlike the insistently ‘vanishing’ Native Americans whom farmers themselves displaced from the land). And yet, as Wendell Berry points out, ‘if a good thing is failing among us, pretty much without being argued against and pretty much without professed enemies, then it is necessary to ask why it should fail.’8

This co-existence of mythification and destruction may be regarded as an exercise in what anthropologist Renato Rosaldo calls ‘imperialist nostalgia’:

‘Imperialist nostalgia revolves around a paradox: a person kills somebody and then mourns his or her victim. ... In any of its versions, imperialist nostalgia uses a pose of ‘innocent yearning’ both to capture people’s imaginations and to conceal its complicity with often brutal domination.’9

Farm advocate David Ostendorf illustrates the relevance of this ‘paradox’ to the family farm:

‘For the most part, the lingering wholesome values associated with life on the farm and in rural America have helped this society cover up the destructive, operative values in the countryside. For example, we glorify the family, its hard work and good life on the farm, while we ignore the policies that have been destroying that life for years. We see and believe television commercials depicting the simple beauty of family farming but do not recognize that they are paid for by multinational corporations intent on dominating agriculture. We are concerned about what we see happening to family farmers in the 1980s, but we really do not want their incomes to go up if it means that our food bill will also go up.’10

To the extent that rural people themselves embrace this mystique, seeing themselves through the lens of popular myth as a ‘dying breed’, they also embrace powerlessness, denying themselves the agency to deal with change on their own terms and the opportunity to counter the language of obsolescence with that of liberation.

A dying community
Because of the church’s place at the centre of many rural towns, its loss has often been experienced as symbolic of the death of the community itself. Filmmaker Mark Brodin’s 2001 documentary Delafield tells the story of just such a church. Delafield, in southwestern Minnesota, was settled in the 1870s by Norwegian Lutherans, displacing the indigenous Dakota. As soon as their sod houses were built, Brodin tells us, they ‘put their most important building in the middle of their most loved spot, a church in the middle of a cornfield.’ Delafield was a 36-square mile rural ‘township’ without a downtown as such, so in effect the church constituted the community’s geographic and psychic centre. Brodin’s father, a fourth-generation descendant farming his great-grandfather’s land, remembers that as late as his 1940s childhood, his whole world–the school, the grain elevator, the train station and the church–encompassed a mile’s radius, and he ‘took comfort in that.’

In the past twenty years, farm consolidation in Delafield has been dramatic: farmers who started at 80 or 160 acres are now running operations of 1,200 acres, ‘and that’s considered very small, many are farming three and four thousand [acres].’ At one time Brodin considered taking over his father’s 600-acre spread but the economics were daunting – splitting a projected $20,000 annual net income with his parents – so like many he left the farm to go to college in the 1980s and did not return. Small-scale farms had produced a diversity of subsistence crops and livestock, but now instead of feeding itself Delafield ‘feeds the world,’ growing soybeans and hybrid field corn suitable only for livestock feed or for processing into flour.

Residents of Delafield remember that as recently as the past twenty years, there had been enough children in one square-mile ‘section’ to fill a schoolbus, but now ‘the bus drives and drives, for an hour and a half.’ By the time of Brodin’s generation, the fifth, there were no more children in Delafield Evangelical Lutheran Church; some twenty-five congregants were gathering on Sundays. In 1998, their 125th anniversary, the congregation voted to close the church’s doors, auction the contents, and dismantle and move the building to a ‘historical site’ twenty miles away. Contextualizing their loss, they ruefully joke about the ‘last supper’ as they share a final potluck in the church basement, entirely aware that the death of the church is the sign of the impending death of their community.

The church’s cultural role in effect has become that of hospice, facilitating a mindful passing. In her closing sermon, Delafield Pastor Sue Seiffert invokes the life-cycle, inviting extrapolation from the individual to the communal: ‘This has been a holy place for God’s word to be proclaimed and taught, a place where sins have been confessed and forgiven, a place where people have been confirmed and married and commended to the Lord at life’s end.’ Three months later, Brodin’s camera catches the image of the church building being transported slowly down the highway on the back of a tractor-trailer, a graveyard in the foreground.

Elegiac in tone, Delafield re-positions the present in the past, freeze-framing contemporary scenes in black and white to visually mimic archival family photographs, rendering the still-living as prematurely historical. While the filmmaker’s intent is in no way aligned with the agendas of ‘imperialist nostalgia,’ Delafield nonetheless supports that perspective. Farm communities, it tells us and shows us, are ageing and dying; the appropriate response is grief, not organized resistance. While we follow Brodin to a political rally where the late Senator Paul Wellstone delivers a stem-winder, the filmmaker finds ‘more hype than hope’ there, concluding that rural problems are so complicated that ‘even the good guys don’t know what to do.’ The film’s bleak final words indicate that we are ‘on the road’ to a ‘future without family farmers’.

Cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s gloss of Raymond Williams’s work demonstrates the cultural function of this positioning of the family farmer:

‘There are “residual” forms of alternative or oppositional culture, which consist of meanings and values which cannot find expression within the dominant structure, “but which are principally drawn from the past and from a previous stage in the social formation.” ... They have often formed the basis ... of a critique of existing cultural forms and tendencies: but they “threaten” it, so to speak, from the past.’11

Recreating community
A radically different picture slowly emerges from Kirsten Tretbar’s documentary Zenith, made in the same year as Delafield, about a tiny hamlet (pop. 30) in central Kansas. At first, the picture seems to be the same: like Delafield, Zenith was established by Scandinavian immigrants five generations ago, and also like Delafield the economic situation is desperate – graphically illustrated by the shot of an overturned wrecked car by the side of the road painted with the words ‘Upset Over Low Grain Prices.’ In Delafield, Brodin and his father discuss the necessity of taking full-time off-farm employment to make ends meet and farming in ‘spare’ hours. In Zenith we see ghostly scenes of combines working the fields at night. Zenith-area farms now average 700 acres, and residents say it ‘used to be a town, now basically nobody lives there.’

In mirroring Delafield, Zenith’s church attendance had been reduced to a few faithful souls, and ‘they all had white hair or dyed hair’, as long-time church member Dwilette Paulsen wryly remembers. She looked around and saw the writing on the wall: ‘The church was going to be closed in ten years. The church was just going to die.’ However, rather than accepting death as inevitable, Tretbar’s ‘Aunt Dwilette’ undertook a salvage operation, assembling an adult Bible study class through sheer force of will. Person after person testifies: ‘My Aunt Dwilette is a very persistent person.’ ‘She hounded me and hounded me.’ ‘It’s very hard to say no to Dwilette.’ Her husband recalls the earliest sessions: ‘It was like group therapy in a mental institution. There were marriage problems, divorce problems, money problems, children problems, alcohol problems.’ But people kept coming back: ‘We’re going to church with people we used to party with–now we’re praying together.’

Other Zenith residents were bringing ministries to the community: Charlie Parker attended a Promise Keepers rally in Dallas and started a men’s group when he returned home; one participant credits it with getting him ‘on the road’ to breaking his alcohol addiction. But ultimately newcomer Guy Elliott made the most dramatic (so to speak) difference in the life of the town. Elliott originally brought his proposal for a Great Plains Passion Play to the Zenith Community Church – ‘just our church’, Dwilette laughs. Seven years later, the play involves some thirty surrounding churches and draws an audience of 3,000. Unchurched construction workers and oil riggers pitch in with droll good humor: ‘If you work for Carl, you have to go down to the Passion Play. He won’t pay you unless you go down and play a Roman guard, but you go down and you get hooked. Besides, I like carrying a spear and a sword, it makes me feel important,’ one chuckles. Draft horses are pressed into service to draw chariots, deer-spots become theatrical lighting, and Jesus ascends to heaven in the bucket of a cherry-picker.

Participants credit the Passion Play with changing their lives, a ministry ‘not for the people who come to see it, but for the people who are in it.’ In Zenith the talk is of the future, not the past: ‘We’ve bottomed out, and now we’re all coming back up.’

Story-telling about ordinary people
Delafield and Zenith lend themselves to being read as a continuous narrative which suggests a powerful contextual theology of crucifixion and resurrection for rural communities, Delafield’s church embodying Good Friday and Zenith’s Easter Sunday. The films themselves both implicitly and explicitly invoke the Easter story, culminating in the last words of Zenith: ‘Maybe this is where it will start, on that hill with the three crosses. Maybe this is where it should start.’ Historically positivist, American Christianity has neither adequately addressed decline and loss, nor yet developed a contextual theology of liberation which speaks to the condition of rural communities. Together, Delafield and Zenith contribute to that project, one which would allow rural people to both grieve and arise.

Drawing on the work of Walter Ong, Tex Sample makes a persuasive case that rural America is primarily an oral culture, ‘a people who can read and write ... but whose appropriation and engagement with life is oral.’12 At the same time, however, rural America no less than the rest of the country is thoroughly media-saturated, eagerly adopting satellite dishes and cable to compensate for the poor television reception from distant urban transmitters. Sample refers to mediated culture as ‘electronic orality’, coexisting with and drawing both from traditional orality and literacy: ‘Ours is not a future of electronic orality devoid of literality and traditional orality. Instead it is one where all three will be with us into any projectable time to come.’13

In both traditional and electronic orality, Sample notes, theology takes the form not of systematics, but of storytelling:

‘No more radical activity exists. No amount of discourse can do with traditional and oral people what the concrete, lived stories of ordinary people can accomplish. ... The central role of stories needs to be understood by Christians if for no other reason than their place in the teachings of Jesus.’14 He calls for ‘forms of ministry that can call forth from clergy and laity and from congregations and denominations the capacity to worship, proclaim, teach, and witness in expressions that are authentic to the lives of the diverse people of the United States.’15

Delafield and Zenith clearly demonstrate the potential for storytelling media as a ministry that speaks in the new language of electronic orality, and filmmakers as extraordinarily powerful contextual theologians. Media productions like Delafield and Zenith enable communities to tell their self-story and participate in constructing a narrative theology that is both authentic and liberating, ‘a theology that we believe in our bones and live out of our hearts.’16

In this light, if these two films in succession bring us from Good Friday to Easter Sunday, what remains as yet unmade is the rural film which tells the story of the Kingdom church, the liberation church. With its final words, Zenith leaves us with a promise as yet unarticulated, the vision which will draw rural communities onward from the crucifixion toward resurrection: what is the story of the rural community living as Kingdom people? Delafield delineates the oppression of the heartland but sees no hope, a chronicle of a death foretold. In turn, while many individuals in Zenith have been personally redeemed by the Passion Play, we see no evidence that the church and community are as yet engaged in addressing the structural sin which relentlessly threatens their hard-won gains.

Intriguingly, the picture that emerges of the rural Kingdom church may not be as clear-cut as the ones we see in Delafield and Zenith, for the rural US has been experiencing rapid demographic change in recent years as a new wave of immigrants arrives and settles, this time from the south. Rural theology, contextualized via narrative media ministries, can re-appropriate and deepen – can ground, one might say – the interdependence which is one of globalization’s strengths, while challenging its deterritorializing, abstract, and homogenizing tendencies.

Notes
1. Martin Giese, ‘The Distinctive Context of Rural Ministry,’ Klimoski 2002, p. 50

2. Actually, if one considers that the 1786 Shays Rebellion was motivated by farm debt and low prices, one can place genesis of America’s ‘rural crisis’ a great deal earlier.

3. ‘A Defense of the Family Farm,’ Comstock p. 356

4. Rowley and Freshwater, p. 9

5. Wayne Franklin, foreword to Drake Hokanson, Reflecting A Prairie Town, quoted in Beeson p. 2

6. John Logan quoted in Rowley and Freshwater, p. 4

7. See ibid., p. 8

8. op. cit., p. 351

9. Rosaldo, p. 108

10. David Ostendorf, ‘A Protestant, Populist View,’ Comstock pp. 326-7

11. Hall p. 332

12. Sample p. 6

13. ibid. p. 11

14. ibid. pp. 62-3

15. ibid. pp. 11-12

16. Jung et al. p. 127

Sources
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Barker, Lance R., Crossing Boundaries–Building Bridges (New Brighton MN: United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, 1991).

Beeson, Peter G., Rural Matters: A Meditation, unpublished white paper, 2002.

Berry, Wendell, ‘The Prejudice Against Rural People,’ The Progressive, April 2002.

Brodin, Mark, producer/director, Delafield (No Boy At All Productions, 2001).

Comstock, Gary, ed., Is There a Moral Obligation to Save the Family Farm? (Ames: Iowa State UP, 1987).

Davis, Dee and Tim Marema, ‘A Rural Perspective,’ unpublished white paper, Center for Rural Strategies, 2002.

Hall, Stuart, ‘Culture, the Media, and the ‘Ideological Effect,’’ in James Curran et al., eds., Mass Communication and Society (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1977).

Jung, Shannon et al., Rural Ministry (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998).

Klimoski, Victor and Bernard Quinn, eds., Church and Community: Nonmetropolitan America in Transition (Washington DC: Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, 1970).

Klimoski, Victor and Lance Barker, eds., Abundant Harvest (St. Paul: Minnesota Consortium of Theological Schools, 2002).

Lind, Christopher, Something’s Wrong Somewhere (Halifax: Fernwood, 1995).

Milner, Clyde A. II et al., eds., The Oxford History of the American West (NY: Oxford UP, 1994).

National Catholic Rural Life Conference, Manifesto on Rural Life (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1939).

Quinn, Bernard, The Changing Context of Town and Country Ministry (Washington DC: Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, 1970).

Rogers, Walter B. and George E. Buckmire, The Rural Culture/The Farm Family (Edmonton: University of Alberta Department of Extension, 1967).

Rosaldo, Renato, ‘Imperialist Nostalgia,’ Representations no. 26, 1989.

Rowley, Thomas D. and David Freshwater, ‘The Rural Dilemma,’ www.terrain.org/articles/10/ruraldilemma.htm

Rural Policy Research Institute, ‘Rural Matters Perspectives,’ RUPRI ‘Rural Matters’ Conference anthology, unpublished.

Sample, Tex, Ministry in an Oral Culture (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1994).

Schreiter, Robert, The New Catholicity (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1997).

Stock, Catherine McNicol, Rural Radicals (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996).

Tretbar, Kirsten, producer/director, Zenith (Prairie Fire Films, 2001).

Pamela Calvert is an itinerant Quaker televangelist and a Ph.D. candidate at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She is currently at work on the media-based community anti-hate campaign =Not in Our Town= , and is a founding board member of Working Films .