Locavangelism: Eating as Spiritual Practice, Part III

Editorial note: This is Part III of Rachel Wheeler's discussion of what she calls "locavangelism." Part I is here; Part II is here. The last couple of paragraphs here are a repeat from Part I, which I repeat here as a summary of the series.

by Rachel Wheeler

Why now?

Having attempted to show how various wings of the modern food-centered environmentalist movement draw on patterns of evangelicalism, I’d like to take a stab at answering two questions: why food now? and what does it all mean? The immediate answer to the first question, I believe is 9/11 and the 2008 financial meltdown. Growing your own tomatoes, people are discovering, is a way to economize, enjoy better food, and connect with a past that feels safe during a time of great uncertainty. Locavangelism seems to represent a sort of personal declaration of isolationism. The past decade, beginning with 9/11, has persuaded many that globalization represents a threat rather than an opportunity, and this sense of threat has led many to want to seek a closer connection to the dirt in their own back yards. But I think we can’t stop there. The 1990s were crucially important in laying the groundwork that would eventually produce the locavore movement.

The turn to food, I believe, marks a desire to marry belief and practice, it represents a backlash against an era that liberals and conservatives are seeing as superficial: the go-go-90s witnessed the make-over of many American cities. Everyone celebrated the decreased crime rates, and the cleaner subways – both unquestionably good developments—but the 90s also brought a new era of consumerism and suburbanization with the growth of sprawling McMansion studded developments gobbling up prime farmland on the outskirts of many cities (particularly in the Midwest). Shopping became the number one leisure activity among Americans, and suddenly people traded in their under a dollar coffee habit for $3 (and more) grande skinny caramel macchiatos.

Political liberals got their President in 1992 with Clinton’s election, while Conservatives were laying the groundwork for a Republican take over that came in 1994. Republicans and Democrats had great reason for hope in the 1990s. On the left, the 1990s marked the high point of the “politically correct” or PC movement, when liberals learned to call black people “African-Americans,” and Indians “Native Americans” and feel they were doing their part to right the wrongs of prior, unenlightened times. The 1990s also saw the growing influence of the Religious Right. The Republican Revolution of 1994, and the election of a born-again Christian - George W. Bush-- in 2000, swelled hopes among America’s evangelicals that a conservative Christian agenda would finally be implemented. His election marked an astounding and seemingly unassailable alliance of conservative Christians, fiscal conservatives, and big-business. But neither Clinton nor Bush accomplished what their supporters hoped, leading to a suspicion about the meaning of professions of faith, whether of the PC or the evangelical variety: does calling a person in a wheelchair “physically challenged” rather than handicapped change their experience of being handicapped when public buildings are not accessible? Will a politician who professes to be born again necessarily be above political compromise? Some Conservative Christians began having second thoughts about their enthusiastic alliance with big-business. Liberals and conservatives were dismayed by their leaders’ political (and moral) compromises, though perhaps more often, they were inclined to see the problems as coming from the other side of the political aisle.) As Rod Dreher writes in Crunchy Cons, “Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.”

The writings of locavangelists, of the lefty and Christian Agrarian variety, are rife with professions about the incongruity of belief and action. All the authors considered here write of the impulse to bring belief and action together. The financial implosion has lent further impetus to the desire for change: the promise of ever increasing wealth, of ever increasing house values, has proved illusory and this realization has prompted many to reconsider the meaning of work. If it is not to make more money and buy a bigger house, what is it for? So, I think there is something of a widespread re-alignment of values going on, with many people opting to focus their energies on the familial and the local, shunning the plastic and the consumerist, and seeking above all, the authentic, however that might be constructed. Beavan, the No Impact Man, writes: “I want my work to align with my values. I want to write about what’s important. I want to help change minds. The blurb for Year of Plenty (by Goodwin, the Presbyterian pastor) announces, this is the story of “one family wrestling with what it means to re-integrate life and faith.”

What locavores on the left and right seem to have in common is their emphasis on the importance of practice. It seems to me to be a commentary on what many now see as the superficiality of the 1990s. Both sides are seeking ways to realize their beliefs through actions. It is telling, I think that the environmental movement is growing not by more people heading for escape to a pristine wilderness, but through rediscovering the ancient traditions of agriculture, a turn that seems eminently more practical in a precarious world. As Ragan Sutterfield writes, “the problem with our role in creation is that we don't remember it. In our fallen state we have forgotten our place, both within God's will and love and also in our love and care for creation. We need to be reminded of who we are and what we are about. Practices and disciplines are our primary way of learning to remember, of being recollected to our place and call as creatures. I would like to offer farming, done well, as one of those disciplines.”

I find it fascinating, that a predominantly Protestant country has suddenly discovered “practice.” I don’t know quite what to make of this: it could be a response to the broader political and cultural forces, or it could suggest the assimilation of important religious ideas and practices from other religions. Americans are clearly hungry for practical guidance: Michael Pollan’s prescriptive book Food Rules, was quickly vaulted to the top of best-seller lists. Americans seem to want to be told what to do and many are finding new spiritual rewards in practicing the discipline of eating according to Pollan’s rules. Locavorism may well be the new Kosher, but it is being embraced with evangelical fervor.

Eating as Spiritual Practice: Locavangelism and the Evangelical Tradition in America

Today I'm posting Part II of Rachel Wheeler's "Eating as Spiritual Practice: Locavangelism in America Today," presented originally as a paper at a conference and shortened slightly here for blog format. Part I introduced some of Rachel's basic ideas; Part II below draws out the parallels she sees between evangelical thought and locavore practice; Part III, posted on Sunday December 4th, concludes the series. Thanks for Rachel for these provocative explorations!

Part II of Locavangelism in America
by Rachel Wheeler

History and Definitions

I would like to suggest that aspects of the contemporary environmental movement draw heavily – and largely unconsciously—from the deeply rooted American tradition of evangelicalism. Evangelicalism has been a powerful force in American culture from the revivals of the First Great Awakening in the 1740s to today when upwards of 40% of Americans identify themselves as “born again.” So just what is evangelicalism? Scholars generally agree on three basic elements of evangelicalism (or four depending on how you divide them up): the importance of the “born again” experience and a personal relationship with Jesus; Biblicism; and the importance of spreading the word. I’ll tackle these one by one, giving a brief explanation of each before considering how various environmentalists and locavores embody these qualities.

The Born Again Experience

The hallmark of evangelical piety – the born again experience – was the defining feature of the First Great Awakening in the colonies, itself part of a larger transatlantic Protestant evangelical awakening. The born again experience essentially speeded up the conversion process that 17^th century New England Puritans had made the basis of church membership. Early Puritan leaders faced the challenge of establishing ecclesiastical structures in a radically different religious and physical environment from what they had known in England. If church membership was not to be a matter of birth to Christian parents, but conferred upon the visible saints of God, then the church needed a means of establishing who was among the elect. Full church membership was thus granted to those who were able to deliver in front of their minister and other church members a compelling account of spiritual journey toward Christ. A pattern soon emerged, termed by Edmund Morgan the “morphology of conversion” marked by the stages of “knowledge, conviction, faith, combat, and true, imperfect assurance. . . .

A number of prominent environmentalists were raised in evangelical and fundamentalist traditions: John Muir, often credited as being the grandfather of the American environmental movement in the 19^th century, was raised in a strict Calvinist household; Dave Foreman, who founded the radical environmentalist movement EarthFirst! in 1979, was raised in a fundamentalist church and had once considered becoming a preacher. (Although, I won’t go into it much here, Foreman’s philosophy is fascinating as a sort of Calvinist environmentalist apocalyptic millennialism – Foreman is deeply convinced of human depravity and that our environmental sins are leading us quickly toward an apocalypse in which Mother Nature will meet out justice). . . .

All of these environmentalists, as different as they are, have in common that they renounced the Christian gospel of their upbringing and became ministers of the green gospel. But it is not only those who have evangelicalism in their family tree that become environmental evangelists. Below, I’d like to look at various shades of environmental evangelism, from current and former evangelical Christians and to those with no direct link to evangelicalism.

The lecture by the Mad Vegetarian Cowboy I mentioned at the beginning conforms perfectly to the form, if not the substance, of the evangelical conversion narrative: the Christian content has been vacated and an alternate model of righteous living substituted in its place. I have not been able to find out about Lyman’s religious background, but odds are good that someone raised in ranching country in the 1950s belonged to an evangelical church. Like Lyman, Julia Hill was set on the path toward environmental by a medical disaster. When she was 22, the car she was driving was struck by a drunk driver and she was nearly killed. During her recovery, which took nearly a year, she came to realize, “that my whole life had been out of balance…The crash woke me up to the importance of the moment, and doing whatever I could to make a positive impact on the future.”

Like Lyman, the trauma didn’t prompt an immediate conversion, but set her on the path toward a new life. It would be some years before she found her “Jesus,” but writing in retrospect, she felt she was being called by the one true power, the power of Creation. On a whim Hill headed west, scarcely recovered from the accident, and when she first sets foot in a redwood forest, she feels: “these majestic ancient places.. are the holiest of temples, [and] hous[e] more spirituality than any church…”

She stumbles upon a disorganized activist camp trying to save the ancient forests from the chainsaws. In her depiction, the would-be activists are too caught up in petty bickering to do the work of activism. Hill volunteers and one night becomes more than two years. During that time, Hill is transformed by the tree she comes to call Luna.

Hill’s description of her transformative moment sounds for all the world like a born-again experience, the moment of justification by grace that only comes after being laid low in one’s own sinfulness and helplessness: “I had to be broken until I saw no hope, until I went crazy, until I finally let go. Only then could I be rebuilt; only then could I be filled back up with who I am meant to be. Only then could I become my higher self.” In his Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, Dave Foreman sounds like a modern day Gilbert Tennant when he argues for the importance of grace: “breaking free from the gilded chains of civilized banality is not easy. One cannot achieve a state of wilderness grace through books, through intellectualization, through rational argument. Our passion comes from our connection to the Earth and it is only through direct interaction with the wilderness that we can unite our minds and our bodies with the land, realizing that there is no separation.”. . .

Political conservative and Christian author Rod Dreher admits that he used to mock lefty eating habits until a friend offered his family their week’s share from a CSA (explain Community Supported Agriculture) and he was converted by the cauliflower. Presbyterian pastor Craig Goodwin’s conversion was prompted by his purchase of a “Spa Factory Color Sparkle Custom Nail Mix Studio” as a present for his 7 y.o. daughter to bring to a friend’s birthday. It was the height of meaningless consumption, and came in the aftermath of the Christmas season, and in the midst of the 2008 financial meltdown. After the crisis, he and his wife resolved to spend a year living by four rules: local, used, and homemade (the fourth rules was Thailand – they would buy goods from Thailand, which enabled them to keep their coffee).

Colin Beavan, the child of a-religious, hippy, liberals has no direct connections with evangelical Christianity, yet his memoir of a year of living lightly on the earth has all the hallmarks of the classic conversion narrative. Beavan announces in the introduction to No Impact Man: “I’m going to tell a story that is more confession, a pre-changing of my ways stocktaking, a prodigal son, mea culpa sort of thing.” He then recounts his sinful ways, in his case, his prideful tendency to see the faults in others but not himself: “It’s true, that I had occasionally tried to make a difference in the world, but I was coming to think my political views had too often been about changing other people and too seldom about changing myself.” On an unnaturally warm January day in New York City, Beavan finds himself aghast at the impact of global warming, the complacency he sees all around him and his sense of helplessness. “Back on that summery day in the middle of winter,” he writes, “I seemed to be hitting bottom.” His epiphany was that he must change himself: “I wasn’t sick of the world, I was sick of myself.”

Beavan came to speak at my university in Indiana last year, and in a lecture hall packed with about 500 students, I had the same feeling I’d had hearing Lyman years earlier: here is a modern day itinerant minister of the environmental gospel. In his chatty, self deprecating hipster way, Beavan exhorted his listeners to change their lives. While Beavan did not invoke a higher power directly, his message implied a faith that individual actions do matter, and that individuals can find the power to do the seemingly impossible. He also implied that the way to righteous living is a matter of common sense apprehension of “truth,” and this raises a second feature of evangelicalism: the belief that there is a source of truth and that it is available to all.

Biblicism/common sense

Famed American religious historians George Marsden and Mark Noll have both explored the fusion of evangelical Christianity with a popularized form of Enlightenment philosophy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, resulting in a common sense reading of the bible among evangelicals, and later, fundamentalists: the bible means what it says, and says what it means, and its eternal, enduring truth can be perceived by anyone, not just seminary trained clergy.

This approach to the Bible is readily apparent in the writings of Christian environmentalists, even though conservative Christianity and environmentalism have long been seen as antithetical. For example, Joel Salatin grounds his farming philosophy in his religion: he finds in the Bible a clear account of God’s order of creation, and the charge to humans to steward His creation. In an interview, Salatin explained: “I am a Christian, and I think that the Judeo-Christian ethic calls us to realize that we are stewards of creation – that we are not to just rape it, pillage it, whatever, we are to steward it – and lays down certain principles of growth.” He continued to explain, “When God made [the earth] in Genesis, the plants were to reproduce after their own kind. And genetic modification doesn’t make plants produce after their own kind. So, you know, even to that point, [there is a] template there to live by.” Salatin’s farming philosophy is rooted in his reading of the Bible: farming practices must enhance, not hinder, animals’ and plants’ ability to express their God-given nature. In this view, corn fed beef is heretical, and even sinful.

Don Colbert, a graduate of Oral Roberts University (Pentecostal), and a practicing doctor, draws even more directly on the Bible in encouraging his readers to reform their diets. Colbert begins his 2002 book with the question from the title: What Would Jesus Eat? He expects that his readers as Christians have attempted to model their lives on Jesus’s, but rarely when it comes to food: “we seek to follow Jesus in every other area of our lives, why not in our eating habits?” The bible, believes Colbert, offers a clear path that will lead to physical and spiritual health and so when we eat, we should ask ourselves: “Why am I eating this? And “Would Jesus eat this?” If we ask these questions, he suggests, we will have to face two truths about the way we live: “most of what we eat flows from ill-founded, unwise, and mostly unconscious food choices” and 2) “Most of what we eat in a given day may not be what Jesus would have eaten if He were walking in our shoes.”

Secular environmental evangelists also proclaim a truth that is plain for all to see, often turning to nature itself as source of wisdom and truth. Among contemporary environmentalists, Julia Butterfly Hill expresses this idea most clearly in her resolve: “ I was no longer going to live my life out of fear..I was going to live my life guided from the higher source, the Creation source.” Through her relationship with Luna (the tree), Hill comes to realize: “that what I was feeling was the love of the Earth, the love of Creation. Every day we, as a species, do so much to destroy Creation’s ability to give us life. But that Creation continues to do everything in its power to give us life anyway. And that’s true love.” Hill had accepted Luna as her personal savior and guide for her life.

One could hardly imagine anyone farther apart culturally and ideologically than Don Colbert, a politically conservative Pentecostal, and Michael Pollan, a politically liberal secular Jew, yet in his 2008 book, In Defense of Food, Pollan sounds a note remarkably like Colbert’s. Instead of Jesus, however, Pollan invokes the wisdom of grandmothers: “Most of what we need to know about how to eat we already know, or once did until we allowed the nutrition experts and the advertisers to shake our confidence in common sense, tradition, the testimony of our senses, and the wisdom of our mothers and grandmothers.”[9] Pollan’s prescription?: “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”[10] Pollan’s truth is a common-sensical truth.

Spreading the word:

Having found salvation, and a new gospel, the enviro-evangelists all feel compelled to spread the word. Here I’d like to start with the seemingly most un-evangelical of the group: Michael Pollan. Pollan is of Jewish background, but apparently non-practicing. His writing is the epitome of rational discourse, hardly the fire and brimstone of the evangelist. But yet, his works are in fact exhortatory and not entirely unlike that most famed example of fire and brimstone preaching: Jonathan Edwards’ infamous “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” a sermon more often despised (or praised) than it is read. Edwards was a careful student of the Enlightenment, and the power of the sermon comes from the clinical, precise dissection of sin and its consequences. Likewise, Michael Pollan’s work dissects our environmental (food) sins and the consequences to individual, communal, global, and environmental health. Pollan’s equivalent to “Sinners in the Hands…” is his “Letter to the Farmer in Chief,” a letter to the newly elected President Obama published in the New York Times in January 2008, in which he argues that arguing that Obama must make “reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration.” If we continue on our current path, Pollan argues, our destruction is assured. And just as Edwards spelled out the precariousness of the sinner’s state, as a spider dangling above the pit of hell, held up only by the slenderest thread of God’s grace, yet deserving of damnation unless the sinner reforms, Pollan describes in great detail the ways that our food choices are clogging arteries, polluting the environment, driving up health care costs, and destabilizing our economy. His program of reform includes everything from supporting farmer’s markets, doing away with agricultural subsidies to big business, establishing a grain reserve, establishing mandatory gardens at primary schools and creating a new School Lunch Corps whose mission would be to change children’s “food culture.”

Joel Salatin, the Christian libertarian capitalist lunatic farmer, was spreading the word of redemption through agriculture long before he was discovered by Pollan. Salatin devotes much of his time to spreading the green gospel. The farm’s website announces: “Believing that the Creator’s design is still the best pattern for the biological world, the Salatin family invites like-minded folks to join in the farm’s mission: to develop emotionally, economically, environmentally enhancing agricultural enterprises and facilitate their duplication throughout the world.” . . .

Ragan Sutterfield makes a similar point in his book, Farming as Christian Discipline, “My hope is that Christians will come to see one of their tasks as staking out claims for God's Kingdom by redeeming land from the margins and using that land to create gardens that offer not only good food but also community development and hope.”[12] While Barbara Kingsolver has moved on from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle to other writing projects, her website continues to serve as a site of almost religious witness: there is a page filled with reader-submitted pictures of lush gardens and happy children accompanied by testimony of the transformative power of communion with home-grown (or at least locally grown) tomatoes.

Like the temperance and bible tract societies of the nineteenth century the locavangelist movement tends to operate on the conviction that the path to the millennium will be paved by the conversion of individuals: if enough people make the choice for salvation the Kingdom of God will be achieved. And for this, the movement, especially Pollan, have come in for criticism. One reviewer, Laura Shapiro, criticizes Pollan for preaching a doctrine of “individual dietary purity,” which reflects “his religion – the holy, catholic, and apostolic church of food, where only martyrs and lost souls have to shop at Safeway.” According to Shapiro, Pollan alienates the unconverted, because, she write, “he can’t quite bring himself to take us seriously unless we can prove we’ve been born again.” Only time will tell if Shapiro’s critique proves justified, or if the movement gains the momentum and organization to seek systemic change.

Eating as Spiritual Practice: Locavangelism in America Today

Editor's note: I'm delighted to guest post today a contribution from our old friend Rachel Wheeler of IUPUI - Indianapolis, who's currently serving a year as a Fulbright Fellow in Germany. We've blogged before about Rachel's excellent first book To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-century Northeast.

Lately, though, Rachel has been contemplating some important matters more close to the present day. She presented a draft of her ideas as a paper, and I'm excerpting a bit of this below as Part I of what will be a three part post about food, sustainability, and religious sensibilities in contemporary America. On this most food-centric of holiday weekend, it seemed appropriate to post this. After reading this, continue on with Part II of this series here, and the finale, Part III, here.

Eating as Spiritual Practice: Locavangelism in America
by Rachel Wheeler

About a dozen years ago, I found myself on a college campus in Portland, Oregon, listening to a talk by a man who billed himself as the “mad, vegetarian cowboy.” Howard Lyman was the founder of an organization called “Voices for a Viable Future,” and that day, as I’m sure he did at hundreds of other public appearances, he told the story of how he had grown up on a cattle ranch in Montana in the 1950s. It was a small operation, but one that had sustained the family for several generations. Then he went off to ag-school at a time when “better living through chemistry” was embraced by agricultural scientists. He came back to the farm with the zeal of the convert. He told his father he wanted to make the ranch bigger and better. They bought up more acres, and started on the path to modern, chemically intensive, factory farming and feed-lot ranching.

Then in 1979, Lyman became paralyzed from a tumor on his spine. His doctors said they could operate to remove the tumor, but chances were he would remain paralyzed, or worse, die during the surgery. Lyman made himself a promise that if he survived, he would devote his life to what he believed was right. The surgery was successful: Lyman not only survived, but he was once again able to walk. At the time, Lyman was 300 pounds (135 kg), and he suffered from diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. True to his word, he changed his life. He became a vegetarian, dropped to a healthy weight, and started un-doing all the “improvements” he had implemented on the family’s ranch. He became a lobbyist on Capitol Hill against factory, feedlot farming and even found himself being sued for libel by the beef industry. He became president of an organization named: EarthSave, whose motto is “healthy eating for a healthy planet.” Today he runs an organization called “Voice for a Viable Future.”

Though I cannot know for sure, I am willing to bet that the vast majority of the people in the audience that evening counted themselves as despisers of “organized religion” (the Northwest being the least-churched region of the country, and Reed College students being the second most un-religious students in the whole country) and that they perceived nothing at all religious about the evening. But I couldn’t help but feel I had just attended a religious revival. Lyman’s talk had all the hallmarks of a revivalist sermon, minus any mention of God or Jesus. He had told of the sinful ways in his youth, his arrogance and his disregard for the wisdom of tradition. He recounted the crisis sparked by illness, a miraculous cure, and the epiphany that allowed him to see the error of his former ways. He then chronicled his path of righteousness. The lecture ended with what felt like an altar call, as Lyman exhorted listeners to renounce the sinful ways of the world and follow the narrow path of righteous eating.

In the dozen years since I heard the Mad Vegetarian Cowboy, a lone voice in the wilderness has turned into a loud chorus; and a cultural shift seems to be under way with food front and center. You can scarcely open an American newspaper or magazine today without finding a story that in some way mentions the locavore movement. The term “locavore” was coined in 2005 to mean someone who eats food that did not travel far to reach the plate. The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary declared “locavore” the word of the year for 2007. The Girl Scouts now offer a badge that can be earned by preparing a meal of locally grown food. The movement is far from monolithic: it is possible to find a wide range of belief and practice, from the casual practitioners who occasionally frequent farmer’s markets to augment their supermarket shopping, to those who might be termed fundamentalist locavores, who will not eat a morsel at a restaurant without knowing how far the food traveled, and how the animals were housed and fed. The locavore movement, made up largely of the college educated and reasonably well off, has created a mini-publishing industry, and a flurry of books recounting experiments in extreme locavorism or eco-living has rolled off the presses in recent years: some of the titles include: the bishop of locavangelism, Michael Pollan’s, In Defense of Food, Collin Beaven’s, No Impact Man, Barbara Kingsolver’s, Animal Vegetable Miracle, Kristen Kimball’s, The Dirty Life, and my favorite title (though I confess I haven’t read the book), by Vanessa Farquarson, Sleeping Naked Is Green: How an Eco-Cynic Unplugged Her Fridge, Sold Her Car, and Found Love in 366 Days.

There is an equally voluminous output by Christian publishers, though it has gone largely un-noticed by the mainstream media. Presbyterian pastor Craig Goodwin recently published, A Year of Plenty: One Suburban Family, Four Rules, and 365 Days of Homegrown Adventure in Pursuit of Christian Living, and Ragan Sutterfield, founder of a farm-school for disadvantaged youth, published a collection of essays entitled, Farming as a Spiritual Discipline. Rod Dreher, a Methodist turned Catholic turned Eastern Orthodox, has written about conservatives who embrace what are usually seen as liberal issues in his book: Crunchy Cons: Or How Birkenstock Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party); and one of my favorites, Don Colbert’s, What Would Jesus Eat?

One of the most prominent voices today bridges the Christian and the secular, lefty realms and belongs to Joel Salatin, who calls himself a “Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic,” or sometimes, just a “lunatic farmer.” Salatin first came to national prominence through the writings of Michael Pollan, who featured Salatin in his 2006 Omnivore’s Dilemma, which has become the bible of the Locavore movement. Salatin is a 1979 graduate of Bob Jones University (a fundamentalist Christian university), who runs a farm in Virginia. He writes on the farm’s website: “We are in the redemption business: healing the land, healing the food, healing the economy, and healing the culture.”[1] What the “mad cowboy” and the “lunatic farmer” both mean of course, is that they are far from crazy. Like Wendell Berry before them, who often wrote poems as “the Mad Farmer,” they mean that they are the ones who perceive reality most clearly, and who are willing to be seen as crazy by the world in order to proclaim their truth. Consciously or unconsciously, these authors are invoking the trope of the “fool for Christ;” the believer who challenges societal norms in order to follow a higher calling, and, they hope, lead the way to salvation.

This recent food “madness” begs for interpretation. Is it simply the latest health craze destined to meet the same fate as the Atkins diet, or aerobics? or is there something deeper going on? I think indeed there is something deeper going on, and I believe there are profound resonances with deeply rooted elements of American religious culture. But I think what is most fascinating of all is that the movement has gained substantial momentum among two groups who rarely care to be associated with each other: evangelical Christians and secular liberals. And I think this convergence offers some hope (Tea Party vs. Occupy Wall Street to the contrary) that the chasm between right and left may in fact bridgeable. . . .

What locavores on the left and right seem to have in common is their emphasis on the importance of practice. It seems to me to be a commentary on what many now see as the superficiality of the 1990s. Both sides are seeking ways to realize their beliefs through actions. It is telling, I think that the environmental movement is growing not by more people heading for escape to a pristine wilderness, but through rediscovering the ancient traditions of agriculture, a turn that seems eminently more practical in a precarious world. As Ragan Sutterfield writes, “the problem with our role in creation is that we don't remember it. In our fallen state we have forgotten our place, both within God's will and love and also in our love and care for creation. We need to be reminded of who we are and what we are about. Practices and disciplines are our primary way of learning to remember, of being recollected to our place and call as creatures. I would like to offer farming, done well, as one of those disciplines.”[2]

I find it fascinating, that a predominantly Protestant country has suddenly discovered “practice.” I don’t know quite what to make of this: it could be a response to the broader political and cultural forces, or it could suggest the assimilation of important religious ideas and practices from other religions. Americans are clearly hungry for practical guidance: Michael Pollan’s prescriptive book Food Rules, was quickly vaulted to the top of best-seller lists. Americans seem to want to be told what to do and many are finding new spiritual rewards in practicing the discipline of eating according to Pollan’s rules. Locavorism may well be the new Kosher, but it is being embraced with evangelical fervor.

[to be continued]

---

[1] http://www.polyfacefarms.com/

[2] Ragan Sutterfield, Farming as Spiritual Discipline

Our Great Pantheist Epic

Paul Harvey

Here's a belated 4th of July post -- little power outage around here cut off my internet access so we're a little behind on posting. Anyway, in honor of the 4th, what better than Bruce Springsteen doing "This Land Is Your Land," the-song-that-should-be-our-national-anthem. "America the Beautiful" would also be a great national anthem, especially since it was inspired by my local landmark Pike's Peak, honors land, and the latter verses hail both "liberty" and "law." Either one of those would be great, and I'd put my hand over heart every time -- just ANYTHING but the unsingable, militaristic, bombast/drinking song we're stuck with presently.

In case you don't know, "This Land Is Your Land" was written as Woody Guthrie's angry response to the treacly patriotism of "God Bless America." Even Carl Lewis, who famously butchered our hideous national anthem, can sing "This Land."

And this one's for you too, Professor Fea. And for our national parks, under significant threats according to a just-released report which also recommends a number of actions to forestall their possible decline.

Only St. Jude Can Prevent Forest Fires

Emily Clark

This morning in Tallahassee was wonderfully pleasant in temperature due to storms passing through the area last night. However, the air quality was horrible, as smoke from nearby wildfires covered the city in a smelly haze. The Florida Division of Forestry has deemed wildfires an area hot topic, and a big part of the problem is a drought. Raised in south Texas, I view droughts not as occasional; they’re the normal environmental state of being. But isn’t Florida supposed to get enough rain? I mean, the Everglades and swamps are here. And Florida isn't the only state in a drought. The majority of Texas has been in a severe drought for months, with many places ranking at the highest severity level (exceptional).

When in need of rain, what can mere humans do? Apparently, pray. Just two months ago in April, Texas governor Rick Perry declared “the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas,” and “Texans of all faiths and traditions” were “to offer prayers on that day for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life.” Crop failure and wildfires are plaguing the state, and since (according to Perry) “Texans have been strengthened, assured and lifted up through prayer,” it only made sense to pray for rain. In the wake of a hopeless exceptional-ranking drought, prayer would be the answer. Move over Smokey Bear, enter St. Jude.


Perhaps it’s fitting that today I read Robert Orsi’s Thank You St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes as I prepare to take my doctoral comprehensive exams this December. I may not have been in Indy for the RAAC that I have so jealously read reports on from fellow bloggers, but Orsi has been on my mind too. If you haven’t read Thank You St. Jude, I highly recommend it. Personally, I like it better than Madonna of 115^th Street. In it, Orsi investigates the devotional worlds of women who have called upon St. Jude. In doing so, Catholic women (“the immigrants’ daughters”) have appropriated the saint, and Orsi explores how they use their devotions to regain their voices and how their appeals to Jude can also push them further into their state of hopeless despair. In analyzing the functions, results, and workings of the women’s devotions, Orsi in the end embraces the ambivalence of it all. Jude and the women who ask for his intercession live in unstable and “in-between” worlds. The questions of bracketing belief and passing judgments that seem to have come up again at this June’s RAAC (and reminiscent of the famous “Orsi-Prothero Smack-down” in the HDB) permeate the pages of Thank You St. Jude as well. When he laments how a woman asked Jude to keep her husband faithful instead of confronting the husband, is Orsi passing judgment on the oppressive nature of this woman’s devotion or he is simply embracing the “in-between ground” he endorses in Between Heaven and Earth? Truly, the intersubjectivity beloved by anthropologist Michael Jackson remains a blurry area hard to define when deployed in religious studies and American religious history – though it is a task and goal that I love and applaud Orsi and others for engaging.

After finishing Thank You St. Jude, I visited the website for the National Shrine of St. Jude in Chicago that begins Orsi’s narrative, and the shrine is in need of help. In his book, Orsi argues that Jude needs the devotion and sustenance of the women who call on him, just as the women who ask for his help need him. Both the women and Jude inhabit a space of vulnerability – the women at the edge of hopeless despair and Jude the long-forgotten saint who could slip back into obscurity. It seems Jude needs help more than ever right now. Upon opening the shrine’s website, one immediately learns that the shrine is $60,000 under budget and is in need of donations. The shrine is once again selling the healing St. Jude's oil, a product that was not available when Orsi was writing. Another possible way to donate is to electronically purchase a “virtual prayer candle,” which comes complete with a 3, 9, or 30 day novena. Though I am an immigrants’ great-great-granddaughter of German and Czech Catholic heritage, I haven’t purchased one yet. But, perhaps come late fall with a hopelessly large pile of comps reading still to tackle, I might take Jude up on that offer.

Pasquier on the Impact of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

Randall Stephens

Mike Pasquier has been a busy guy. In addition to writing his rich study of Jesuits in late 18th and 19th century America, our fellow RiAH blogger has been collaborating with other LSU researchers who are studying the impact of the Deepwater Hoirzon oil spill. Ashley Berthelot at LSU Gold reports:

Michael Pasquier, assistant professor of religious studies and historian at LSU, has developed "Standard Lives: Visualizing the Culture of Oil in Louisiana." The goal of this project is to complement scientific investigations of the Deepwater Horizon disaster by documenting the cultural impact of environmental stressors on Louisiana's coastal communities.

"To do this, it's necessary to look at oil from 'the ground up,' so to speak," said Pasquier. "I knew we needed to take a long and unbiased look at Louisiana's relationship with the oil industry, and by extension, its effects on the everyday lives of refinery and offshore workers, as well as the businessmen, teachers, farmers, fishermen, mariners, homemakers and others with direct and indirect ties to petroleum-based services."

Pasquier started his project by delving into a photo collection at the University of Louisville that showcased in detail how the industry fundamentally transformed the social and environmental landscape of Louisiana at mid-century. . . .

"As a native of Louisiana, I grew up in a family and in communities with deep stakes in the oil industry, so I already had my finger on the pulse of a people economically and culturally invested in oil. Now, what I wanted to do was to find a way to look behind the typical photos of a literally oiled landscape to see the faces of people who are directly impacted by even the most subtle of economic and environmental changes," said Pasquier. "When we look at the photos of oily pelicans or an oiled coastline, we should also be trying to understand the backstory that was there long before the oil spill. We should also be looking for the everyday human story that isn't drenched in oil." . . .

"This isn't about justifying our use of oil, or being pro-oil or pro-environment," Pasquier said. "It's about assessing the terrible consequences of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster by taking the time to focus on and understand the big picture, the realities that exist in everyday life for many Louisianans. This is about our history and our culture – this is about us and our future." read on >>>

Many of us heard Mike's preview of this tremendous work at the 2010 AAR. Can't wait to see the eight short documentaries that will result!