BAPTIZED WITH THE SOIL: CHRISTIAN AGRARIANS AND THE CRUSADE FOR RURAL ...

266 Pages·2013·7.46 MB·English

by  Kevin Lowe

The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

College of the Liberal Arts

BAPTIZED WITH THE SOIL:

CHRISTIAN AGRARIANS AND THE CRUSADE FOR RURAL COMMUNITY,

1910-1970

A Dissertation in

History

by

Kevin M. Lowe

© 2013 Kevin M. Lowe

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

December 2013
ii

The dissertation of Kevin M. Lowe was reviewed and approved* by the following:

Philip Jenkins
Emeritus Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Humanities
Dissertation Adviser
Co-Chair of Committee

David G. Atwill
Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies
Graduate Program Director
Co-Chair of Committee

Kathryn Merkel-Hess McDonald
Assistant Professor of History and Asian Studies

Carolyn Sachs
Professor of Rural Sociology
Head of Women’s Studies Department

*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School.
iii
Abstract

This dissertation is a history of the Christian commitment to rural America. Throughout
the early and middle twentieth century, a broad Christian agrarian movement preached
the importance of maintaining rural communities based on small-scale, family farm
agriculture. This dissertation focuses on mainline Protestants, who were the most active
and most visible of all Christian agrarians, although they have been the least studied.
Christian agrarians argued that saving rural communities was critical for the nation’s
future, because to live in the country, and especially to farm, was the most moral way to
live. They believed that small rural communities were the best route to justice and
opportunity for the nation as a whole. Protestant agrarians worked closely with the power
of government, especially through state universities and cooperative extension, to train
ministers and missionaries who could champion farming and rural life. Their belief that
farming was an act of cooperation with God in creation led Christian agrarians to become
leaders in the soil conservation movement, inspiring an environmentalist awareness and a
language of stewardship decades before the environmental movement.
iv

Table of Contents

List of Figures...............................................................................................................vi
Acknowledgments........................................................................................................vii
Introduction - Consecrating the American Countryside.............................................1
What is Christian Agrarianism?...................................................................................5
Farms, Cities, and the Struggle for American Identity..................................................7
Possible Solutions to the Rural Crisis........................................................................11
Agricultural Missions................................................................................................15
The Holy Earth..........................................................................................................16
The Abundant Life....................................................................................................18
Catholicism in the Countryside..................................................................................20
Mainline Protestantism and the Nation’s Future.........................................................22
Historiography...........................................................................................................28
Chapter Outline.........................................................................................................33
Chapter 1 - Working in God’s Country: The American Agricultural Missionary,
1910-1970.....................................................................................................................36
Rural Work in the Denominations..............................................................................38
Interdenominational Cooperation...............................................................................41
Training the Rural Pastor: Missionaries and Ministers in Town and Country.............47
Summer Schools for Rural Pastors.............................................................................49
Cooperation Between Seminaries and State Universities............................................57
The Cornell University School for Missionaries ........................................................61
Other Missionary Schools..........................................................................................69
Missionary Training in the Government.....................................................................72
Rural Home Missions: The Methodist Church...........................................................74
Rural Home Missions to African Americans..............................................................79
Conclusion................................................................................................................83
Chapter 2 - Spiritual Efficiency: Rethinking the Rural Church Experience, 1925-
1970..............................................................................................................................84
Parish Consolidation and the Larger Parish................................................................85
Larger Parishes in Practice.........................................................................................89
Other Strategies for Church Cooperation.................................................................100
The Spirituality of the Rural Church........................................................................102
Rural Life Sunday...................................................................................................104
The Ideas of Rural Life Sunday...............................................................................105
Worshipping on Rural Life Sunday..........................................................................110
Rural Life Sunday and 4-H......................................................................................113
Harvest Home Sunday.............................................................................................119
Conclusion..............................................................................................................123
v
Chapter 3 - Co-Workers in the Kingdom: The Lord’s Acre Movement, 1930-1970
....................................................................................................................................125
Farming and the Depression....................................................................................126
The Lord’s Acre......................................................................................................128
The Lord’s Acre Begins...........................................................................................130
James G.K. McClure and the Farmers Federation....................................................132
The Federation’s Religious Department...................................................................134
The Plan..................................................................................................................137
The Lord’s Acre in Practice.....................................................................................139
Praise and Criticism for the Lord’s Acre..................................................................145
Promoting the Movement........................................................................................150
Growth and Inclusivity............................................................................................158
The Lord’s Acre Looks Abroad...............................................................................161
Spiritual Benefits of the Lord’s Acre.......................................................................163
Spiritual Benefits: Living Biblically........................................................................164
Spiritual Benefits: Communal Participation.............................................................170
Spiritual Benefits: Christian Character.....................................................................171
Spiritual Benefits: Partnerships with God................................................................176
Building the Kingdom.............................................................................................179
Passing the Torch....................................................................................................185
Conclusion..............................................................................................................187
Chapter 4 - The Gospel of the Soil: Soil Conservation, Stewardship, and Christian
Environmentalism, 1930-1970...................................................................................190
Christianity and Soil Conservation...........................................................................194
Soil Conservation in the Federal Government..........................................................198
The Eleventh Commandment...................................................................................201
Preaching Soil Conservation....................................................................................203
The National Council of Churches and Agricultural Conservation...........................215
The NCC and Stewardship.......................................................................................217
The State and the Spiritual Necessity of Soil Conservation......................................223
Soil Stewardship Sunday.........................................................................................228
The Ideas Behind Soil Stewardship Week................................................................231
Publicizing Soil Stewardship...................................................................................234
Churches Respond to Soil Stewardship Week..........................................................237
Conclusion..............................................................................................................240
Conclusion - Who Needs Rural America?................................................................242
Bibliography..............................................................................................................248
vi
List of Figures

Figure 1: Church members at an unidentified church, holding samples of their Lord's
Acre projects.......................................................................................................143

Figure 2: James G.K. McClure, Jr.; Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace; Dumont
Clarke; R. Douglas Stuart (chairman of the industrial advisory board of the National
Recovery Administration), in Asheville, North Carolina, February 25, 1935........146

Figure 3: Lord's Acre Sunday at Sulphur Springs Baptist Church, Rutherford, North
Carolina, November 16, 1952..............................................................................167

Figure 4: Alice Petersen of Mills River, North Carolina, with her Lord's Acre ducks...172
vii

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due first of all to Philip Jenkins, who chaired this dissertation, for his
unfailing support and mentorship through a sometimes grueling process. Many thanks to
David Atwill, Kate Merkel-Hess, and Carolyn Sachs for offering their time and expertise
by serving on the committee. I would also like to thank Jennifer Mittelstadt, under whose
direction I undertook the initial work in 2007 that later bloomed (albeit in very different
form) into this dissertation.
Generous financial support for this dissertation came from the Penn State History
Department, the Penn State Center for Global Studies, and Ted and Tracy McCloskey.
The assistance of knowledgeable and unflappable archivists and librarians, at
multiple locations, was indispensable. I would like to thank the following people: Eleanor
Brown of Cornell University; Matthew Beland of the Drew University Archives; Chris
Anderson of the Methodist Library at Drew University; Tracy Del Duca of the
Ecumenical Library of the Interchurch Center; Karen Paar of Mars Hill College; Tanya
Zanish-Belcher and Laura Sullivan of Iowa State University; Ann L. Moore of the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Betty Bolden of Union Theological Seminary.
I would like to thank as well all of the special collections staff of those institutions, along
with the staff of the Presbyterian Historical Society, and the interlibrary loan department
of Penn State University.
Also indispensable was the love and support of close friends, particularly when
things got rough. Thanks most especially to Ann Hubert, Dan Boucher, Kyle Macht, and
Gretchen Macht. My community of musicians in central Pennsylvania is too numerous to
name individually, but I thank them all for welcoming a rogue grad student into their
midst. Many thanks to my family—particularly my parents, Jim and Carol Lowe, my
brother Brian Lowe, and my grandparents Jack and Janet Lowe. They may not share my
fascination with these topics, but they have been patient and unswerving supporters, and I
could not have done this without them. Most importantly, I am eternally indebted to my
wife Sarah. Her love is a great and wonderful grace.
1

Introduction
Consecrating the American Countryside

The rural church is not a miniature or
embryonic urban church. It is not an
apprentice school for urban pastors, nor an
asylum for broken-down ministers. Its
primary function is to the community.
- Arthur Carlos Van Saun, 19321

Rural America is suffering.2 Communities across the rural United States are daily
losing jobs and opportunities. Though agriculture still dominates much of the rural
countryside, farms employ only a tiny percentage of Americans. Meanwhile, the
difficulty of sustaining rural non-farm businesses and industries means that many rural
places continue to experience a “rural brain drain” by being unable to retain educated,
entrepreneurial young people—destabilizing what might otherwise be healthy
communities.3 Alan Guebert laments the rural Midwest as “a hundred empty Main Streets

1 Van Saun, “Replanning the Rural Church,” 103.
2 Throughout this dissertation I regularly use the words “America,” “American,” and “Americans” to refer
to the United States. Although I acknowledge the political and intellectual deficiencies in applying this
term to only this one nation, the degree to which the terms are entrenched in our language makes them
difficult to avoid.
3 Wood, Survival of Rural America; Brown and Schafft, Rural People and Communities; Brown and
Swanson, eds., Challenges for Rural America; Castle, ed., Changing American Countryside; Brad Plumer,
“We’re Running Out of Farm Workers; Immigration Reform Won’t Help,” Wall Street Journal, January
29, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/29/the-u-s-is-running-out-of-farm-
workers-immigration-reform-may-not-help/ (accessed February 6, 2013); Jennifer Sherman, Those Who
Work, Those Who Don’t: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2009); Shirley Stewart Burns, Bringing Down the Mountains: The Impact of Mountaintop
Removal Surface Coal Mining on Southern West Virginia Communities (Morgantown: West Virginia
University Press, 2007). The phrase “rural brain drain” is taken from Patrick J. Carr and Maria Kefalas,
Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What it Means For America (Boston: Beacon Press,
2009).
2
for every busy one....Empty libraries, closed churches, full cemeteries.”4 John Ikerd goes
so far as to call the contemporary depletion of the countryside “colonization”:
“Colonization today is being carried out by corporations instead of nations and the
territories being colonized are rural areas instead of whole nations.”5
Many of these problems can be attributed in one way or another to a long history
of industrialization in the countryside, a trend that stretches back to early in the twentieth
century. Beginning soon after World War I, as Deborah Fitzgerald has argued, American
agriculture started to become agribusiness, predicated upon an industrial ideal—an
economy of scale and mechanization that has required fewer and fewer people to work
the land. Since then, rural communities have become smaller and more dispersed. Rather
than the web of small farms and villages it once had been, much of the American
countryside (especially in the Midwest) has been transformed into endless fields of
mechanically harvested crops, with hardly a person or town in sight.6
This dissertation explores the history of the opposition—those who believed that
this industrial ideal was dangerous. It is a history of the belief that community is more
important than the individual, that solidarity was more important than profit, and that one
should put one’s neighbor (and the earth) before oneself. It is a history of people who
championed agrarianism in the face of agribusiness. In other words, it is a history of an
alternative idea of what the countryside was for.

4 Alan Guebert, “View from the Levee: No One’s Home,” The Daily Yonder, September 5, 2013,
http://www.dailyyonder.com/view-levee-no-ones-home/2013/09/05/6751 (accessed September 12, 2013).
5 John Ikerd, “The Role of the Rural Church in Sustaining Rural Communities,” presentation at the 2007
International Rural Church Association Conference, Brandon, Manitoba, Canada, July 4, 2007,
http://web.missouri.edu/~ikerdj/papers/Brandon%20--%20IRCA.htm (accessed September 10, 2013).
6 Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory.
3
It is also a history of American religion, because the loudest champions of
agrarian community values were Christians. Beginning around the time of World War I,
American Christianity developed an influential agrarian voice. Critical of
industrialization—though by no means opposed to the modern world—Christian
agrarians staunchly defended family farms, small-scale agriculture, and rural
communities that provided justice and opportunity for everyone. They stood by the idea
of the rural community when many other social leaders were willing to sacrifice it to the
twin goals of progress and modernization. Redoubling their efforts during the
Depression, and then maintaining them for decades to come, they promoted
environmental conservation, teaching churchgoers about the importance of preserving the
soil for future generations and developing a rural spirituality based on appreciation for
the natural world. In other words, they argued that a healthy nation required healthy rural
communities and healthy rural churches.
The legacy of Christian agrarianism still exists today. One can open almost any
major Christian periodical today and find discussions about agriculture and rural life. The
ability to sustain communities in the countryside seems increasingly relevant to American
Christians. Christians from across the spectrum have become loud and visible champions
of sustainable agriculture, family farms, community-supported agriculture (CSA)
programs, and organic food. Readers can easily find, for instance, critiques of corporate
agricultural subsidies in the mainline Christian Century. Both evangelical and Catholic
writers champion the virtues of organic gardening and the CSA model.7 Recognizing a

7 Amy Frykholm, “Down on the Farm: The Problem with Government Subsidies,” Christian Century, April
22, 2008, http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2008-04/down-farm (accessed February 6, 2013); Josh
Bishop, “Digesting Grace: Why the Food We Eat Matters to God,” Christianity Today, August 15, 2012,
http://www.christianitytoday.com/thisisourcity/7thcity/digesting-grace.html (accessed February 6, 2013);