The Evolution of the Country Community / A Study in Religious Sociology

by Warren H. Wilson

In contrast to other classes of the population country people have a marked preference for individual action and an aversion to co-operative effort. The causes of this are historical. In general these causes are of the past and they are not a matter of persuasion. The American farmer has not co-operated in the past because: first, the necessities of his life made him independent and impatient of the sacrifices necessary in co-operating with his fellows. We have still many influences of the pioneer in modern life. So long as agriculture is solitary work and its processes take a man away from his fellows, co-operation will be retarded. So long as the countryman has to practise a variety of trades, he will be emotional, and the social life of the country will be broken up by feuds, divisions, separations and continued misunderstandings. No mere education as to alleged right and wrong can plaster over the old economy with new ethical standards. Until the loneliness and the emotion are taken out of farming country people cannot co-operate.

A good part of the United States is still in the land farmer period. The characteristic of the land farmer is his cultivation of group life. The historical process by which this group life is broken up is exploitation. Farmers whose lands have not been exploited and whose group life has not suffered the undermining influence of exploitation will not normally co-operate. I am convinced that in most farming territories the loyalty of the countryman to his group is the second reason for his refusal to co-operate. Again, this refusal of his is not subject to persuasion. He is obeying an economic condition which shapes his life and controls his action. Striking instances are furnished in many regions of the amazing disloyalty of farmers to one another, and to their own pledged word. These are to be explained by the type to which the farmer in these sections conforms. We must not expect the land farmer to obey the ethical standards of the husbandman.

A good instance of this conformity to type was furnished in the case of meetings held in Louisiana and Western Mississippi among the farmers who raise cotton. The occasion of the meetings was the approach of the boll weevil to their districts. The attendance upon the meetings was large, indeed universal. The situation was clearly understood and the speakers secured from the farmers present a promise quite unanimous to refrain from cultivating cotton for a year. The purpose of this was to meet the boll weevil with a territory in which he would find no food. Thus his march eastward across the cotton field would be arrested.

The farmers having made their promise and agreed heartily in the proposal, adjourned. Weeks and months passed and the time approached for planting cotton. Farmer after farmer, who had attended these meetings and given his promise, privately decided that he would plant a cotton crop and secretly expected that he would secure a larger price that year because so many of his neighbors were to raise other crops. When the full season for planting cotton had come it was discovered that so many farmers had planted cotton that the plan of co-operation was a failure, and the whole district went back to cotton, with full prospect of assisting the boll weevil in his course toward the East. The reasons for this action lie in the type of farmer who thus found it impossible to co-operate. Each of these farmers regarded above all other things the success of his own farm and his own family group. In contrast to this interest no other claim, no exhortation and not even his word given in public had any lasting influence upon his action.

The third element in the inability of country people to co-operate is the ideal of level democratic equality which prevails in the country. Where universal land-ownership has been the rule every countryman thinks himself "as good as anybody else." So long as this ideal prevails, that subjection of himself to another, and the controlling of his action by the interests of the community, are impossible. The farmer cannot co-operate when he thinks of social life in terms of pure democracy. There must be a large sense of team work, a loyal and instinctive obedience to leaders, a devoted spirit which looks for honest leadership, before there can be co-operation. These things come not by persuasion, but by experience. Co-operation is the act of a mature people. Not until country people have passed through earlier stages and discarded earlier ideals can the preacher and the organizer and the teacher successfully inculcate a spirit of co-operation.

Country churches are highly representative in their present divided condition. This multiplication of churches in the country is lamentable chiefly because it registers the divided state of country life. It is true that divided churches are religiously inefficient, but it is vastly more important that divided churches are embodiments of what one country minister calls "the tuberculosis of the American farmer, individualism."

It was natural for the pioneer to desire a religion in terms of a message of personal salvation. Personality in his lonely life was the noblest, indeed the only form of humanity known to him, therefore the herald was his minister and emotion was his religion. It is very natural for the land farmer to organize religion in terms of group life. His churches were only handmaids of his household. They had but the beginnings of social organization. They taught the ethics of home life, of the separate farm and of a land-owning people. Obviously the church for the pioneer and for the land farmer could be a very weak and indifferent organization, but efficient for the religious needs of those independent, self-reliant types of countrymen.

For these reasons in all parts of the country the pitiful story is heard of divided communities. One need not recite it here. It usually is the account of three hundred or four hundred people with five or six country churches. At its worst there is a small community in which missionary agencies are supporting ministers who do not average one hundred possible families apiece in the community. The condition of Center Hall, Pennsylvania, has been described in another chapter, in which there are within a radius of four miles from a given point twenty-four country churches. This community represents a condition of transition from the land-farmer type to that of exploitation. Some of these churches are the old churches of the land-owning resident farmers, but the most of them are said to be the newer churches of tenants who have come into the community. Our present concern is to recognize the relation of the divided churches to the divided social life of the community. The criticism of the country community must be made on an understanding of the stage of development to which that community has attained. Whatever is planned for the upbuilding of the country community must be planned in harmony with the well-known facts of rural development.

Business life introduces into the community a new standard of values. Cash and credit take the place of barter. The exchange in kind on which originally the community depended comes to an end. Business life very shortly induces combination. The whole of modern business presents a spectacle of universal combination and co-operation. The farmer who is most conservative is surrounded on all sides by the aggressive forces of business. Combined in their own interest they compete with him on unequal terms. He stands alone and they stand combined.

Americans are looking with growing interest on the experience of Denmark where a multitude of co-operative associations represent the spirit of the people. This spirit has been deliberately cultivated in the land for forty years. It is the universal testimony of observers that the prosperity of Denmark is dependent on these co-operative agencies and upon this united spirit. The exodus from the country has been arrested, agriculture has been made a desirable occupation, profitable for the farmer and most probable for the state, and the people as a whole have taken front rank in social and economic welfare. Essential to this constructive period of Denmark's life is co-operation.[32]