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

by Warren H. Wilson

Slowly the country town is coming to realize that its reputation as well as its progress is determined by this grade of citizen. No exceptional success on the part of one or more families and no substantial goodness by a whole grade of the population can compensate for the lowering of the standard of the whole town by these people. The life and death, the reputation and the progress of the town are dependent upon the extinguishment of these peasant conditions.

This is illustrated by the fact that where votes are for sale in a town those purchased votes determine the election in the majority of cases. They constitute the movable margin between the two parties; and by shifting them one way or the other the political policy of the town is determined. This fact illustrates the whole moral situation of the town, for just by the same flexible margin is the moral life of the town determined. The duty of the church therefore is with the people upon the economic and social margin of the life of the rural community.

The farmer's moral standards are opposed to combination. He believes in personal righteousness and family morals. He does not believe in the moral control of the individual or the household by the economic group. It has been impossible, therefore, to combine the farmers in the East in any general way so as to control their markets by maintaining a high standard of product. The only control that is dreamed of by the leaders of the farmers is the control of the quantity of their products. They do not think of combination which will control themselves, and so maintain a higher quality of product in order that thus they may dominate the market in the great city.

The present state of ethical opinion among Eastern farmers is not in sympathy with the ethical demands of city populations. The Western fruit growers' associations have fixed the standard for the farmers who raise the fruit, first of all, and by means of this standard they have conquered the market in distant cities. The standard to which they compel their members to conform is the standard of the demand in the world market. If the milk farmers about New York City are to combine they must first impose a self-denying ordinance upon their own members and furnish the city with a quality of milk in harmony with the demands of modern sanitary experts. This is an ethical principle not of the pioneer or the farmer economy, but of the new husbandry to which very few farmers have conformed.

In the building of country communities, therefore, the ethical teaching must be of a new order. There is already a general teaching of morality in the country churches. The temperance reform is a moral propaganda born of the farmer economy. The expulsion of the saloon from country places has been in obedience to the farmer's conscience. The temperance reform exhibits the transformation from individual ethics which were advocated in 1880 to communal ethics which are represented in the local option aspects of this reform. In 1880 the individual was asked to sign the pledge of total abstinence. In those days it was as important that innocent children sign the pledge as that drunkards sign it. The lists of pledge signers were padded with the names of persons who had never tasted strong drink. In 1893 the Anti-Saloon League began its agitation, which has proceeded among country people with increasing influence. The individual is ignored and the pledge is signed now by the community, by the county or by the state. The attack is not upon the individual drunkard, but upon the community institution, the saloon. This is a great gain in the direction of social ethics. It illustrates the transformation from the pioneer whose impact was upon the individual to the standards of the exploiter period in which the impact is upon the commercial institution. The local option movement has had its growth in the period of exploitation dated by Prof. Ross from 1890. In this movement the country churches have been distributing centers, the places of discussion and nuclei of moral energy.

If the general moral standards of country people are to be transformed from the pioneer formulae to those of the modern world economy, the country churches must be led by men trained in economics and reinforced by a thorough knowledge of social processes. The temperance movement already begins to show the deficiencies of a propaganda purely negative. Its leaders have shown no conspicuous sympathy with the play-ground movement, which is an essential part of the same ethical process. If the saloon is expelled something must be put in its place, but the temperance reformers have not been wise enough for substitution: they have only been skilful in expulsion. Country life, in its representative communities, suffers today from monotony and emptiness.

The ministers, teachers and other rural leaders need the training which will equip them in positive and aggressive social construction. As the economy of the exploiter comes in to transform the country community it is necessary for the preacher and the teacher to train the population in the ethical standards of the new time. Naturally new contractual relations will prevail in business, and trusts will be committed to the leading men in the farming community, for which they need definite moral preparation. There is many a farmer in the United States who may be safely entrusted with the honor of a woman, but cannot be entrusted with a million dollars to spend in the interest of the community. In many a country community it is perfectly safe to leave the door unlocked, but it is not safe to purchase a quart of milk for a child. There is many a farmer from whom it is morally safe to purchase an acre of ground, but one cannot be sure in purchasing a cow from him that she will not be tuberculous. These are new standards not required by the old economy and not taught in the old meeting-house.

One defect of the country church at the present time is that it has for the countryman no message appropriate to the struggle in which he is actually attempting to do right. Many churches in the country teach only the standards of right and wrong to which the farmers already conform. For a short time a new minister is popular with them because his new voice and his fresh elocution contain a subtle flattery. He denounces the sins to which they are not inclined and praises the virtues which they have learned to practise from their fathers. But after about six months of such preaching the farmer wearies of a preacher with no new message. Indeed the countryman is puzzled and perplexed by modern situations about which the minister has no knowledge. The farmer is forced to be an economist, but the minister has never studied economics. The farmer is face to face with problems of exploitation. The values not merely of land but of money are in his thought. But the preacher has had no training in finance and he cannot speak wisely or surely upon the marginal problems with which the farmer is perplexed.

The household economy of the farm is no longer sufficient. The sins are not merely those of adultery and disobedience and disloyalty. They are the sins of the world market and the world economy. In these moral situations the minister is silent. He knows nothing about them. He is inclined merely to object if the farmer purchases an automobile. He does not see what the automobile is to do for the agriculturist. Sunday observance, total abstinence, family purity, honesty as to personal property, these are his stock in trade and these alone. It requires, therefore, a genius to preach in the country, because only the most brilliant preaching can render traditional moral standards interesting among country people.

It is proverbial among ministers that "the best preachers are needed in the country." The reason for this is that none of the preachers has any but an outworn standard to preach. They must reinforce it with extraordinary eloquence in order to keep it attractive. Very ordinary men, however, if they understand the modern spirit, can hold the attention of country people. The grange has ministered to the farmer's conscience. Yet its leaders have been commonplace men, unknown to the nation at large. The great movements which have influenced the farmer in the past twenty years have most of them been pushed to success by men unknown to any but farmers. What orator has come into national prominence out of the enterprises of agricultural life in the past two decades? The farmer does not need great eloquence, but he does need a thorough understanding of the moral and spiritual situations arising out of the exploiter process in which he is immersed. He needs moral teachers for the era of husbandry which is dawning in the country.