God Land--It's complicated

Lenz, Lyz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss and Renewal in Middle America. Indiana University Press, 2019. viii + 151 pp.

A few years ago, a high school friend changed his relationship status on Facebook from "Married" to "It's complicated." Deluged by expressions of concern and support, he quickly changed it back. Everything was fine, he assured us, "But what marriage isn't complicated?"

Indeed, what marriage isn't? Or what church, or club, or town, or country? But there are a lot of forces out there, in and out of politics, demanding we choose between opposing alternatives, as if everything were binary and life were a true-false test.

When last Lyz Lenz appeared on this blog, she was writing about the uncertain future of rural and small town churches (Lenz 2016). That research is included in this book, which covers a range of religious and political phenomena, but with at least one common thread: We don't understand each other. Americans are by and large too comfortable with our stereotypes to understand across differences, which ultimately makes it hard to grasp even our own situations.

The Midwest is complicated:

These are the frustrations of the people who live here with the depictions of the Midwest. We are conservative, but also very liberal. We are farmers, but we are also business people. We are the place people are often from, and yet not the place to move to. We are the connective tissue between the coasts, but are also flown over. Resisting representation, caught between the extremes, we are seen as a void--a "great desolation" wrote the novelist O.E. Rolvaag. But that's the biggest mistake people have been making about this great middle place since America was first settled--assuming that it's empty. (50)

Religion is complicated:

When we talk about divide, we also have to talk about union--we have to talk about the messy meetings between strangers and the outpourings of love. We have to talk about strangers standing in pews next to one another, singing the same songs, saying the same prayers, offering one another handshakes of peace, sharing bread and wine--and even if all of these small rituals mean different things to each person, we are there together offering ourselves in messy and holy community. (55)

Even traditional Christianity as practiced in the rural Midwest is complicated: The heartland is full of faith, both expansive and hard. Both full of beauty and of fatalism. It's an open hand and a closed fist (33). Elsewhere, but I can't find the damn quote, Lenz notes that the elderly church ladies she interviews radiate disapproval, but even so if she were in trouble they would be quick to offer a meal, a ride to the hospital, whatever.

Occasionally we meet someone who successfully navigates across the complexity to meet the human on the other side in an act of love.

Several months after I moved out and filed for divorce, a friend of mine sends her father over to my house with a chair from her house.... Instead of bringing me the hand-me-down chair, however, her father brings me a brand-new chair he bought just for me. It's leather and it's gorgeous. And I'm shocked.

I've never met this man before. He's a local business owner and a very conservative Catholic. I worry that he might judge me... But two of his daughters have divorced, he tells me. He says in a year I'll be doing better than before... While he moves the chair in, he jovially remarks on the sign in my dining room that reads "Resist!" and I'm embarrassed by his generosity, my politics and poverty. The only thing I have to offer him is a box of Girl Scout cookies, which he accepts gladly. The next day he sends me a picture of the cookies cut up into letters that spell "Resist." (54)

A lot of the stories, however, find something other than this intuition of common humanity. Shrinking rural churches don't welcome the newcomers that could keep their institutions alive, because the newcomers are too different, so they shun and resent them. (The Asian American Reformed Church profiled in chapter 8 is established only after protracted struggles with white residents of the town and the national Christian Reformed denomination.) Instead of reaching across religious divides, they reinforce them. To a troubled world, they respond with myths, about the virtues of the flames they keep alive (see chapter 3 on nostalgia) and the iniquity of the other. One pastor's wife's shout of "City values are sinful!" abruptly ends discussion on that topic (108). And nothing gets better.

Looming throughout the book is the national presence that is Donald Trump, whose political success has fed off divisions while encouraging and deepening them. He's first mentioned on page 1, and last 2 1/2 pages from the end. Trump has become something of a national Rorschach test, allowing many in the Midwest to see a sympathetic protector of their threatened value system. The author meets a Muslim friend for coffee:

She tells me she never felt separate from the community here until the election [of Trump in 2016]. Seeing people she knows, people her husband works with, posting such hateful things on Facebook about Muslims in America and supporting that man, that man who is now the president--well, that really gave her pause. "These are the people I've had in my home. The people I've fed, and then I see them posting on Facebook like I am the enemy, like I am the problem." (122)

However, the white evangelical Christians who voted in such a huge proportion for Trump are preoccupied with their own grievances:

Two days after the attack in Pittsburgh [in 2018, when eleven worshipers at a synagogue were gunned down], one of my former pastors shared a story on Facebook, which alleged that ESPN edited out references to Jesus in a story about football player Tim Tebow. "There has never been a worse time to be a Christian," declared my former pastor. This pastor's feed is filled with dire warnings about how Christians in America are going to be banned, soon, if we are not vigilant.... A white Christian pastor, ignoring the violence against [blacks, Jews, and] Muslims while perpetuating a victim narrative for Tim Tebow, is part of the story of faith, most notably the stories we fail to tell. And these silences are inextricably linked to race, power, and class. (124)

Trump, too, is complicated: both the galoot who glibly mocks or ignores half of America, with his rhetoric as well as his ethics-free life, and the gallant defender of traditional moral values.

Reading God Land, I often felt whipsawed among all the contradictions and complexities. Maybe I too yearn for a little simplicity in this troubled world. But God Land is a little postmodernist miracle of a book, preaching that we oversimplify the world ("essentialize" in postmodernist lingo) at our peril. The world is complicated, and a clear-eyed faith can help us navigate complexity and conflict, addressing problems as one diverse-but-beloved community. (See Marohn 2015 & Proppe 2016 on this.) Nostalgic, insular faith might comfort us for the moment, but it's false comfort, ignoring complex realities and intensifying conflict. We need to see more, however confusing and uncomfortable this complicated world can be, and to do better.

Lyz Lenz (swiped from lyzlenz.com)

SEE ALSO:

Lyz Lenz "The Death of the Midwestern Church," Pacific Standard, 20 January 2016 [updated 2017]