The Internet Monk has written a really interesting series called The Gospel for Appalachia, here, here and here. It raises a couple of questions that have been in the back of my mind for a while, which I am writing here rather than on his site partly because when I tried to register there I got back a blank email instead of a password, and I never got around to asking about it. But anyway.
One question it raises is how much the biblical commandments to help the poor command a long-term solution to poverty. The iMonk points to various factors in Appalachian culture that hold it at its low economic level, and wonders how much the Gospel can change the culture. And in fact, that seems to be a pretty common experience among helpers in the field, that some cultures collectively don’t seem to want to get richer.
There seem to be two common responses to this: a) take Jesus’ word for it that “the poor will always be with us”, and figure that feeding the hungry and clothing the naked is good enough, or b) try to change the culture. Both the iMonk, and a lot of members of my church who work with the poor, are trying to do b) in different ways. But what does rising out of poverty really require? The iMonk at some points seems to be equating Christian work with certain aspirations like owning a house and bringing factories into the region, or generally being upwardly mobile even if your family thinks you’re getting “uppity.” But this does seem to invite the danger of replacing a culture of poverty with a culture of ambition, which is not any more biblical. Eric Schwarz argued on this post that wealth creation is good because you have to make money to be able to give it to people; but it’s a real question in my mind how often this common rationale for obtaining money and power (I will use it for good!) survives the values one has to adopt in order to get them. (In fact, I think Anakin Skywalker used the same reasoning in Revenge of the Sith, but that’s probably a silly example…)
I think part of the problem here is that above a certain subsistence level, poverty is relative. Middle-class Americans consider their own condition to be normal, so they feel obliged to “normalize” the rest of the world. One commenter mentions how his Appalachian forebears didn’t know they were poor until the government told them so, which implies that what people gain materially they might lose in self-worth. Still, I am aware that accepting poverty as the way things are has historically been used in Christendom to justify extreme disparities of wealth. (And to be the perpetual recipient of charity doesn’t seem that good for people’s mental health either, as these essays point out.)
The other thing I’ve been wondering for a long time is how the Gospel can overcome certain pernicious aspects of an honor/shame culture. Michael mentions this as an important part of the Appalachians’ cultural dysfunction: boys and men get into fights over every insult, don’t deal well with working under authorities, and flee colleges where they’re looked down on by other students. (I assume women are also affected by this, though perhaps in ways less visible to a male pastor.) It’s easy for coastal liberals to dismiss how important this is to other cultures; but we also have to face how our relative lack of an honor/shame attitude comes from culture and circumstance rather than moral superiority. We routinely submit to large corporate and governmental structures. We leave it to law enforcement to avenge us. We can escape damaged reputations by moving away and making new friends. We act as individuals rather than as representatives of families. We train children not to defend their honor by giving them facile answers when someone attacks them. The fact that the honor/shame values still persist so strongly in the the schoolyard, as well as in movies, bars and other pockets of uncivilization, shows how imperfectly these factors work.
It seems that it’s at least possible to live in clan-based rural societies without habitual honor-based violence — Mennonites and Quakers historically managed to do it. (Michael also mentions that the community he lives in was founded by a reformed feudist.) But they also both had (and some still have) a habit of chucking people out when they couldn’t get along with others, and also present problems as models if you want to haul people out of rural poverty. There’s no denying it’s a tough row to hoe. In a post on homosexuality a while back Eve Tushnet pointed out, “There are and have been countless cultures in which men felt that their identities as males required cruelty, to take an easy example. St. Augustine has especially acute comments on that dynamic, and on how deeply it can be embedded even in the nature of a believing Christian man.” (To see how little headway this made against the European honor culture, try reading the allegedly Christian Morte d’Arthur.) I don’t know how well this corresponds to how gay people feel about being gay, but it seems to run very deep in many people (including women, although honor in that case is more tied to family pride and sexual purity).
I think some people have tried to address this question, since missionaries keep running into it. My boyfriend told me about somebody who worked in Asia (I forget the name) who wrote a book about preaching the Gospel in an honor/shame culture, and was told by the natives that it was a good book for Westerners but not for them. But where does that leave us, trying to speak across an unbridgeable divide?
Great post. Fascinating. I like the commenter on Internet Monk’s blog who said: “Nobody wants to be “helped†by those who look down on them. It will take someone who grew up there and knows the people and their families to convince them that there are better ways of doing things.” Denigrating trailers – as if God looks down approvingly at those who “move up” from a trailer to a house – strikes a very discordant note. Similarly with respect to education, since spiritually speaking it’s overrated. God might well be more pleased with the average resident of Appalachia than the average recipient of a PhD.
But I’m far more sympathetic to your concern about violence. Is there really more violence in Appalachia? Isn’t there more in downtown Detroit? And if so, isn’t that the an even more important venue for the gospel as IM sees it? There’s no question, though, that the Appalachian culture holds to grudges and feuds and that is irreconciliable with the crucial gospel message of forgiving our enemies… All cultures have good points and bad points and it’s easy for us to denigrade theirs, just as for many Christians an over focus on homosexual sin is acceptible simply because it isn’t our particular sin. True cultural change requires God’s touch; the Spaniards were completely unsuccessful in changing Aztec religion & culture until the vision of Our Lady of Guadalupe occurred – a vision of a Mary of blended Indian and Spaniard physical features – and after which conversions were manifold. God will convert the Appalachians, and us, in his due time; the rule is that grace builds on and doesn’t destroy nature.
Comment by TSO — January 11, 2006 @ 8:26 am
Forgive the spelling & grammatical errors. Yikes, I need an editor.
Comment by TSO — January 11, 2006 @ 8:36 am
Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that Appalachia is the only place in the U.S. with a violence problem. I was just thinking about its particular motivations for violence. Though since you mention inner cities, I have noticed that a lot of the violence there also seems honor-based — you hear a lot of talk about ‘respect’ and ‘juice’ and so on in that context. The ‘we’ I was using there was more narrowly referring to upscale liberals like the inhabitants of my church, among whom violence is indeed quite unusual, at least in adulthood. But we certainly have our own sins to worry about.
I should emphasize also that physical violence isn’t the only problem with excessive concern over honor — as Michael points out, it can generally hold people back by making them unwilling to admit to their weaknesses or submit to anything, and therefore to let the Spirit transform them. But again, honor culture is hardly unique in that respect, it’s just a particular way of enabling that sin.
Comment by Camassia — January 11, 2006 @ 8:47 am
My boyfriend told me about somebody who worked in Asia (I forget the name) who wrote a book about preaching the Gospel in an honor/shame culture, and was told by the natives that it was a good book for Westerners but not for them.
This struck me as peculiar seeing as the New Testament (and Old for that matter) were written for and in an honor/shame culture. For this reason it should be especially applicable to other honor/shame cultures. The harder thing is to read and apply it correctly to a guilt/achievement/rights culture such as ours. For example, the authors of the NT are keenly aware of the shame and dishonor a convert to Christianity would incur, and so have numerous strategies to deal with it. Jesus redefines the honorable way to respond to an honor challenge (e.g. turn the other cheek). Paul argues that the censure given by outsiders carries no weight since their wicked acts (revelry, idolatry, etc) show they are the shameful ones. Anyhow, the point being that Scripture appears to speak rather directly to a culture such as the Appalachian one that is honor/shame based and prone to violence.
Comment by Jason — January 11, 2006 @ 9:17 am
You’re right in theory, but I think the problem the iMonk is talking about is the extent to which it hasn’t worked, especially in societies where Christianity is the majority, or indeed universal, religion. The Appalachian people he describes are convinced they are already good Christians and that the Bible supports all their traditional standards, much as medieval knights believed that Christianity was perfectly congruent with the chivalry code so long as you put a cross on your standard. You can believe that if you pick and choose your scriptures. I think one issue is that honor/shame cultures and guilt/achievement/rights cultures pick and choose in nearly opposite directions, so perhaps it is good for us to interact, fraught though that may be.
Comment by Camassia — January 11, 2006 @ 9:39 am
I think the element of honor and shame plays a larger role in coastal urban society than may be generally acknowledged. Would an outsider to the societies of the Upper East Side or Fairfax County or Brentwood really agree that getting one’s toddler into the “right” preschool is a matter of achievement, and not honor? Is the difference between a degree from Boston College and a degree from Boston University really that quantifiable, apart from the honorific value? Is a teenage pregnancy less shameful to a Ivy-bound honor-student teenager from Newport Beach than to a teenage grocery cashier in White Sulphur Springs, WV, or more so?
People in coastal urban cultures fight over insults in their own ways. Suburban parents argue with teachers to raise their third-grader’s show-and-tell grade. Cubicle dwellers file sexual-harassment complaints over coworkers’ pictures or posters that they find offensive. Here in DC, a city employee was fired from a managerial job for using the word “niggardly” after employees protested. Local wheelchair users lobbied for extra-wide fare gates in the subway stations, so they could enter like ambulatory people, rather than being waved through the employee/emergency gate. (I should probably add that I’m not disputing the rights of any of these people to raise these issues; I’m just suggesting that outsiders might see these disputes as arising from honor).
As for submitting to large corporate and governmental structures, plenty of people in Appalachia go to work for large mining companies or their governmental oversight agencies. I suspect that Appalachian people join the military in a greater proportion than coastal urban people do. It’s urban culture that most exalts the entrepreneur — if your company doesn’t respect you properly, then to heck with them; open your own shop and compete against them.
I think your comment 5 is quite right but that the sentiment you describe may not be unique to Appalachia. I suspect that most people of urban coastal cities similarly think that they are good people and that their lives fit whatever moral precepts they acknowledge (whether Christian or otherwise). Very few people see themselves as wicked.
Comment by Tom T. — January 11, 2006 @ 9:39 pm
Hey, our comments are precisely 12 hours apart. Purely coincidence.
Comment by Tom T. — January 11, 2006 @ 9:40 pm