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Chapter 3 Against the Church, For the Church Berry and Christianity Some years ago a student of mine asked in a seminar on Wendell Berry whether Berry’s ideas depended on Christianity or at least on a religious view of the world. I remember answering with considerable equivocation, first because I wanted to avoid saying anything that would encourage my non-Christian students to write off Berry’s ideas, but also because I was myself uncertain. I remember saying I saw no reason why one might not reach, from a purely secular point of view, the same kinds of conclusions as Berry about a whole variety of matters: the need to conserve topsoil, the inapplicability to agriculture of industrial modes of thinking, the absurdity of our regarding food as a weapon, the inevitability of destruction to particular environments (pace Berry) in an increasingly global economy, and so forth.1 This seemed to me an unsatisfactory answer to the student—and it still does—because there is throughout Berry’s work a deep sense of our dependence as creatures on a world only rightly understood as sheer loving gift. Berry has spoken of himself, in “The Burden of the Gospels,” as “first of all a literalist,” as he thinks “every reader should be,” meaning by this simply that he “expect[s] any writing to make literal sense before making sense of any other kind.”2 Following him in this, I want to make literal sense of his statement that he takes the Gospel of John literally, or, as he puts it in “Sabbath IX, 1999,” “The Incarnate Word is with us, / is still speaking , is present / always, yet leaves no sign / but everything that is.”3 If Christianity involves not simply our assenting to a number of doctrinal positions or declaring a cultural identity, but rather our coming to understand ourselves as being drawn up into the life of God, then it is difficult to 78 The Achievement of Wendell Berry see how any question could stand completely outside of Christian reflection . I believe that Berry does understand himself in this way, and so, with that in mind, I would have to answer my student that Berry’s ideas are those of one who believes, as he puts it, “that not just humans but all creatures live by participating in the life of God, by partaking of His spirit and breathing His breath” (BG, 66). Perhaps this means that Berry’s thinking depends upon Christianity; perhaps it means that non-Christians who arrive at something like the same conclusions as Berry are acting from something like what Christianity means when it talks about our participating in the very life of God. If I were trying to answer my student’s question from Berry’s own most direct comments about Christianity, I might be inclined to come to something like Huck Finn’s conclusion after he’d been reading “considerable” in The Pilgrim’s Progress: “the statements was interesting, but tough.”4 In response to a question about his “religious background,” Berry has said that he “was raised as a Southern Baptist,” but he’s “always felt” himself “an outsider to the sects and denominations.”5 He deplores the process of exclusion by which religious groups “come into being and cohere,” adding, “We know what a bloody business this is” (THC, 118). He criticizes Christianity for its lack of interest in nature, “the body’s life and all that it depends on,” which is “to say,” as he puts it, that Christianity “has not been interested enough in our economic life,” that it “has been too easy to be ‘a good Christian’ while destroying the world that (we are told) God loves.” Moreover, modern churches “have entirely lost their artistic tradition,” too often gather in buildings that are either “brutally ugly or rather tackily pretentious ,” and have generally sat by and “even approve[d] while our society hurries brainlessly on with the industrialization of child-raising, education , medicine, all the pleasures and all the practical arts.” If “Christians quit worrying about being ‘Christians’ or church members” and did what Jesus “told them to do,” the “church” might “sooner or later dissolve into something much better” (THC, 119). Berry confesses to being “sometimes” a “rather bewildered reader of the Bible”; argues that the “human mind too readily imposes on God,” becoming “owlishly knowledgeable about his mysteries, when it needs to be humorous and forgiving”; and seeks, at times, to distance himself as far...

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