In Rural Iowa, Reformed And Unafraid

Pastor Kurt Monroe sent me a really informative e-mail today in response to the piece I wrote the other day quoting at length the New York Times story about Iowa Evangelicals (“Cardi B. And The Conservative Christian Island”). I publish this here with his permission:

I’m the pastor of First Christian Reformed Church in Sioux Center, Iowa, and am writing about the NYT article and your recent blog posts. Perhaps it’s too late given the pace of the 2020 news cycle, but you can file it away for the next time Sioux County finds itself in the national spotlight.

I’ve been thinking about writing to you about Sioux Center since I read your first blog post in response to Elizabeth Dias’s article. I saw yesterday that you’ve posted another blog with some input from Sioux County locals, including a Dordt professor, for which I’m grateful. (There are probably about a dozen Dordt profs in my congregation, but [journalism professor Lee] Pitts is not one of them). He’s right, though; journalists don’t get Sioux Center. It is honestly one of the weirdest places in America to understand if you don’t know about it (and the Dutch Reformed history in America) or can’t spend time in it. I’ll try to describe a bit of that weirdness in BenOp terms that you might find interesting.

First of all, Aaron Renn’s most recent “Masculinist” that referred to Doug Wilson’s movement in Moscow, ID as a BenOp community motivated me to communicate to you my conviction that one of the things that prevents journalists from understanding Sioux Center (and Sioux County more broadly) is that it is, broadly speaking, a BenOp community (if it’s possible for a town or county to be such). My family has only lived here for a little over a year (having received the call to the church in Sioux Center from the CRC in largely de-churched upstate Binghamton, NY), but my wife’s family has roots here in Sioux Center for three generations. I knew enough about Sioux Center prior to moving here that this would be a place that has some BenOp attributes already and some BenOp tendencies that could be built upon, shored up, and reinforced.

Here’s a brief description of the BenOp kind of stuff already happening here: 39% of school-aged children in Sioux Center attend Christian schools of the Reformed Kuyperian tradition. I’m guessing that a healthy majority of the public school students and their families attend church at least once every week and most more than that. As an example, when our son was taking driver’s education from the public school, the instructor, as he was explaining the schedule, said, “We don’t drive on Wednesdays so that you can go to youth group.” It was assumed that most of the kids in that room would be attending youth group though I expect roughly 2/3 of the students there were public school students. Certainly no one in the room thought it was odd that the public school’s driver’s education program would arrange its schedule around church activities.

Many families in Sioux Center still eat together, have substantive conversations around the table, and read scripture together as a family as well as individually and at church. If you get invited to someone’s home for dinner in Sioux County you can be almost certain that when everyone is done eating the father will scoot his chair back, retrieve a Bible from a kitchen drawer, and lead the family in devotions. (Folks are becoming a bit more egalitarian: sometimes the mother leads devotions, but it’s still almost always the dad that scoots his chair back and gets the Bible). They don’t do this just because the pastor is over for dinner; they do it all the time. (I know this probably sounds crazy, but it seriously happens. I started chuckling every time we would get invited to people’s homes because it kept happening like it was a liturgical act).

The high school years of Sunday School in the Christian Reformed churches (there are five of them, the smallest of which is around 300 in membership) are devoted to study of the Heidelberg Catechism and Belgic Confession. As Lee Pitts points out, it’s not perfect. All of the problems (hypocrisy, legalism, judgmentalism) that you would expect are present, but by and large they aren’t nearly as bad as you might think (or near as bad as they probably were around thirty years ago). And the BenOp practices and habits I mentioned above aren’t the liturgies and practices of anywhere near every home, but if I were a gambling man I’d put money on it being way more common here than nearly anywhere else in the country.

We also have the same challenges of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism and cultural engagement that morphs into mere cultural consumption and conformity to the broader culture that the rest of the Church faces in late modernity. Affluence, comfort, and consumerism are temptations here like they are elsewhere for all American Christians. But there is an honest attempt to create and maintain the kind of thick Christian community that the BenOp calls for along with intentional catechesis and whole-of-life Christian liturgical practices. I’ve spent the last year mostly observing, but I came to Sioux Center assuming that part of my call to pastor a church here was to help continue building and shoring up that kind of BenOp community and then fighting against the temptations and pitfalls that accompany a culture that is so overtly Christian. I am certain that this factors into the inability of Elizabeth Dias (and even Emma Green, who has written about Sioux County in The Atlantic) to understand this place.

Dias was trying to make a political point about Sioux County’s white Evangelicals. But the kind of BenOp Christianity in Sioux County, according to my experiences and conversations here, creates a resilience against the kind of political attitudes Diaz suggests are at work in Sioux County. Dias wanted so badly for Sioux County to fit her preconceived Evangelical box, but it just doesn’t. She expects Sioux County to embrace these feelings of Ana Navarro-Cárdenas in political reverse:

Undoubtedly you can find a lot of Evangelicals who would go to bed happy knowing that Trump and Pence would be there when bad crap happens. Dias did find them, even in Sioux County. (As has been noted, she found her quotes from the most conservative denominations represented in town, each represented by only a small congregation in a town with 5 CRCs, 3 large Reformed Church in America churches, and a joint Spanish-speaking CRC-RCA. Why did she skip over the vast majority, made up of CRC and RCA members, to find her quotes?)

In general, Sioux Center, through the BenOp type habits and practices I mentioned above, actively works to embed in its hearts and minds the broad meaning of the first question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism:

“Q. What is your only comfort in life and in death?

A. That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.”

You regularly see people in the grocery store with that phrase from the catechism printed on their T-Shirts. Would the culturally refined world of Elizabeth Dias find that kitschy? Yes. Sioux County residents paint that phrase on the walls of their homes. Also kitschy? Sure. But it’s not insignificant or without real meaning. And it points to one of the most significant emphases of the Reformed tradition: the sovereignty of Christ over all things. In that sense, this Sioux County Reformed brand of Evangelicalism shored up with BenOp community and practice has a resilience against the elevation of the political order and specific politicians to a place of trust (and idolatry) to which other forms of Evangelicalism might be more prone. (I’m thinking especially of the forms of Evangelicalism that don’t have historical roots that precede the Enlightenment and therefore don’t have built-in resistance to autonomy and individualism and so make Christianity almost exclusively about the personal relationship with Jesus at the expense of belonging to, and being accountable to, the church and there Church’s long history of practice and doctrine).

In the end, though, it seems to me that these journalists’ cannot understand the Reformed Evangelicals of Sioux Center (and also wouldn’t understand BenOp style communities of faithful, orthodox Christians of all types) when it comes to politics because they can’t understand people for whom the political order isn’t their ultimate source of meaning and order and the guardian of their personal autonomy. (They can’t understand people for whom personal autonomy isn’t the ultimate telos, for that matter). They can’t understand people whose only comfort and hope lies outside the immanent frame. The reporters themselves don’t look to anything other than themselves and the political order for their salvation and flourishing, and they seem unable to comprehend how anyone else could either. (It could be that the owners of house with “In God We Trust” on the roof, which I drive past every time I go to the grocery store, actually mean that our trust must be placed in God—not in America or politicians).

Of course, within Sioux County the temptation exists to elevate the political order and politicians to an idolatrous place, and some succumb to it. But all of the conversations I’ve had with real people in Sioux County over the past year indicate that Sioux County’s voting habits in the national elections are mostly the coldly calculated, transactional, nose-holding, lesser-of-two-evils activity that Dias says it’s not. A person might disagree with Sioux County residents’ calculations (they might calculate that Trump is the greater threat), but that person would be ignorant if they accused Sioux Center residents in general of the kind of fear-induced enthusiasm for Trump Dias suggests, and they would be stark-raving mad if they thought the average resident of Sioux County capable of the kind of adoration and hope for the Trump-Pence ticket that Ana Navarro-Cárdenas has for the Biden-Harris ticket.

This also means that the residents of Sioux Center don’t view themselves as “besieged white Evangelicals.” That was perhaps the most humorous thing about this whole moment in the national spotlight—that people would come away thinking that Sioux County was hunkered down in fear. I wouldn’t blame anyone who read Dias’s article for coming to that conclusion. She hunted down the folks who could give her the quotes she wanted to lead people to that conclusion.

But if you were to come to Sioux Center you would quickly discover that we carry ourselves in a way that couldn’t be farther from “besieged.” Yes, we know the cultural fight we’re up against as we seek to solidify ourselves against conformity to the Cardi B. anti-culture that comes our way through our screens, but that’s nothing new (is Cardi B. all that different from the Madonna of the 80s and 90s?). We know the task before us, and most are savvy enough to know that presidents and politicians aren’t going to help on that front.

But overall, Sioux County is the most optimistic, upbeat, generous, hopeful place in which I’ve ever lived. It is exactly the opposite, even in 2020, from “besieged” or fearful. Its residents are certainly the most neighborly, open, and trusting I’ve ever encountered, including, as Pitts suggested, a cooperation between the Dutch grandchildren of immigrants and the recent immigrants from Central and South America. It’s not perfect, and we’re not a melted pot yet, but just wait until our children start marrying one another, which has already started.

People here aren’t in favor of open borders (including the members of the Spanish speaking CRC-RCA church), but we’re not anti-immigrant; everyone is too close to their own immigrant story for that. Sioux Center’s civic decisions also manifest a lack of fear and siege mentality. I could give a host of specific details that would make people scratch their heads in wonder at this odd place and how a rural county could be growing like Sioux County is, but I’ll leave it at that general description for now. People in Sioux Center and Sioux County carry themselves not as a besieged people but rather as those who know that Christ is sovereignly reigning over all things—even in 2020—and is coming again to make all things new.

If you’ve read this far, you’ve either got more time or more energy than I thought! I hope that some insight into the workings of what is something of a Reformed BenOp community is helpful.

What a fantastic letter! If you’re ever in Sioux Center, Iowa, go visit the folks at First Christian Reformed. I’ve got to find a way to get out there when we can all travel again.

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