Against Rootlessness

Embrace the locality as a reflection of your identity. Put roots down.

By guest author Jack Milton.

Regionalism is a concept that is out of step with most of the American public. In fact, the idea of embracing a regional identity provokes disdain in certain quarters (and occasionally, paranoia: see recent tweets by James Lindsay). Think of the people you have known with distinct regional accents; you may even have one yourself. If you have the local accent, you may be thought of as unsophisticated by some. To talk like people “from here” makes you a hick.

In the 1950s, children were affected by the way people spoke on the small screen. The advent of television provided a steady linguistic diet for its viewers. Over generations, a greater homogeneity developed among local dialects, resulting in the erosion of regional distinctives across the United States. Simply put, people gradually sounded (and looked) more alike over time. If you did not modify your speech but instead retained the regional dialect, you were low-status. You were a hayseed. Television (and mass media in general) became a way to calibrate speech. This was a more exacting influence on behavior than leaving the farm for the university ever was in earlier generations.

Also at this time, greater economic opportunities developed. Moving from one place to another became much more feasible for common people. If a job provided an increase in living standards, one would have no problem moving from Seattle to Miami, or to Bangor from Los Angeles. Moving from region to region has become a commonplace activity in America. There is also the phenomenon of small town/rural brain drain. It was touted in the 1960s how America would benefit from getting the best and brightest from other countries through immigration. We wanted the best people from abroad to come to America to invest themselves in our industries and development. Brain drain occurred in nations that were losing their educated elite to the U.S. or to other Western countries.

Small town and rural America have long experienced the same kind of brain drain as foreign lands did with immigration. Who do you know that went away to college, grad school, etc. and still came back to his hometown to make a career?

Graduates understand that the opportunities to advance in their fields of study are going to be in the top 30 or so large U.S. metropolitan areas. Naturally they move to cities and stay in urban areas. Does this resemble Globalism in miniature? And really, what other pattern is offered to people? Everybody follows the conventional wisdom with no mind of alternatives.

But instead of being another person who moves hither and thither to get ahead, whose main ambition is personal advancement, what about being From Somewhere? What about returning to the place that you are from? Embrace the locality as a reflection of your identity. Put roots down. Before the postwar boom, college graduates normally returned to their small towns or rural communities. They hung out a shingle and went into local business, became mayors, or practiced law.

Vestiges remained of the days when being a part of the region or having a local identity was the expectation. A person became a part of the continuum of generations. You and your family were established in a place. Your establishment there is for the betterment and enrichment of the place in which you live. The region in which you have been planted is HOME.

This is of particular significance to Christians. Contemporary attitudes about participation in Christian worship are colored by consumerist attitudes. Churches are merely providers of goods and services; we find what we want and make our order cafeteria-style to satisfy our Christian consumer tastes. In contrast, the regional or localist view is that you intentionally put roots down for your family; you seek to perpetuate Christianity in your home region. You build your rooted Christian life in your homeland mindful of the New Testament illustrations of conversion and Christian growth to farming or home construction.

We must recognize that Christianity on the regional level requires new seasons of continued planning and periodic maintenance. A man plants his family in his home region and seeks to replant, re-establish, and renew the faith there, as is the goal. There’s no guarantee that Christianity will continue to flourish in an area if there’s not a conscious effort. Continued Christian renewal is the program. The result is societal renewal. The end goal is that the identity of your people in the land develops over generations until it is said that “all those people from So-and-So County, they’re all Christians.” They are not addicts, they are not gays, they’re not blue-haired dog daddy and cat mommy activists; they are Christians. That’s what you want, to plug your life and descendants into a multigenerational project of Christian and familial renewal. If we are all just Christian couch potatoes with no vision for replenishing or for renewal, we become a beleaguered minority facing an opposition of escalating boldness. Putting down roots, being where you’re from (or being from where you’re at now) is key to the development of Christian community. It is also key to re-establishing a shared identity for Christians in opposition to the atomized individualism described in Andrew Isker’s book The Boniface Option: A Strategy for Christian Counteroffensive in a Post-Christian Nation. If people are mere subatomic particles floating in the social ether, they will fall prey to political manipulation and control.

With these things in mind, consider your own identity. Who are you? Where are you? Where did your people come from? Do you have a people? What is the state of Christianity in the place where you live? Could you discern it, if you wanted to know? Does consumerism appear to be the predominant characteristic, or does a caretaker mentality dominate Christianity where you live? You have agency, and you can, by the Grace of God, cause change. But this takes effort and personal vision. Think about these things, and continue giving attention to them. Consider where you can put roots down to establish a Christian life and your influence on others. The reward for doing so is to be the one who will steer future generations in the right direction and preserve them.