Knowing and Loving: A Review of American Harvest
Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s book won’t solve any of the religious and ideological debates that divide urban and rural, liberal and conservative Americans, but her journey through the wheat fields of the heartland with a team of harvesters is a sincere attempt to understand people who seem fundamentally different from herself.
Review by Gracy Olmstead
Much ink has been spilled on America’s urban vs. rural divide: whether it is real, how pernicious it is, and what to do about it. But few considerations of what separates us have resulted in real, tangible change. The gulf is still present—indeed, in 2020, it seems to have widened.
In her book American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland, Marie Mutsuki Mockett seeks to understand and bridge this divide. Mockett is tied to the heartland via a seven thousand–acre wheat farm in Nebraska, owned by her family. While she has spent most of her life in more diverse, secular cities, her childhood was marked by visits to the family farm and its harvest seasons. It wasn’t until her father died and she inherited the farm that Mockett grew more curious about the differences between her own culture and that of her neighbors in Nebraska.
When Eric, a neighboring Mennonite farmer, invites her to join his wheat harvesting team on their journey across the heartland through Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Idaho, Mockett accepts and begins her journey into another world—one in which hunters, Mormons, cowboys, members of the Shoshone-Bannock tribes, hellfire pastors, and even a snake-handling Pentecostal church all make an appearance.
“Eric told me he wanted to share his America because he feared how little we have come to understand each other,” Mockett writes. “The divide between city and country, once just a crack in the dirt, was now a chasm into which objects, people, grace, and love all fell and disappeared.”
Mockett originally has one question for those she meets: “Why,” she wonders, “are our farmers and harvesters, who are conservative Christians, okay with GMOs, while people in the city, who believe in evolution, are obsessed with organic food?”
Those of us who have experienced both worlds can often feel a tension between them, and within ourselves, as if we are straddling a divide between two places that are complicated, imperfect and at odds with each other.
I grew up in a rural, religious landscape, and fascinating as this question is to Mockett, it immediately struck me as simplistic and impossible to answer. I know as many conservative Christians “obsessed with organic food” as I do progressives. And as Mockett herself will point out later, many secular people are perfectly comfortable with conventional agriculture and its methodologies.
But I think what Mockett is trying to understand here, and throughout her book, is more complex, embedded within the assumptions of the question itself. Namely, what are the divisions of culture and science, religion and politics, that help make us who we are in America? And how do our spiritual beliefs and environments influence our stances on these issues?
In many ways, I recognize the harvesters Mockett spends time with as “my people.” My grandpa and great-grandpa were both farmers (farming at a much smaller scale than any of the wheat farmers considered in this book). I grew up in Idaho farm country, surrounded by white, Republican folk—many of them evangelicals and Mormons, farmers and agribusiness workers. I had several dear friends who were ex-Mennonite, a couple of whom received only an eighth-grade education before giving up school for full-time work.
As an adult, however, I have inhabited something a bit closer to Mockett’s own world: one in which ethnic diversity, organic food, multifaceted religious beliefs, and progressive politics are far more pervasive. As she notes, those of us who have experienced both worlds can often feel a tension between them, and within ourselves, as if we are straddling a divide between two places that are complicated, imperfect and at odds with each other.
But the rural world is new to Mockett, and she isn’t always sure how welcoming or hospitable it might be to progressives or people of color like herself. She often (understandably) feels alienated and alone in this rural landscape, and she begins her journey with little more than a rudimentary understanding of farming and Christianity. To her immense credit, however, she pushes forward to build relationships and expand her knowledge of each region she visits.
While the book explores issues like genetic modification, the organic movement, and the use of industrialized practices to “feed the world,” it primarily focuses on the people who populate farm country, and what they believe about the world. Mockett seeks to understand a group of Christians whose views on science and the Bible often lead outsiders (herself included) to stereotype them as “stupid.” How could anyone not believe in evolution? What sort of person believes in an imminent global apocalypse? What form of religious fundamentalism could convince someone that many humans are destined for hell?
…both Mockett’s attempts at explaining agriculture and the harvesters’ attempts at explaining God seemed lacking, as if some important puzzle piece were missing from each.
Mockett’s curiosity is insatiable. Though she comes to this topic with little to no prior knowledge, her clear-eyed, outside vision reminded me just how confusing and frustrating the evangelical landscape can be: Why are some Scripture passages interpreted in an extremely literal fashion, while others are not? Why do churches constantly berate personal sins, but choose to ignore a collective view of sin—the sort that might lead us to remorse and repentance over our history as a people and nation?
This is all new terrain for Mockett, and her only guide through this confusing landscape of denominations and doctrines is an “exvangelical” on the harvesting crew named Juston: a tender-hearted young man who prefers The Liturgists podcast and Rob Bell to Christian orthodoxy, and is himself full of doubt and frustration over the state of American Christianity. They grapple together with the chasm between other harvesters and themselves, each trying to bridge the divide in their own way.
Throughout the book, I tried to determine why both Mockett’s attempts at explaining agriculture and the harvesters’ attempts at explaining God seemed lacking, as if some important puzzle piece were missing from each. Then I stumbled across a passage in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, which considers indigenous wisdom, sustainable ecology, and scientific knowledge side by side.
“I think it’s fair to say that if the Western world has an ilbal [sacred text], it is science,” Kimmerer writes. “Science lets us see the dance of the chromosomes, the leaves of moss, and the farthest galaxy. But…does science allow us to perceive the sacred in the world, or does it bend light in such a way as to obscure it? A lens that brings the material world into focus but blurs the spiritual is the lens of a people made of wood. It is not more data that we need for our transformation…but more wisdom.”
Mockett reminded me that love is not always comfortable. It often involves a decision to remain, to listen, and to be faithful, despite the many ideological or political debates that threaten to sever us.
American Harvest is full of empathy and beauty. But its characters—progressive and conservative, Christian and secular alike—often lack any conception of mystery in the subjects they debate together. From permaculture to Cain and Abel, complex, nuanced subjects often seem boiled down to data points and predictions, stripped of any sense of wonder. A debate over whether Revelation’s ending takes place in a city misses the heart of the last chapter, which is reconciliation between God and man, and the restoration of a broken world—“Shalom,” as Mockett writes earlier in the book. The heart of the Biblical text, and indeed the heart of agriculture, contains a call to communion, and science, insofar as it draws us to comprehend the mysteries of the earth, can help us on our quest for shalom. But parsing either verses or data with an eye toward certainty and pure rationality falls short, pulling us toward domination of the subject studied, rather than toward reverence and a desire for communion.
As another reviewer noted, this book would be even better if Mockett remained in one of the places she visits with her harvesting crew. As it is, we get glimpses of each place but never the deep vision that would come from inhabiting just one of them for an extended time. Nonetheless, Mockett still offers a variety of insights. Perhaps the most important of these is a slow but steady gathering of nuance, complexity, and compassion: Many of the book’s primary considerations of religious belief are deepened by the end, and many of its characters become more multifaceted with each chapter.
By the close of the book, Mockett sees much more than a simplistic landscape. She has abandoned her preliminary question regarding evolution and GMO seeds for a thousand more detailed and interesting inquiries. She understands more of the faiths, fears, creeds, soils, climates, ecologies, histories, and cultures that make up rural America.
Mockett reminded me that love is not always comfortable. It often involves a decision to remain, to listen, and to be faithful, despite the many ideological or political debates that threaten to sever us. It is difficult to bridge the chasm. But to do so, with a full awareness of the cost, is a way of loving that is deeply needed in our world today.
Gracy Olmstead is a writer whose work has appeared in The American Conservative, New York Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. Her book Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind will be published March 16, 2021.
American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland was published on April 7, 2020, by Graywolf Press. Fare Forward thanks Graywolf for providing our reviewer with a copy of the book, which you can purchase on their website here.
