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Coming together in Fargo

Christian Century, July 30, 1997 by Stewart W. Herman

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The idea of the gift economy is an abstraction, of course. The practice of giving gifts is energized by particular feelings derived from particular beliefs -- which leads us to a third level in explaining the outpouring of voluntarism in Fargo and Moorhead, and finally to an assessment of its value for the public life of these communities. To what extent the volunteers during those critical six weeks were consciously motivated by religious convictions is impossible to tell. However, there is an affinity between the economy of gifts and a kind of pietism that has deeply influenced the religious life of the region: the faith imported by Scandinavian immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This pietism's theological anchor is a gift of impenetrable depth and inexhaustible mystery, the redemptive death of Jesus. It asserts that a new community is created by Christ, a community in which all human persons have equal and infinite value. "In the very midst of all the earthen structures th at enclose this city the shepherd is present to watch over you this day and even to call you by name," preached one Lutheran pastor as the river crested. This pietism points to God as incarnate in the spirit that binds the community together. "God is in the hearts and minds of people who work together to defend and sustain each other," said a UCC pastor. The simplicity and immediacy of this relationship between God and the community provides a powerful rationale for focusing upon the needs of neighbors.

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This pietism also generates social capital. Against the individualistic ethos of consumer satisfaction, which is no less alluring in the Red River Valley than in other regions, it counterpoises an equally simple and powerful ethic: a confident, sometimes cloying endorsement of the warmth, happiness and fulfillment to be found within the circles of family, friendship, church and community. This pietism not only provides an especially sturdy bulwark against the uncontrollable vagaries of prairie weather; it takes its particular hue in no small measures from the endless struggle against that weather.

The conviction that Jesus works to sustain whole communities provides a sturdy substrate for volunteering in whatever activities, secular or religious, aim at the good of the whole. But the chief emphasis is upon helping. I could see such faith in the exhaustion of my students who felt obliged by Jesus' love to respond to every call for help that awoke them at two in the morning. For them, the Christian community is one body in Christ, and becomes wounded when members of that community encounter misfortune. Indeed, most of the area clergy that I polled viewed the flood as a means through which God's gift of community could be strengthened.

This pietism did not pause to speculate whether God was using the flood to chastise or warn the community or to accomplish purposes independently of or in contradiction to human purposes. "God could but would not will such disasters," insisted one Catholic priest. In a terrain where the Red River and its tributaries provide the only natural squiggles on a strictly rectilinear grid imposed by commodity agriculture, this anthropocentric focus is not surprising, however irritation it might be to more theocentric biocentric or ecocentric forms of piety. Yet in its own way, it does open a door to a transcendent, even disturbing glimpse into the nature of God's governance -- the terrible beauty of a divine economy operating upon nothing but sheer gift, and our inability to sustain such an economy on earth. And this glimpse gives us critical leverage for assessing the place of voluntarism in the governance of human communities.

Coming together in Fargo

Christian Century, July 30, 1997 by Stewart W. Herman

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