A FEW days ago I attended a 95th anniversary celebration for a rural church. Some congregations might wait for their 100th, but this one isn’t sure it will be around for another five years, so it didn’t wait to celebrate.
The church was full, the stories were wonderful and afterward, food and friends spilled out of the packed church basement onto the lawn outside. People didn’t want to go home.
“Why isn’t it like this every Sunday?” I wondered. The population in that area is fairly stable.
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“Folks are too busy,” one of the eldest said. “Haven’t got time for each other anymore.”
I suppose it is a side effect of paved roads, fast vehicles, and low commodity prices. Over half the farmers work another job to stay solvent. And if there’s any spare time they have access to all the facilities within a 100 kilometres.
I suspect that “cocooning” is also part of it. The TV mimics and replaces the contact with people that we used to crave. The result is that there is less involvement in local social groups. Deep friendships aren’t forming as quickly.
There is a significant health cost to that loss. In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam reports on a 40 year study of a community in Rosetto, Pennsylvania. These folks didn’t get heart attacks. They had higher risk factors than neighbouring towns, yet they were healthier. Why?
The town had been settled by people from the same Italian village. They spent a great deal of time together in church, sports clubs, labour unions. In the late afternoon they sat on their front porches and visited. In the evening they went out to social clubs. They learned how to draw on each other for financial, emotional and other support.
Ironically, in the 1960s and 1970s, when the younger Rosetans began to build backyard terraces, pulling out of that social contact, the rate of heart disease rose until it reached the national average.
Many farmers who settled on the Mennonite reserves such as the one near Altona, Man., knew the importance of social support. They built their farmhouses close together in villages and then travelled out to work their fields.
This European model was ignored by Clifford Sifton. He was the one who drew up our checkerboard system of land division – one family on each quarter or half section – when the West was being settled. Perhaps that physical separation made it easier to engage in competitive farming when the boom and bust cycle of the 1970s and 1980s hit.
I’ve interviewed rural people over the last decade and I’ve seen what an enormous economic cost there is to the loss of our rural social net.
Farm and business families under stress desperately need a word of hope or advice but they are often afraid to ask for it. They’re not sure who to trust.
Fear of being shamed or taken advantage of keeps them hiding inside walls of mistrust and so they don’t get the support they need to stay financially healthy.
For the sake of our bodies, our families and our farms, let’s take the time this weekend to go to church or visit a friend.
Cam Harder is associate professor of systematic theology at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon. He can be reached at crharder@shaw.ca. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Western Producer.
