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Rural Pastors Detail Distrust and Alienation

You can’t go wrong with what Jesus said. During the 60s, we saw a shift in the church. The church walked away from “this is the way the Bible is.” We had that basic core, but we don’t have that anymore. There were lines you did not cross. We all agreed; we don’t agree anymore.

On Halloween of 2024, two days after our Listening Tour lunch with African American pastors at Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church on the east side of Indianapolis, we travelled to Boswell, IN, a very rural small town near the Illinois border. It would be difficult to imagine two more different discussions in the same week—the week before the election. Each group of pastors knows, abstractly, that the other exists, but there was no hint of seeing their particular situations as part of the same social environment, even though they are in the same state and roughly 90 miles apart.

The pastors we met in Boswell were all white, though there are plenty of Latino pastors in the area also. Three were men and two were women. One was United Methodist and another Free Methodist, with the rest from independent or Restorationist traditions. One of the five churches represented shares its space with a Spanish-speaking congregation.

This group expressed the concerns most closely linked to conservative voters. There was certainly concern about immigration, but this was less vitriolic than one might hear elsewhere.  Boswell is about 1/3 Latino and the nearby town of Ambia is more than 50% Latino. In Boswell, there is one restaurant (not counting the ice cream stand) and one bar, and both serve Mexican food.

The Boswell pastors instead spoke mostly of alienation and distrust. Distrust they named clearly; alienation is our interpretation of their reflections. Their congregants are worried that the world they thought was real has crumbled around them and that elites have not only allowed this to happen, they have encouraged it. From their perspective, authorities are telling them that gender difference is not real, so much so that even male and female are not concrete designations. They always knew that foundational sexual mores were violated, but assumed the biblical injunctions were still authoritative. Now those injunctions seem not to apply.

One pastor voiced his concerns about how his values seemed to be overlooked. He said, “If I look at transgender, abortion, [or] immigration, there’s a sense in conservative areas that generally everything people value is at risk of going away. There’s a sense that if we don’t get this [the election] right, then it’s all going.”

Not surprisingly, several mentioned high levels of distrust toward elite policymakers, university professors, and the like. (One even said, “No offense intended,” to which I replied, “none taken.”) There was some discussion of the truth being simple and the news and government policy making it unnecessarily complex.

Although the themes of distrust and evaporating authority came up again and again, the conversation always turned back to money. Walking along Boswell’s downtown street (there’s just the one), there was no one there and no stores were open. There is no industry to speak of outside of farming. The meat and poultry jobs are being done by Latinos. The older white residents of the area know that their finances have been squeezed by forces they probably cannot even name. One of the pastors detailed the financial hardships of his congregants, saying, “All I hear is that they’re broke. Everything has gone up, neighbors are working two jobs, and when they open their wallets, they don’t have any money.” Even the age-old complaint about government taxing social security benefits reared its head.

As one pastor told us: “The economy is the thing that hits everybody personally from week to week, and [there is] a real fear about whether we can we handle four years of wasted policy and regulation and raising taxes. All the philosophical stuff is a big deal, but the economy pushes it to a very personal level.”

Like the African American pastors two days before, these pastors were worried about poverty and their congregation’s ability to do anything about it. But these pastors did not frame that issue as economic injustice. They saw it in terms of bureaucracy, social planning, and regulations. They pictured elites putting other social concerns above economic growth and vitality. There was a sense that taxes were too high, but the pastors did not mean tax rates. They were concerned about taxes—that is, strains—like seniors paying social security tax on small earnings while also receiving social security benefits.

The lunch with African American pastors just two days earlier prompted a brief bout of despair in me, and it would be fair to say this lunch did little to dispel that. In both cases, pastors saw their communities put upon by forces outside their control and both saw economic insecurity as central to their problems. But they had almost entirely opposite views of the causes of the problems and equally opposite views of the solutions. One group saw racism as central to the injustice, while another saw the loss of traditional values and authority. Both were cynical. Both were distrustful.

And these two conversations were not in disparate corners of America, they were in Indiana, about 90 miles from one another. The two groups of pastors are largely governed by the same people and, interestingly, neither the white, rural pastors nor the African American urban pastors feel like these politicians are working for them.

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