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Rural Pastors Detail Distrust and Alienation

There was a time where you could talk about your differences, and if you agreed or disagreed, you could just simply talk, ‘Hey, I believe this and that,’ when it comes to politics. And now it’s like, especially in my little congregation, if you’re not on the side of [the majority], then you don’t talk. I won’t know who the other ones [the minority] are, because they’re not speaking.

“There was a time…” Those four words sum up the conversation in Ogilville, IN, in October 2024. Project Director Art Farnsley and Research Associate Tim Orr traveled to Ogilville for breakfast with 8 pastors. Most of the pastors were from Jackson and Bartholomew Counties, located about 50 miles down I-65 from Indianapolis. They served congregations that are rural or located in very small towns.

The pastors were not locked in nostalgia for an imagined past, but they recognized that their ministry took place in an environment where rapid, recent social change has caused dislocation and mistrust.

The two topics most on their minds were education and immigration. On education, the pastors said their congregants were especially concerned that liberal social values, values they would call “woke,” are getting tangled up with how traditional academic subjects are being taught in schools. One pastor shared, “I think there’s a sense now that parents have, ‘Well, I want you to give my kids a great education in math and science and history, but I also recognize that you’re probably going to work against my moral claims. You’re probably not going to support them.’”

The underlying issue is implied acceptance of homosexuality, and the concern is not limited to the parents’ generation. “I think, for students, there’s this frustration right now because students have their own sense of morality as well, and this generation is notorious, especially high school, for not trusting. I think that’s a positive actually. They have a fair amount of suspicion about ideas and things that are happening.”

Immigration came up, most specifically in the context of Seymour, IN. Seymour is the largest town in Jackson County and over the past decade has seen a dramatic increase in its population of Spanish-speaking residents who are drawn to the area for work. One pastor said residents did not know exactly how immigrants were learning about Seymour as a destination. He said he had heard there were signs in Mexico advertising job opportunities in Seymour, although he acknowledged that he did not “know if there’s truth to that.” Seymour was one of three Indiana cities chosen for pilot programs in immigrant welcome centers. Many residents resisted, leading to the welcome center being abandoned in Seymour, though it went ahead in the other two cities.

The pastor who mentioned advertisements in Mexico for jobs in Seymour talked about his congregants’ hesitation to welcome immigrants to the community, “They would probably be more on like, ‘We gotta get this under control.’” But his perspective differed slightly. He explained that he would partly agree with his members, “Yeah, we need to pray for that,” but he added, “How can we leverage these opportunities for Kingdom opportunities?”

The biggest problem for these pastors is that this sustained mistrust closes lines of communication. Conservative members are concerned about “wokeness” on sexuality issues in schools and in immigration, but the larger problem for the pastors is that these concerns make discussion impossible, even within their relatively homogeneous congregations. One pastor explained that if people did not share the opinions of the majority, they simply did not speak. Another pastor shared, “I’m just going to say that the fear of dissolving relationships has put people in silos where there are things happening.” Still another said, “I see less face to face happening. I grieve that because I like the face to face.”

Ogilville sits just outside Columbus, IN, a prosperous town that is the home of Cummins, a leading diesel engine maker. That prosperity means a much larger professional managerial class of Americans than most similar cities in Indiana might have. Columbus is more like an urban edge city compared to Seymour, which is more like a small town. (Seymour is in fact the “small town” in John Mellencamp’s song of that name.)

Columbus, with Cummins, has also attracted hundreds of highly-educated immigrants from Japan, India, and China who work in skilled jobs like engineering and information technology. Diversity has been part of the story there for generations, but that diversity has historically meant more jobs for workers, not fewer. The area is far enough from Indianapolis that it had few African American residents and so relatively little tension during the Civil Rights era or from busing for desegregation.

But now, the pressure of pluralism is at the doorstep of the rural and small-town residents of Bartholomew and Jackson counties. Their schools, likely influenced by the more suburban demographics of Columbus, promote a more liberal view of sexuality, including gender identity. The movement of highly-paid union jobs in manufacturing to other locations goes hand-in-hand with Latino immigrants moving in to provide lower-cost labor for the kind of manufacturing that remains.

No surprise, then, that the working-class, white, residents feel like unwanted change is being forced upon them, and even less surprise if they struggle to articulate exactly what it is about these changes that bothers them. They have legitimate concerns about biblical authority on sexuality and legal authority on immigration, so they use these to push back. And these legitimate grievances are mixed in with other, more emotional, responses to a loss of status for men, for white people, and for a particular view of Christian orthodoxy. They do not want to be unfair or uncaring—they share these values—but they feel like they are being told to accept changes that, to them, feel like a deadweight loss.

Pastors of rural and small-town churches are in a jam. They are compassionate and they want to help, but they are caught in a web where some strands come from legitimate concerns for authority and orthodoxy, but others come from fear. The forces of change that shape their environment are far beyond their control. Little wonder they feel that mistrust is driving their members into silos and stifling open communication.

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