Small-Town America, by Robert Wuthnow

The popular imagination, influenced by a relentless bread-and-circus news media and entertainment culture, has a way of creating stereotypical “truths” that are more fiction than fact, limiting if not entirely erasing the histories and stories of entire peoples. Over and over this happens: to Native Americans, to most other racial and ethnic minorities, to women, to sexual minorities. As stereotypes take root in our collective mind and memory, it becomes very difficult to hear the depth and variety of people’s lived experiences, to see in others the same complexity we value in our own selves and our own histories.

Residents of small towns are one stereotyped group: they are caricatured as poor, uneducated rednecks who see no need to go past the county line, or as romantic back-to-the-landers who nobly forgo the many pleasures of cosmopolitan living in favor of the simpler, more honest existence of putting their hands in rich soil. And then there’s the trope of the local kid returning home after personal tragedy—the tale of redemption set amid red barns and cornfields. Whether we see denizens of small-town America as simpletons or preservers of a simpler way, we seldom explore the complex truth of their lives.

Having fled a small West Coast town for the glamour of New York City at the age of 18, and then having returned to small-town life for my pastoral first call in the Midwest nine years later, I’ve lived many of the complexities of small-town and rural American life. I therefore read Robert Wuthnow’s Small-Town America: Finding Community, Shaping the Future with great appreciation.