HEARTLAND RESTORATION, by Gary North

Christianity was primarily an urban phenomenon in the early Roman Empire. As Christianity expanded its influence over the next centuries, the villages became the places where the old occult paganism retained a foothold. To some degree, this never changed. John C. Lawson’s brilliant but neglected study, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion (1911), shows how much of the pre-Christian occultism has survived, especially in rural areas of Greece.

In the United States today, the reverse is true. The rural areas of the nation are more heavily influenced by Protestantism, while the cities tend to be humanistic, with pockets of Catholicism and, in Midwestern cities, European Protestantism. The Bible Belt is the rural South. The Midwestern rural areas are Lutheran and Christian Reformed. Garrison Keeler’s mythical Lake Woebegone has roots in his youth. He does not ridicule the Lutheran religious traditions in which he grew up. His humor is not in any way an heir of H. L. Mencken’s skeptical savagery.

The rural Northwest is comparatively atheistic. Oregon and Washington are the only states in which atheism is found in the low double-digit range. But in small town heartland America, the core population is still Christian, still attends church, and is socially conservative.

The rural regions of the nation are considered sleepy and backward by most residents of large cities. This is an old prejudice. Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto derided "the idiocy of rural life." The popular television situation comedy of the mid-1960’s, Green Acres, rested on this prejudice. The wife felt starved in the country. She longed for New York City, especially its shopping. A Sear’s Catalogue was not what she had in mind. However, that was before Wal-Mart.

Sam Walton used sophisticated computer technology to reduce inventory costs and create a mass-marketing empire, which began in the rural South. He used the South to test his theories of marketing at the expense of under-funded local sellers. Large urban retailers paid little attention to him. Their prejudice against the rural South blinded them to the looming threat. By 1980, he was ready to take on the old giants of retailing. He beat them.

But, like Mao before him, Walton used small town America as a stepping stone to conquer the cities. His target had always been the cities. But he bided his time until he had the capital and the volume-based discounts to beat the urban giants. This time, our targeted areas must be the rural heartland. It is here that we can establish a beachhead for Christian dominion. This will be the market for Christian reconstruction. All it will take is a breakdown engineered – literally – by the humanists.

Wealth in the modern world is concentrated in the great cities. These are the centers of commerce and finance. They house the great universities and research hospitals. They have a higher percentage of educated residents, who are products of secular humanist institutions of higher learning. The cities are where the action is. They are where the division of labor is most advanced. That is to say, they are where men are most dependent on the free market to provide them with life-sustaining goods and services. Urban populations are dependent on an impersonal social system of the delivery of goods. Not friendship but cash rules in the cities. Not kinship but credit cards.

An urban man’s reputation for ethical excellence applies only to his business dealings. Anything else is considered private and therefore irrelevant to the fundamental consideration, namely, his willingness to deliver the goods. This urban prejudice against ethics has spread to every social institution. It is dominant in politics, the media, and law enforcement. The old slogan is no longer believed: "If he cheats on his wife, he’ll cheat anyone."

This is why God’s judgment will come against the cities far more than on rural or small town locations. The cities are defiant in their contempt of God and God’s laws. Urban lawyers, urban bankers, urban TV anchormen, and urban politicians shrug off rural concerns as irrelevant to the modern world. But not for much longer.

The cities have high per capita income, especially leisure income. This is because of the high division of labor, most notably intellectual labor. A person can find his precise slot in the production process. He increases his output accordingly.

The danger is that the social order that permits such an extended division of labor is subject to disruptions. In the past, these disruptions have been military, epidemiological, and financial. Military enemies target large cities – centers of production and authority. Disease spreads faster in urban areas. Economic depressions hit highly specialized producers harder than they hit farmers.

But as the money economy and the division of labor have spread to rural areas since 1850, farming has become more specialized, more capital intensive, and more dependent on debt. This has brought commercial farming under the umbrella of the banking system. Meanwhile, the exodus to the cities has depopulated rural areas. So, the modern farming system is vulnerable to the same kinds of economic breakdown as the cities.

This is why urban famine is still a possibility. Farmers will eat; city dwellers may not. Also, with a major depression will come a breakdown in public health systems when cities run out of funds. The arrogance of modern urban man knows few limits. He thinks he is immune to the traditional judgments of God. This is an illusion that the breakdown of computers and systems dependent on computers will dispel rapidly. Men have entrusted their futures to computers and banks and the welfare State, false gods all.

Leadership has accompanied great wealth. The nations of this era are dominated by urban political elites, not just in the realm of civil government but in all realms. The economic bankruptcy of the cities, if severe enough, will undermine the existing leadership structures. This will present a major opportunity for those living in more decentralized environments.

Wealth will be destroyed on a massive scale if the computers go down. This is not mainly a matter of wealth redistribution. It is a matter of wealth destruction. The knowledge economy is vulnerable to anything that will reduce communications and raise the cost of information. The millennium bug is uniquely empowered to do this. What will be lost – information – will not be transferred. It will be destroyed.

But in terms of comparative wealth per capita, the economic losses in the cities will be an order of magnitude greater than the country. To use an extreme example, the forced change in lifestyle will be devastatingly greater for the New York stock broker vs. the cajun fisherman in the bayous of Louisiana. The fisherman may have to give up his outboard motor and revert to paddles. The stock broker may not get out of the city alive if there is a shutdown of the power grid. And if he gets out, he will carry little of value with him, and he will not carry it far.

The two American political parties do not raise most of their funds in the rural heartland. The American Civil Liberties Union is not rural-based. The Supreme Court is urban. Across the board, the American political system is urban-dominated. The same is true of most industrial nations and all of the large ones.

The centralization of political power has accompanied the centralization of population. This is about to change on a scale undreamed of by today’s elites or the voters. It is about to change on a timetable unprecedented since the tower of Babel. Neither the cities nor the heartland are prepared for this change. The urban elites are not ready to surrender power, and the heartland is not interested in grabbing it. Urban elites will not surrender power; it will be stripped from them by impersonal electronic machines that care nothing about men’s goals or expectations.

Without the national government’s ability to mail computerized welfare checks of all kinds, it will lose its legitimacy. State governments will suffer the same loss. The welfare State has promised security that only God could provide, and to special interest groups to whom God would not provide it. This perverse promise is about to die, all over the world, all at once. When the welfare checks stop coming, political power will shift dramatically to local units of civil government. When the tax collectors who rely on computers to follow the money and banks to provide a means of collecting it – checks – find that the computers are down and so are the banks, the existing political elites and their dependents will be without the trappings of power. Power will go to the army (briefly) and permanently to local political entities that can still collect taxes in forms not dependent on computers.

In 1965, R. J. Rushdoony’s collection of essays appeared: The Nature of the American System. In it, he argued that the growth of the doctrine of state’s rights is an anomaly that was antithetical to the original American political system. When the electoral college was restructured in the early nineteenth century so that the winner took all – all of the members of the state’s electoral voters – the presidency became a contest between regions. Before this, he argued, electors had represented districts closely associated with counties. The state’s rights doctrine developed out of a shift in the way electoral votes were counted. This led to the Civil War.

His more important argument was that the county was the fundamental unit of civil government in early America. It had the power to collect property taxes from county residents. Residents therefore guarded their money and their rights against larger political entities. Localism was the heart of the American political system. The doctrine of state’s rights was a departure from this original localism.

In the year 2000, the United States will go back to something like 1789, if it doesn’t go back to 1781 – the Articles of Confederation. This seems impossible today, but if mainframe computers break down completely in 2000, taking banks, telecommunications, tax collecting, the military, and, above all, the national power grid, this is what will happen. Nobody is ready for this.

The county will become the primary agency of civil government for the same reason that it was in 1789: the legal power to tax and the ability to collect those taxes. If you want to find out who has power, follow the money. Politically, money in a world with neither mainframe computers nor fractional reserve banking will be cash. It will be local. The economy will become a face-to-face economy. So will politics.

The American Civil Liberties Union is about to receive a death blow. So is the secular humanism that undergirds the ACLU. The urban intelligentsia will soon be bankrupt. No more gasoline for BMW’s. No more National Public Radio. No more power.

The urban intellectuals kid about Bubba. Well, Bubba is real, but Bubba isn’t where the power is. The power in heartland America is in the churches, the men’s service clubs, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the local coffee shops. It’s in family get-togethers. There aren’t many smoke-filled rooms in heartland America. Smokeless tobacco predominates. These people aren’t overly interested in the opinions of pointy-headed intellectuals, to quote an earlier master of heartland politics.

The urban elites would be aghast to think of where the power will lie after 2000. They do not take y2k seriously, so they do not think about such matters. But I do.

The heartland will be ready for Christian Reconstruction when the mess produced by the urban elites brings down the urban institutions of power. This computer-driven breakdown will not be saddled on Christians. We did not occupy the corridors of power in this century. We did not program the computers. It will soon be our turn to point the finger, to identify the mortal and spiritual causes of the disaster (Deut. 8:17-20).

Our day is coming, sooner than you think, and sooner than today’s power elites think. Be patient. Be prepared. Be out of the city.

Copyright 1998, Institute for Christian Economics

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