Theology Today - Vol 42, No. 4 - January 1986 - ARTICLE

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Appalachian Spring?
By James H. Smylie

"We are all Appalachians. We depend on the rich resources of that region for our abundant life, while at the same time we tend to ignore the widespread poverty, the injustices and inequalities, which continue to mark the life of the people. This, then, is a report about some of the literature now available to help us understand the problems of Appalachia, the images and models which underlie our preconceptions, and the place of the Christian faith in the lives of the people."

MARTHA Graham commissioned Aaron Copland to compose "Appalachian Spring." The premiere of this collaboration by America's deans of dance and music took place in Washington, D.C. in 1944. The music and dance celebrate the pioneer on the Appalachian frontier in the early nineteenth century, and use plain harmonic and melodic materials, including the Shaker hymn "Simple Gifts," to create the image of the place and the people. Graham and Copland transformed and illuminated their materials. Many years later we still enjoy the music.

"Appalachian Spring" may be plain and simple. Appalachian studies is anything but. THEOLOGY TODAY has recognized this from time to time. In 1947, for example, Richard Charles Smith reported on "The Coal Miner and God." He dealt with the soul of Appalachians as shaped by the miners' occupation, a meditation on Job 28:14 in which the biblical author speaks of work in "darkness and deathful gloom." Then Smith reflected on his own experiences as home missionary in a West Virginia mining community with its dirt and grime and hurting people. Much later, in 1976, in "Serpent-Handling as Sacrament," Mary Lee Dougherty shared her research into the power which some of the people there believe God gives to them to handle snakes, fulfilling promises made in Mark l6: 15-l8. While not agreeing with their interpretation of the text, she describes this phenomenon with sympathy, and as a way in which some people experience the "sign and seal" of God's presence and

James H. Smylie is Professor of American Church History at Union TheologicaI Seminary in Virginia and Editor of The Journal of Presbyterian History. Born in Huntington, West Virginia, where his father was a pastor in the Appalachian region, Dr. Smylie has continued his interest in the literature on Appalachia and, in recent years, has conducted a summer tour of the area with a group of interested seminarians. It has recently been announced that more than thirty-five seminaries and divinity schools will be collaborating with Berea College, Kentucky, and the Commission on Religion in Appalachia to establish a comprehensive program for those anticipating ministry in the region.

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power in their dreary lives. In the spirit of these two earlier essays, this present article seeks to carry farther our understanding of Appalachia.

We are all Appalachians. We depend on the rich resources of that region for our own abundant life, while at the same time we tend to ignore the widespread poverty, the injustices and inequalities, which continue to mark the life of the people. This, then, is a report about some of the literature now available to help us understand the problems of Appalachia, the images and models which underlie our preconceptions, and the place of the Christian faith in the lives of the people.

Appalachian studies appears to be a growth industry. We now have sizable bibliographies, numerous assessments of where we are in these studies, and convenient anthologies designed to give the busy but interested reader an introduction to the subject. For example, Appalachian Journal, edited on the campus of Appalachian State University, Boone, N.C., is only one of several periodicals exploring the life of the region. It has published two issues entitled "A Guide to Appalachian Studies" (Autumn, 1977) and "Assessing Appalachian Studies" (Winter-Spring, 1982). In these, we find essays on the literature of various subjects from anthropology to mountain religion, guides to general resources and current periodicals, bibliographies of literature, including unpublished dissertations, and suggestions for further research. Moreover, these issues identify a who's-who and a who-is-doing-what in the field. In the former issue, authors discuss attempts to define Appalachia in terms of its geological age, making the existence of great deposits of coal the distinguishing mark of the place, and also the way it has expanded over the years to include Northern, Central, and Southern subregions reaching from southwest New York to the northeast corner of Mississippi. The definition expanded when the Appalachian Regional Commission was founded in 1965 and Federal funds began to flow to help in the war on poverty.

In the latter issue of the Journal, essayists introduce debates over the purpose of Appalachian studies. We find that some of those engaged in the study of this region think of their work as similar to what goes on about New England, the South, the Great Plains, and the Southwest. Others consider themselves as part of a movement, more like Black, Native American, Hispanic, and Women studies, in which research and writing issues in advocacy for the people of the region. In this connection, observers note a division between "bard" and "soft" academics, the "soft" being the folklorists, literaturists, and historians whose studies sometimes reinforce the problems; the "hard" being those who wish to use their powers of explanation to change the situation. Sometimes we find it difficult to see a distinction between the "hard" and "soft" approaches, since those who work in folklore, literature, and history cannot help but point out some of the difficulties of life in the region. We

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should keep another matter in mind. Appalachia is not simply a place that has needs. It is a place that can give. Some of those engaged in these studies affirm that Appalachians have something to offer others in terms of insight into what makes and keeps life humane, reflecting a style of life appropriate for the world in which we live.

Two anthologies, among others available, introduce us to Appalachia in very affective as well as effective ways. Robert J. Higgs and Ambrose N. Manning, of Johnson City, Tenn., have edited Voices from the Hills: Selected Readings of Southern Appalachia (New York: Ungar, 1975) which includes selections from the very earliest observers, such as William Byrd and Anne Newport Royall, story tellers and poets, such as Mary Noailles Murfee, John Fox, Jesse Stuart, and contemporary criticism, such as Harry M. Caudill's celebration and lament entitled "O Appalachia!" Bruce Ergood and Bruce E. Kuhre of Ohio University, Athens, offer us another satisfying collection of essays in Appalachia: Social Context Past and Present, second edition (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1983). They include representative essays on the definition of the region, its historical background, its demographic, cultural, economic, political characteristics, its family, educational, and religious life.

What these editors show is that Appalachia is a varied thing, inhabited by people who descend from the early settlers and also from recent immigrants, by people who are rural and urban and suburban, by people who are very poor, and by others who are very well off. The economy is industrial and extractive, involving timber, coal, gas, oil, and chemicals. It is also agricultural and recreational. This helps to explain why the region is defined, then redefined, and will undoubtedly be defined again. A statement by the People's Appalachian Research Collective raises the question "Why Study Appalachia?" Taking an advocacy position, the writers declare that "Hillbilly is beautiful," that "Appalachia is America" in the sense that many of our national problems come to focus in this region, and that such study offers an opportunity to "change global America" by changing the area. Indeed, America's status as a world power may be intricately tied to the rich resources of this region.

Where did we get our primary image of Appalachia as "A Strange Land and Peculiar People," the title of an article published in Lippincott's Magazine in l873? Some students of Appalachia complain that the people and the region get bad coverage from "Lil' Abner," "Snuffy Smith … Beverly Hillbillies," and "Hee Haw," although those who mix country music and bad humor on the latter give the impression of crying over their image all the way to the Nashville banks. John-Boy of "The Waltons," although an Appalachian of a different sort, does not alter the image completely. Some observers think that this kind of hillbilly image

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motivates those who would like to save and elevate hillbilly souls, while at the same time overlooking the systemic problems of the place and persons who live there.

To help explore perceptions of Appalachia, Henry D. Shapiro wrote Appalachia on Our Mind The Southern Mountains and Moutaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1978). Shapiro, who teaches history at the University of Cincinnati, studies how we as Americans have dealt with our sense of the "otherness" of Appalachia, and the "cognitive dissonance" which the region stirs in us as we think of its general poverty in an otherwise affluent society. Starting his investigation in the period after the Civil War, days of growth in our national and global self-consciousness, he moves to the 1920s when John C. Campbell published his famous study, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1921), an important historical document still in print.

The first to discover and define Appalachia, according to Shapiro, was the "local color movement," made up of literary people who rode horseback through the mountains and discovered isolated people living up hollows, in coves, and on ridges, wretchedly poor, and preserving a different mode of life which the writers then proceeded to describe in the nationally circulated journals of the time.

One way of explaining this phenomenon was to speak of these people as "contemporary ancestors." They were descendants of immigrants from England, Scottland, and Ireland, for the most part, who continued the customs and the language, and fostered as individualists the same love of liberty which we often associate with our American Revolutionary forebears when we wave the flag. Others have not been as complimentary in observing the life of these people. Instead of being considered descendants of freedom-loving immigrants, Appalachians have been considered offspring from the lower strata of European life who moved into the region to escape their responsibilities to society. The blood feuds between families such as the Hatfields and the McCoys and the fights between the moonshiners and revenue officers were not signs of independence and freedom, but rather further evidences of poverty of spirit as well as physical deprivation.

Missionaries such as Campbell took an interest in the people and discovered they were needy not because of their genes but because of their environment. A Congregational minister and Director of the Southern Highland Division of the Russell Sage Foundation, Campbell helped denominational home mission societies cooperate in a ministry among the needy in Appalachia. At one point, some sympathetic observers thought the only way to help Appalachians was to move them out of Appalachia. Then came improved means of transportation and communication, and people felt that the best help would be to draw people out of the isolation into larger Appalachian communities, make them proud of their culture by encouraging crafts and the preservation

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of folklore, folksong, and folkdance, while at the same time introducing modernization into the region.

With regard to Appalachia's "otherness," Shapiro suggests that we tended to resolve our image problem by thinking of Appalachia as really like America, or by thinking of Appalachia's deviation from America as only apparent, and not a threat or embarrassment. According to the author, it should be noted, during these early Appalachian studies we took our first steps in defining America as a pluralistic society of several distinct regions, rather than as a monolithic national entity.

Shapiro's book is rich and rewards careful study. But I think it is seriously skewed at one point. In exploring how Appalachia was on our mind, he does not deal with what American industrialists had in mind for Appalachia in the period after the Civil War. They discovered the region also. In this connection, Ronald E. Eller's recent book, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, l982) covers almost the same time frame and supplies information and insight not found in Shapiro's otherwise fine monograph. Whereas the local color writer and the home missionary found a strange land and a peculiar people, industrialists found valuable stands of timber on the surface of the land, rich deposits of minerals under the surface, and people who seemed ignorant of the value of the resources by which they were surrounded. While the region and its people appeared isolated, they soon played an indispensable role in America's industrial development. Not to bring the image which the industrialists had of Appalachia into our purview tends to distort our perception of what went on after the Civil War in the region.

Shapiro rightly points out that some early students of Appalachia considered the people there to be victims of either their genes or their environment. Eller points out that they were victimized by those who were more sophisticated about what was going on in the modern world and could exploit Appalachian ignorance and cheap labor. Some inside the region brokered power for the profit of those who controlled it from the outside. Eller, who teaches at, and directs the Appalachian Center of, the University of Kentucky, thus adds another dimension to our image of a "hillbillyized" people.

More recently, William H. Turner, at Kentucky State University, and Edward J. Cabbell, of the John Henry Memorial Foundation of West Virginia, have edited a volume entitled Blacks in Appalachia (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1985) in which the authors tell about a racial minority within a cultural minority, an invisible race within a culture which for many tends to be ignored. Both whites and blacks appear as victims who are often blamed for that victimization.

In l976, Kai T. Erikson published Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976). Erikson, in this Sorokin Award winning study, recounts

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the disaster of Feb. 26, l972, on Buffalo Creek in Logan County, West Virginia, which took the lives of 125 people. While this event may be a vague memory in most minds, Erikson shows how deep is the grief of the people who survived this catastrophe. The coal company pleaded that it was caused by rains and was an "act of God." The company was responsible, however, for unstable slag piles behind which it allowed the accumulation of over 132 million gallons of black water. These impoundments finally gave way, spilling the water and ruin in its wake.

In a chapter on "The Mountain Ethos," Erikson explores how the conditions under which people live in Appalachia, including the constant danger of disaster above and under the ground, makes them appear as a "tangle of contrary tendencies." The people seem to love tradition, yet prize personal liberty, to be self-assertive yet also resigned, to be self-centered and also group-centered, to be forever poised between ability and disability, to show a sense of independence, yet a need for dependence. Erikson's five "axes of variation" are useful in helping us avoid oversimplifying the character of the people who live in this region, who have been thought of as living in a "strange land" and being "peculiar."

III

Sociologists with a historical bent have recently been discussing models by which to grasp what is going on in Appalachia and which help to interpret the characteristics of the people. They argue that the model which we choose will inevitably shape our thoughts about what should be done about the region. One of the models interprets Appalachia as a "subculture of poverty." Michael Harrington made this popular in The Other America (New York: Macmillan, 1963). He called attention to the fact that poverty in Appalachia is often "invisible" to most of us who drive over interstate highways enjoying the scenic beauty of the place, much in the same way as we listen to the strains of Copland's "Appalachian Spring" in our living rooms. Jack Weller reinforced some of Harrington's insights in Yesterday's People (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1965). Weller wrote as a Presbyterian home missionary not remembered fondly by some of his former parishioners who did not appreciate the way he depicted them in his book.

Weller, whose book is still in print and full of valuable insights, wrote with a pastor's heart and a prophet's concern about what was happening to the people and to the region. His study points beyond itself to another model. In a word, Appalachia is a colony within the United States which suffers because of the way in which some inside and some outside the region exploit it and contribute to the injustices and inequities. There are several variations of this model.

John Gaventa, who works in grass-roots education at the New Highlander Research and Education Center, New Market, Tenn., gives us a helpful study of this model in his socio-historical volume, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley

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(Urbana: University of Illinois, l980). Borrowing insights from persons like Paulo Freire in the Third World, he focuses our attention on Central Appalachia, which includes parts of western Virginia, southern West Virginia, northeast Tennesee, and eastern Kentucky, that is, the Cumberland Plateau so very rich in coal deposits.

Why is it, he asks, that an area so rich in resources should continue to be the home of people who are generally so poor? Furthermore, why is it that the people who live in the region so often think of themselves as powerless to do anything about their condition? He argues, to put his case as briefly as possible, that the conditions in Appalachia are such, not simply because people participate ineffectually in the political processes or because they are virtually kept out of such participation, but because those with power exercise their influence over the powerless through the mobilization of bias, by shaping the predominant values, beliefs, and institutional procedures which operate to the benefit of the colonizer at the expense of the colonized. The latter are reduced, in a word, to virtual quiescence by the former. Gaventa explores this explanation by giving us the story of a London-based company, called the American Associates, which early in this century owned 60,000 acres of eastern Kentucky and built the town of Middlesboro as a "miracle town" in order to extract the coal of the area for world markets and to make owners wealthy.

Gaventa's book merits the prizes it won because of how well he tells a very complicated tale. There are many victims and few winners. His narrative and analysis cover not only the ups and downs of a multinational corporation, but also the way in which the local elites cooperated with the American Associates, and in which the Federal regulatory apparatus related to both the multinational and the local elites. Furthermore, he also tells us about the rise of the United Mine Workers, from the tumultuous days of its organization to its contemporary corruption and troubles.

One way the powerful have of keeping people powerless is mystification--for example, they suggest that the way things happen to be are truly the American way. To challenge the status quo is un-American and, worse, Communist. In this way, power creates and maintains power. Those who owned and managed the mines used this approach, for example, in the struggle against unionization under John L. Lewis. Ironically, when Lewis and his followers were challenged by miners who thought they were not benefiting from the activities of the UMW and tried to organize another union, Lewis charged them with outside agitation and Communism. Gaventa finds that just "as the dimensions of power and powerlessness re-inforce one another, so do the levels of power maximize the capacity of the holders of power to lie beyond challenge, and minimize the ability of the relatively powerless subjects of power to formulate or act upon the full extent of their interest within the conflict situation." The "culture of poverty" thus becomes a "culture of silence."

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Gaventa's findings are reinforced by another study by Harry M. Caudill, Theirs Be the Power: the Moguls of Eastern Kentucky (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), with a variation on the theme. Caudill is professor of history at the University of Kentucky, a lawyer, and a former state legislator. He mentioned the fact that Appalachia was a colony in his impressionistic and pioneering book Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), a volume still in print and still very much worth reading. In his new volume, Caudill suggests that, in order to understand Appalachia's problems, we need to see it in terms of a modification of the internal colonial model. Appalachia is more a peripheral region within an advanced global capitalist society. This does not contradict anything Gaventa suggests in his fruitful study. It does widen the context and allow us to deal with the various elements which Gaventa and Caudill introduce.

Caudill writes about the "first moguls" who came into the coal fields to make their fortunes. They were helped by the local people, for example, John C. C. Mayo. Despite the booms and the busts, they often ended up fabulously wealthy because of the resources of Appalachia. One of the things of interest about Caudill's story is the fact that the people who benefited from the exploitation of Appalachia at the expense of its natural and human resources were pious Christians. Mayo was a Methodist. Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Baptists, and Presbyterians also enjoyed the "great barbecue" of American resources. Caudill reports that Richard Mellon, associated with the Pittsburgh Coal Company, testified before the Senate Committee on interstate commerce in 1928 about the unrest in the mining towns. His miners were non-union, and they were often convulsed by strikes because the company turned deaf ears to requests for fairer wages. In a public hearing, Senator Burton Wheeler asked Mellon if he had ever visited the company's mine villages to look at the conditions under which his miners and their families lived. "I have not been out there," Mellon replied, "no." Caudill adds that the company board appropriated $l5,000 for a missionary for the mining town. The Kentuckian thus underscores the paradox of riches involving the wealthy who do not know much about the problems of the poor, yet who turn out to be generous benefactors.

Caudill gives another illustration of how by control of perceptions those in power attempted to deal with challenges to their power in coal, coke, and steel. He includes a ditty written by a woman unionist:

I was raised in old Kentucky
In Kentucky borned and bred,
But when I joined the Union
They called me a Rooshian Red.

Caudill is not very hopeful about dealing with the discrepancy between the wealth and the poverty of the region. He cites another Presbyterian, former Governor Bert Combs of Kentucky, who appeared

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before the Presbyterian Board of National Ministries in l967 and spoke with considerable frankness. "For a half a century," he said, "we have permitted conditions to exist which have created the Appalachian problem. The area has been ruthlessly exploited. The valuable natural resources of the region have been pillaged by those whose only motive was financial profit." Caudill concludes his study by referring to the world context: "The region's doom is virtually sealed: the insatiable global demands for fuel and chemicals have already determined that."

Working at these problems for many years, Caudill has reason to be discouraged. Yet, his writings, and those of Shapiro, Eller, and Gaventa, represent modern protests, suggesting that something more needs to be done and can be done. Activists in Appalachian studies are analyzing why poverty still exists in a region so rich in resources. In this connection, Caudill mentions an important study done by Wells John Calhoun, Jr., Poverty Amidst Riches: Why People Are Poor in Appalachia, a doctoral dissertation presented to Rutgers University in 1977 and available through University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, Michigan. He argues that a cause, but not necessarily the cause, of Appalachian poverty lies in the political economy of the region and in the "peculiar interlock between the industry that dominates the regional economy and the officials that decide public policy for that economy and region."

Calhoun states his propositions: (1) The great wealth of central Appalachia is owned by absentee corporations and a few local elites. (2) Long-term and continuing hemorrhage of wealth has contributed greatly to the poverty. (3) The coal industry exercises political domination in the region. (4) The industry has fostered and continues its domination by means of effective maintenance mechanisms.

He explores these points, including the last, along lines similar to those developed by Gaventa, and reinforces the close tie between those who own and control the area and the poverty, injustices, and inequalities suffered by the people in general.

Perhaps the most important work to appear in recent years offers some hope that things may change. It is the recently published study by The Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force entitled Who Owns Appalachia? Landownership and Its Impact (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1983). For a long while, people in Appalachia have known that others, often outside the region, own the land and control it through that ownership. They have not known the extent of that ownership and the way in which outsiders determine what goes on in the lives of people who live in the region.

After the floods of l977 left many on the Tug River homeless, people had difficulty finding alternate homesites because of the regional land abuses. Coal companies monopolized the land. A group named the Appalachian Alliance was organized to focus attention on land owner

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ship and how its distribution affects the lives of the people and their culture. The Alliance formed a Task Force, obtained funding from the Appalachia Regional Commission, and undertook a study in eighty county courthouses in six states of 55,000 parcels of land and the mineral rights. This represented approximately 20,000,000 acres. The Task Force studied one hundred socioeconomic indicators (available housing, income, service expenditures, taxes, etc.) to examine the relationship between ownership and community well-being. No such study of equal scope has ever been undertaken. Although criticized by a review board established by the Appalachian Regional Commission for a methodological bias, the study emerges, as one writer put it, as an "extremely original, useful, and often pathbreaking achievement" in a very difficult area of research.

Despite criticism, the land ownership and land use study shows clearly that outsiders largely own and control Appalachia and shape the destiny of the people there. The book makes fascinating reading. The researchers found that the ownership of land and minerals in Appalachia is highly concentrated in the hands of a few owners. Only one percent of the local population, along with absentee holder corporations and government agencies, control at least 53 percent of the total land surface in the 80 counties studied. The federal government, the largest owner, holds 2,000,000 acres. Nearly three-fourths of the surface acres surveyed are absentee owned, that is, held by out-of-county and out-of-state owners, and four-fifths of the mineral acres are absentee owned, and not simply in the coal counties. Forty percent of the land and 70 percent of the mineral rights are owned by corporations, and 46 of the top fifty private owners are corporations. This corporate and government ownership threatens the access of people to the land and the control they exercise over its use. This is illustrated best by the taxation picture. The researchers found that mineral rights are greatly underassessed for property tax purposes, that large and absentee owners tend to pay less per acre than the small, local owners pay, and that the federal and other government holders rarely make "in-lieu of tax" payments equal to the average tax paid by private owners. Yet, used for investment purposes, these rights make their holders enormously rich.

The researchers correlate findings with the problems of poverty, inability to diversify industry to provide alternate employment and to avoid the problems of "booms and busts," the housing crisis, and the wholly inadequate public services. The whole picture is complicated further by such phenomena as the "broad form" deeds, supported by the courts, which give "all mineral and metallic substances and all continuations of the same" to owners with the unconditional right to remove them by any method they "deemed necessary or convenient." Multinational conglomerates, with their capital and technology, are taking over more and more of the energy resources of the region. This makes it even more difficult for people who live in the area to control, their own destinies. The land ownership and use study gives support to Calhoun's

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research, and also to those who think of Appalachia as a part of an advanced global capitalist society.

Something else should be noted about the research of Calhoun and the land study Task Force. Armed with the data found in these studies, people living in the region are contesting old patterns in courts and in the legislative halls of Appalachia. They are attempting to break out of the status quo in which some Appalachians have considered themselves trapped. In urging people to assert control over their own destinies, activists remind them of an old image of the people in Appalachia as descendants of American Revolutionary heroes. These ancestors did not hesitate to take up arms in order to defend the proposition that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the people. Reversing the Revolutionary slogan to apply it to Appalachia, there should be no representation without fair taxation. Like some leaders in the Third World, these activists call for land reform in Appalachia of an extensive nature. Since Appalachia is owned and controlled to a large extent by individuals and corporations in Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, London, and even Japan, by industries in which many of us have a stake and perhaps stock, what happens as a result of these studies happens to us as well as those who live in Appalachia.

Turning to the religious life of Appalachia, we do not find as much help from these recent critical studies as we have been getting on the other aspects of life in the area. Jack Weller's Yesterday's People and W. D. Weatherford and Earl D. C. Brewer's Life and Religion in Southern Appalachia: An Interpretation of Selected Data from the Southern Appalachian Studies (New York: Friendship Press, 1962), while dated, still contain useful analyses. Foxfire 7 (Garden City: Doubleday, l982), edited by Paul F. Gillespie, is given over to discussions of various denominations of the region, and includes special chapters on camp meetings, music, baptism, foot washing, and serpent handling. Shapiro in his analysis of home missions in Appalachia on Our Mind shows us what needs to be done from an historical perspective, John D. Photiadis, of West Virginia University, has edited a suggestive group of critical essays entitled Religion in Appalachia: Theological, Social, and Psychological Dimensions and Correlations (Morgantown: West Virginia University, 1978), although the collection suffers from lack of focus. Mary Lee Dougherty's essay on serpent handling may be found in this volume. Writers often point out that the hard life of the mountains has shaped the religious outlook of those who hurt. They tend to be fatalistic, a word often used in the literature; hoping that they have been saved by Jesus, they look forward to a better future. Although this may be an apt description of the religion of oppressed people in Appalachia, it does not describe adequately enough the religious experiences of those who attend the so-called mainline denominations of the

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region. About religious life in general, we may gain insights from a variety of places.

With regard to the religion of the oppressed, Robert Cole's fascinating book Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers, Vol. II of Children of Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971) is a poignant record of the religious worldview of ordinary people. In addition to his conversations with numerous men, women, and children, Coles includes in this book the witness of a preacher who tells why he visits and preaches up and down the hollows and creeks:

That's where the Lord is, you know. Where men suffer, God is there. I believe that. He gave himself over to the poor, to the suffering. He asked all of us who preach his Words to live a simple life, and not be like those Pharisees. That's why I'm not interested in politics and all those social issues you hear people talking about these days. Jesus Christ knew that when ministers get involved in politics, when they become men of money and power, they are Pharisees, corrupt and full of empty, hollow rules. Jesus offers us Life not Death-Eternal Life. If my people spend all their time worrying about this law or that program, they will lose sight of something much more important, Eternity Itself.

People, the preacher adds, who have so much trouble eventually become "addicted to trouble." Yet as he helps people win in "the biggest struggle of them all, against the Devil himself, then it makes the other struggles a little easier to bear."

Undoubtedly, Christian faith and hope serve the people of Appalachia. As forceful as that preacher's warning is, however, on the basis of Christian conviction, ministers and members of religious communities in the area are getting more and more involved in the affairs of the society. Although concerned about mission to the people in Appalachia, as was Richard Smith in the 1940s and l950s, in our time more and more religious leaders seem to be concerned about the systemic problems which confront people in Appalachia.

Two organizations illustrate this tendency. The older one, the Commission on Religion in Appalachia, brings together a number of religious communities and assists them in coordinating their activity in the area. CORA, as it is called, published an Atlas of the Church in Appalachia: Administrative Units and Boundaries (Knoxville: CORA, 1971) which supplements materials found in such anthologies as Appalachia, already mentioned. The Coalition for Appalachian Ministry is another such organization. CAM, which is typical of other denominational societies, strengthens the cooperation among Presbyterians and other members of the Reformed family. Just recently, CAM conducted a seminar and published papers in pamphlet form, the title of which illustrates the timeliness of the topic: Erets: land. The Church and Appalachian Land Issues (Amesville, Ohio: CAM, 1984). At this conference, Walter Brueggemann, professor of Old Testament at Eden Theological Seminary, St. Louis, showed how the Bible is a land use book and a source of insight for people who wish to deal with problems of Appalachia as

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illustrated in the land ownership and land use studies. Brueggemann argues in a series of stimulating theses that the earth belongs to the Lord, that the Lord calls us to be good stewards of the earth, and that these insights should lead to social transformation in connection with the abuses of the earth. CORA and CAM face the difficulty of getting people in the churches which they serve to deal with these problems too.

In this connection, another study should be noted, although it does not focus primarily on religious matters. It deals rather with the attitudes of people, many of whom go to our churches, about change. H. Dudley Plunkett and Mary Jean Bowman hold in Elites and Change in the Kentucky Mountains (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1973) that those in the ministering professions, clergy, physicians, and teachers, seem to be committed to change, while local administrative elites, bankers, lawyers, and politicians, seem to be resistant to change. Businessmen come out more neutral and in an intermediate position. This kind of profile is useful in Appalachian studies to help keep activists realistic about what can be done.

We have come a long way from Martha Graham's and Aaron Copland's "Appalachian Spring": from bibliographical references, through a discussion of images and models, land ownership and land use, to religion and ecclesiastical organizations in the region. Appalachia, as Copland's music suggests, has its share of magnificent scenery. Appalachia is other things, however. Just as somewhat over a hundred years ago it was a land of clear cut timber, so now it is a land of massive gashes made by companies strip mining for black gold. It is a land of considerable poverty, despite the vast wealth of the region. The struggle for existence cuts deep scars on the souls of people, including serpent handlers. Of course, Appalachia is many things. It is, most of all, a land of indomitable people, some of whom are challenging the way things are. These people are the region's greatest resource. In 1975, the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church published a moving "pastoral letter on powerlessness in Appalachia" entitled "This Land is Home to Me." Written in blank verse, and based on biblical and episcopal affirmations about life and against life's injustices and inequities, the bishops challenge the proposition so long held in Appalachia that "Coal is King." Rather, "Christ is King!" They call for transformation of life in Appalachia, a symbol of so much of the suffering in our land and in the world. While it is reported that some of the bishops have had second thoughts about the strong positions they took in this epistle several years ago, they remain committed to its urgent message.

Dear sisters and brothers,
we urge all of you
not to stop living,
to be a part of the rebirth of utopias,

470 - Appalachian Spring?

to recover and defend the struggling dream
of Appalachia itself.
For it is the weak things of this world,
which seem like folly,
that the Spirit takes up
and makes its own.
The dream of the mountains' struggle,
the dream of simplicity
and of justice,
like so many other repressed visions,
is, we believe, the voice of the Lord among us.

At a time when Congress is phasing out the work of the Appalachian Regional Commission, this is a stirring summons to those who are interested in Appalachian studies, and also interested in understanding the needs of people who live in this beautiful yet troubled region.