Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
‘Where I come from’ we claim universal generalities as our peculiar virtues

‘Where I come from’ we claim universal generalities as our peculiar virtues

Last updated on: March 1, 2017 at 6:07 pm by Fred Clark

‘Where I come from’ we claim universal generalities as our peculiar virtues 2017-03-01T18:07:57-05:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

“It’s about family,” the Very Nice man said, repeatedly. The people of his community have “care and concern for family.”

The first four or five times he said this it didn’t seem remarkable because, after all, people caring about their families is pretty much the definition of unremarkable. It’s like someone describing their community by telling you that, “Well, ’round these parts, folks like us tend to be bipedal, and we like to ingest our food orally.”

But gradually, I began to realize what the Very Nice man was actually saying. “You have to understand that family is important to people here.” This, he was suggesting, was something unusual about the people of his community — something he assumed would be strange and exotic and difficult to understand for the rest of us.

And then he said it explicitly, describing this concern for family as a “peculiar virtue” of his community.

Aha. It turns out this Very Nice man and his Very Nice community have some not-at-all nice — and very wrong — ideas about, well, everyone else who isn’t them. Because what he’s really telling us, over and over and over, isn’t that he and his community care about their families. What he’s really telling us is that they imagine other people elsewhere do not care about their families.

This isn’t an expression of local pride, but a slanderous accusation against everyone else who isn’t from around here. It’s not a celebration of the virtues of small-town community, but the prejudice that comes from parochial ignorance mixed with a willingness — and an eagerness — to presume the worst about everyone you don’t already know.

It’s similar to the weird white tribalism you can hear in dozens of Country songs. This has become a sub-genre of Country & Southern music in recent years, and the whole category is based on the same dynamic described above — a celebration of universal human values that winds up denying the humanity of others by claiming those values as the unique and peculiar property of a single community.

Consider for example Rodney Atkins’ song “It’s America” — most of which sounds like it was written in the hopes of being used in a pickup truck ad. The chorus is a bit corny, but it’s expansive and inclusive, and it celebrates good things that are worthy of celebration:

It’s a high school prom, it’s a Springsteen song, it’s a ride in a Chevrolet
It’s a man on the moon and fireflies in June and kids sellin’ lemonade
It’s cities and farms, it’s open arms, one nation under God
It’s America

But something odd happens in Atkins’ second verse:

Later on when I got home, I flipped the TV on
I saw a little town that some big twister tore apart
And people came from miles around just to help their neighbors out
And I was thinkin’ to myself I’m so glad that I live in America

This is, indeed, a Good Thing about the people of this country and a legitimate and accurate reason that one ought to be glad to live in America. People here really will come from miles around just to help their neighbors out after a natural disaster tears apart some neighboring community. And that is, truly, a beautiful thing.

But it’s weirdly wrong that Atkins seems to think this good and beautiful thing is as uniquely and exceptionally American as the moon landing.* It seems like he imagines that Canadians don’t do the very same thing when disaster hits some town in that country. Or as though no one would think of coming from miles around just to help their neighbors out in Mexico, or Scotland, or Thailand, or Russia, or Iran, or Indonesia.

And once you realize that this is what Atkins is also saying, then suddenly what had been a celebration of something lovely turns into a nasty, mean-spirited, ignorant slur of everyone else.

This is why these songs come across less as celebrations of local pride than as expressions of suspicion and hostility to anyone who isn’t from “Where I Come From.” That’s the name of an Alan Jackson song. And of a slightly different Montgomery Gentry song. And of a slightly different Mac McAnally song. And that’s the gist of a slightly differently named song from Luke Bryan.

Brooklyn is a Water Tower Town. (click pic to learn more about Tom Fruin’s sculpture)

These songs all seem to wobble back and forth between a (sometimes clichéd) celebration of a (real or imagined) small community and a series of implied accusations and condemnations of everywhere that isn’t that place. They start out innocently enough, affirming something like what President Dwight D. Eisenhower described as: “the great and priceless privilege of being raised in a small town … the simple honesty, the neighborliness, the integrity.” They attempt to sketch the kind of close-knit small-town community where, as President Lyndon B. Johnson’s dad put it, others “know when you’re sick, and care when you die.” And that’s all good, even if — as Ike also admitted — it tends to fade into “nostalgic memories” that may exaggerate those virtues while blurring away any faults.

But problems arise when these great and priceless things are imagined to be “peculiar virtues” — the sole, exceptional property of the residents of those small towns. And when they assume and reinforce the assumption that everywhere else and everyone else embodies the opposite of the great and priceless things they attribute solely to Where I Come From.

The Montgomery & Gentry song begins with a defiant statement that makes its suspicion and hostility toward everyone else explicit: “Don’t you dare go runnin’ down my little town where I grew up / And I won’t cuss your city lights.”

That’s the undergirding assumption of this genre of songs: You folks don’t — and can’t — understand us because you’re fundamentally unlike us. The premise is that city folk know nothing about small-town folk, and yet that somehow small-town folk know everything about city folk. They sing:

If you ain’t ever took a ride around
And cruised right through the heart of my town
Anything you say would be a lie

And yet they assume that the same thing doesn’t apply to them — that they are able to speak with certainty about the values and character of those people over there, the ones who live under those city lights, without ever taking a ride around those places and getting to know those people. (And one gets the sense that by “those people,” they often mean, you know, those people.) They already “know” all they care to know about big city people, which is: 1) city folk spend all their time “runnin’ down” little towns; and 2) city people are presumed to be the opposite in every way of small-town/country people.

And thus, as a corollary of No. 2, if small-town, country folk believe in honesty and hard work, and if they love their family, their country, and their God, then it follows logically that those people — those big-city people — do not believe in honesty and hard work, and that they do not love their family, their country and their God.**

Some of these songs about “Where I Come From” can be sweet and evocative, rather than defiantly hostile. The good ones seem to want to show you what those places were like — to welcome you there with a genuine hospitality rather than just running through a checklist of tribal totems and performative “authenticity.” They say, “welcome, come on down” rather than “Keep out: You aren’t one of us.”

For example, I love the central image in Scotty McCreery’s “Water Tower Town.” That’s a terrific shorthand description for the kind of small, rural American community the song wants to celebrate, and it pays off again in the delightful double meaning of the last lines of the chorus:

You can see who loves who for miles around
In a water tower town.

That’s such an evocative and endearing detail that, hearing it, I’m willing to at least briefly set aside questions about the Venn Diagram between Water Tower Towns and Sundown Towns. It mitigates some of the other aspects of that song that shade more into the kind of parochial prejudice that ruins the hospitality it wants to display. “Where your friend’s a friend and your word’s your word,” McCreery sings, and, “workin’ hard and livin’ right is the only life we know.” And there the song seems to shift from saying something truthful and real about folks in his town to saying something untruthful and unreal about everyone else.

The difference, I think, has something to do with what James Joyce was getting at when he said “in the particular is contained the universal.” That’s why he wrote about Dublin. That was where he came from, and that was the place he knew, but he believed that the particularities of Dublin were accessible and recognizable to everyone because people are people, no matter where you go and wherever it is that they come from.

The particular detail of a water tower graffiti’d with someone’s declaration of love is specific enough that it evokes its place and tells us something about that place and the people who live there. That makes us smile because — even though we’re not those people and we’re not from there — we can recognize what that’s getting at and thereby recognize the shared humanity of people there and people everywhere else. The particular contains the universal.

But then we hit those stale platitudes about honesty and hard work, which offer nothing in the way of particularity or specificity. Folks ’round here try to be honest, and we’re loyal to our friends, and we value hard work. Congratulations — you just described almost everyone everywhere. Such vague, universal generalities are bad art and bad storytelling.

But those vague generalities also become morally bad. By claiming these universal human virtues as the exclusive attributes of a particular people in a particular place, the song becomes a lie. It bears false witness against its neighbors.

And when it comes down to it, that’s also what the Very Nice man at the beginning of this post was doing. His talk about “the importance of family” was his attempt to explain why the congregants in his white evangelical church in Wisconsin voted for Donald Trump.***

But that’s not accurate. They did not vote Trump because they love their families and because they value hard work. They did so because they wanted and needed to believe that other people — those people — do not love their families and do not value hard work. They wanted and needed to believe that loving their families and valuing hard work makes them exceptional — better, more deserving, more entitled, and wholly distinct from those people over there who don’t love and value those things.

And when you’re that eager to believe something so nasty and so easily falsifiable about other people, well, I’m not sure you’re actually Very Nice at all.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* There is a kind of American exceptionalism in what Atkins describes, but that’s due to the tornado, not to the neighborly response. Tornados are not unique to the United States, but they’re far more common here than they are anywhere else on the planet. That’s due to unique geographical and meteorological features of America’s “tornado alley” — the Rockies and the Gulf of Mexico combine to make tornados as American as apple pie and Chevrolet.

It’s Bad Theology and Bad Science to attempt to link natural disasters to human morality, sin or divine providence, but this particular brand of rank stupidity still remains quite popular, particularly among our friends in the religious right. I sometimes wonder what folks like John Piper or Pat Robertson would say if they ever realized that America has 12 times more tornadoes every year than any other country. But I suppose it’d be the same thing they always say — that this must be divine judgment for the national sins of Roe v. Wade, Engel v. Vitale, and, worst of all, Brown v. Board of Education.

** Jackson’s song makes this even more explicit than the Montgomery Gentry tune. He assures his audience that he has, in fact, driven through all those big cities where those people live, and thus has learned all there is to know about them. The narrator of his song is a trucker who’s seen it all, so he’s not just hostile and suspicious toward those people — he knows they’re fundamentally unlike the good and virtuous folk of the good and virtuous places.

It’s a pretty vile piece of work, rendered ridiculous by Jackson’s ignorant bungling of the details. He complains, for example, that one can’t find good old Southern-style “corn bread and chicken” in Detroit. “It ain’t like mama fixed it,” he sings, apparently unaware that his mama learned that dish from the grandparents of the refugees who fled violence where he comes from and resettled in the Great Migration in places like Detroit.

*** This is from Ana Marie Cox’s new podcast “With Friends Like These,” which is a really fascinating project.

Previous Post

February 27, 2017

I don't have a friend who feels at ease

Next Post

March 2, 2017 Postcards from the class & culture wars (3.2.17)

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category class warfare evangelicals Iraq Left Behind Mammon music Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Which northern king made golden calves for worship at Bethel and Dan?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Omri Jeroboam Jehu Ahab