On December 2, 2024, seventeen Republican governors as part of the Republican Governors’ Association submitted a letter to congressional leaders calling for action on behalf of rural American farmers. This “Joint Agriculture Letter” names these figures as stewards of the land, defenses against foreign dependence and security issues, and representatives of a distinct and virtuous way of life that has rapidly receded.[i] However, the realities of industrialized agriculture look little like the serene, agrarian, and pastoral picture painted in the letter. Four multinational corporations control over 80 percent of America’s beef market and 67% of the nation’s pork sales, and feed grains imported from South America are integral to the Midwest’s agricultural economy. Small farming operations cannot compete with agribusiness’s low price, low wage, high output model.[ii] Intentional and institutionalized forgetting is everywhere in America’s heartland, but is perhaps most evident in the ways the family farm and farming family are heralded as models of a more pure and righteous American life. They are powerful symbols of self-sufficiency, white Christian identity, and a “down-to-earth” sensibility.
This paper will draw from several strands of scholarship to construct an argument about forgetting and myth-making in rural America. First, I take many cues from Steven Salaita’s The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan. The covenantal discourse and “Holy land mania” he locates in both the American frontier and in Palestine provides a clear frame through which to articulate how white midwestern farmers use religion to authorize a particular use for soil. Daniel R. Maher identifies a “frontier complex” constructed through heritage sites in the western United States that is distant from the reality of nineteenth century America. From Bible Belt to Sunbelt by Darren Dochuk argues for a “plain-folk religion” transplanted from the South to Southern California - I believe this brand of “Christian Americanism” can also be found in the Great Plains and Midwestern agricultural regions. Sally Promey’s model of heritage fabrication will allow me to theorize the material construction of the family farm and farming family in religious memory, while Michael Kammen’s Mystic Chords of Memory confronts American heritage as a subjective construction. Finally, I look to the robust work of JZ Smith in theorizing religion and space in To Take Place and Imagining Religions to facilitate a clear intervention in religious studies literature.
I will begin and end with the concrete ramifications of the family farm myth evidenced through the “Joint Agriculture Letter” and similar statements from Republican political figures. Who benefits from this collective forgetting, and how? In what ways do evangelical ideas about nature, domination, and nuclear family structures with clear gender roles support the “heartland” label given to America’s agricultural center? What is being constructed? I understand “forgetting” here as an analytic distinct from concepts of heritage fabrication and historical reconstruction because of how these heartland narratives draw on the language of memory. Through the narrow frame of white rural farmers, Christian identity, and memory, we can better understand the constructive work of mythmaking in America.
[i] “Joint Agriculture Letter,” Republican Governors’ Association (blog), December 2, 2024, https://www.rga.org/joint-ag-letter/.
[ii] James M. (James Michael) MacDonald et al., “Concentration and Competition in U.S. Agribusiness” (Washington, D.C.: Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, June 2023), https://doi.org/10.32747/2023.8054022.ers; “Concentration in U.S. Meatpacking Industry and How It Affects Competition and Cattle Prices | Economic Research Service,” accessed March 6, 2025, https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2024/january/concentration-in-u-s-…; “JBS - We Feed the World with the Best,” accessed March 6, 2025, https://www.jbs.com.br/en/; Carl Zulauf et al., “The Rise of South American Grain and Oilseed Use and Production since 1980,” Farmdoc Daily 13, no. 216 (November 29, 2023), https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2023/11/the-rise-of-south-american-gr….
This paper examines the ways in which the myth of the family farm is constructed and maintained in rural America through memory, religion, and political discourse. Framed around a December 2024 letter from the Republican Governors Association, the paper explores how rural farmers are depicted as defenders of a virtuous agrarian lifestyle in opposition to a dangerous secular world. The family farm narrative functions as an intentional and institutionalized form of forgetting that obscures the realities of corporate-driven agriculture while reinforcing specific social, religious, and gendered ideals. Through this lens, the paper addresses the political and cultural stakes of mythmaking and forgetting in America’s heartland and questions how evangelical ideologies about nature, domination, and family structures shape the midwestern farm.