God's Country: Cultivating the Family Farm and the Politics of Forgetting in America's Heartland

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.