Reading some books, I’m reminded of G. K. Chesterton’s observation that “the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” Books that merely raise topics for discussion and fail to synthesize them into a narrative or argument leave me as unsatisfied as does a perpetually open mouth.
Such, unfortunately, is Ben Norquist and Brian Miller’s Every Somewhere Sacred: Rescuing a Theology of Place in the American Imagination. While it addresses a series of vitally important questions, it does so in a sprawling and superficial manner, thus failing to equip readers to inhabit their places as Christ-empowered ministers of reconciliation.
The book’s structure, unfolding over three movements, holds real promise. The first part offers interpretive frameworks for “reading places,” and it names four common American land stories that the authors argue are half true. The second part describes how settler colonialism, race and class, and the divisions among wild, rural, suburban, and urban settings have shaped American places. The third part considers biblical ways of narrating the significance of land and then makes suggestions for how Christians can enact these narratives today.
As it moves through these topics, however, the book’s audience and aim remain murky. Norquist and Miller state that their goal is for “American Christians” (and particularly “White Christians”) “to reflect on their own experiences and understandings and to reconsider their ideas, assumptions, notions, intuitions, and feelings about the places they live and visit (and those they may never visit).”
Later, the authors summarize this goal simply as “understanding places today.” This incredibly broad purview dissipates any rhetorical purpose and hamstrings what efforts at analysis do appear. Vague assertions, sweeping generalizations, lists of unanswered questions, and historical tidbits accumulate without developing into any coherent whole.
One particular digression recurs several times: the long-running Palestinian–Israeli conflict. In the introduction, the authors state they will draw from many different traditions represented in American Christianity, including Palestinian Christians. Norquist has a background as the director of the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East, so he has a valuable perspective on this place, but the intermittent references to this context seem as if they belong in a separate book.
There are efforts to tie this topic to the American church through critiques of Christian Zionism, but these barely address the dispensational theology at the root of this tradition, and what discussions Every Somewhere Sacred does include almost certainly won’t persuade anyone not already deeply sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. The injustices endured by Palestinians may be “buried stories” in some American circles, but apparently in the circles in which the authors move, all evils perpetrated by Palestinians are equally buried and forgotten.
The Israeli government certainly has blood on its hands, and some American Christians do need to be reminded of this, but they are unlikely to be convinced by a book that discusses land stories in the Levant while making no mention of Hamas or its infamous use of “from the river to the sea” to justify atrocious violence. Such a fraught topic merits its own book; it shouldn’t be tacked onto a book that already has too many loose threads.
Obviously one of the key questions that arises in any discussion of sacred places is whether all places are equally sacred. And if they are, is any place actually sacred? What’s the distinction if the category is universal?
Norquist and Miller nod to these questions several times without really addressing them. Part of the conceptual trouble seems to be that, in critiquing Christian Zionism, they want to universalize the gospel, rendering it placeless. This results in confusing equivocations, as they sometimes insist that “land and place” remain “integral aspects of God’s plan throughout history” and other times insist that the gospel is “not tied to a particular place” because it’s localized in Christ.
Yet later they criticize Protestants who think “that after Christ, holiness is something associated with people, not places.” The closest the book comes to a conclusion on this matter is its affirmation that “there are important ways in which sacred space becomes concentrated in particular places.”
What we never get is a Christological account of how the gospel narrates the scandal of particularity. The third chapter of William Cavanaugh’s Being Consumed would be a great help here. And we need Chesterton’s Napoleon of Notting Hill (with a strong dose of Matthew Milliner’s The Everlasting People), Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, or the end of C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength—visions of how the gospel becomes incarnate in each place and culture, correcting what is fallen and restoring the unique grace each embodies.
It’s never clear what grace Norquist and Miller think America or its many distinct regions might have to offer. The book lists several religiously inflected narratives that cast America as a city on a hill, a new Israel, Babylon, and Sodom and Gomorrah. “There are many land stories, and they frequently disagree, sometimes strongly,” the authors conclude.
Indeed. But they offer no guidance on how we might sift through these stories, rejecting some and revising others.
At another point, they list six assumptions regarding land that they assert are held by “American Christians,” and then they add four common features of US land stories, some of which conflict with these purported Christian assumptions. For instance, “God is the ultimate actor regarding land and places; American Christians have limited agency” is one such assumption, yet Norquist and Miller then claim that one feature US land stories have in common is that “they center human actors.”
How these opposing ideas are to be reconciled is never explained. The authors simply announce that “American land stories and American Christian land stories are intertwined.”
Yet how we narrate land stories has real consequences for how we act. It’s not clear, for instance, what Norquist and Miller think of private property. They describe the long-term positive effects of widespread property ownership, yet they also caution against “assum[ing]” that renters are “less committed to their communities and more transient” (even though it’s simply a reality that renters are far more transient than homeowners).
At times Norquist and Miller praise Native Americans for not viewing land as a commodity individuals can own, but they also affirm W. E. B. Dubois’s claim that the 40 acres and a mule promised to those who had been enslaved testified to “the righteous and reasonable ambition to become a landholder.” Clear diagnosis and normative judgments matter. As it is, readers are left wallowing in “problematic” histories and tensions with no guidance on what ideal we should pursue and hence what restorative action might entail.
This lack becomes particularly apparent in the last chapters, where Norquist and Miller explore how individuals and institutions can enact a Christian understanding of place. While some of their suggestions, such as learning the history of your particular place, are good, for the most part the advice is quite vague.
For instance, in both final chapters they describe what Miller did when he received an anonymous letter urging neighbors to speak out against a drug-treatment facility seeking a permit to open nearby. Miller lists a range of actions he considered taking:
I could ignore the letter and do nothing. I could speak with neighbors and local officials about my thoughts on this possible change. … As a sociologist interested in suburban matters but with many other matters to attend to, I decided to wait and see what would happen among the various groups involved.
In other words, he did nothing. This may have been the right prudential decision—we cannot, after all, personally respond to all the needs and issues in our neighborhoods—but the fact that this is one of the central examples of how we should act in our places reveals the book’s consistent failure of nerve.
Everywhere Somewhere Sacred joins an essential conversation regarding how Christians should understand and tend their places. Norquist and Miller are certainly right that place has been a neglected aspect of Christian catechesis in recent decades. Yet despite what their limited engagement with others seeking to address this need may suggest to readers, really good work has been done in recent decades to help Christians develop a fulsome vision for how the God who became flesh in a particular body and location might be calling us to be his agents of reconciliation in our places.
We can learn from the extensive work of Wendell Berry and Willie Jennings (each of whom are cited only in passing in Every Somewhere Sacred) or the pastoral way Grace Olmstead wrestles with the rural diaspora in Uprooted or the way Eric Jacobsen casts a vision for Christian urbanism in Sidewalks in the Kingdom.
If we hope to follow Christ’s command to love our neighbors, we will need to develop the “elaborate understanding of charity” that Berry sees as implicit in the second-greatest commandment, requiring us to love also the land on which all our lives depend.
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