According to Mike Kilen at the Des Moines Register, the most moral county in Iowa is Sioux County in the northwestern corner of the state.
Where to begin with this piece? Typically, Kilen approaches his subject as though he were observing wild chimpanzees and making notes on their behaviors. He even admits that he's a stranger in a strange land:
There is a journalistic temptation to debunk all this by asking: Whose God? Whose morality? It's another streak we have.
So it's a journalistic streak to be thoroughly and completely ignorant of your subject? Even when it's right in front of your nose? Honestly, these people remind me of the dwarves in the stable in C.S. Lewis' book The Last Battle, who were huddled together, bitter and angry, unable to see their true surroundings.
Janel Curry of Calvin College, a Christian school in Grand Rapids, Mich., studied five Iowa communities and published a research paper in 2003 that praised Sioux County for its success, mainly because it didn't separate the sacred from the secular.
"Among the Dutch Reformed, all vocations are Christian callings, not just pastors or missionaries, so everything you do has profound moral and spiritual implications -- from farming to labor organizing to teaching grade school," Curry said.
"Sioux County works because it has perpetuated its ability to produce high amounts of social capital over the years. The root is in its religious belief system, whose ideology of community worldview has meant people stayed and were in turn taught how to invest in institutions."
In other words, the church teaches them to think about the community more than themselves. It is one of the reasons, she concluded, that Sioux County saw the lowest decrease in farm population of all the study areas during the horrid 1980s. People found a way to stay.
Judging by her results, God is good for economic development.
This is where Kilen gets all journalism-schoolish and asks Whose God and all that jazz. Why that's even relevant, I don't have the faintest idea. But it's a foreshadowing of where he's taking this.
Drive across the county line from the south and you hit the tiny town of Morris. On main street is an old shop with wood floors. Inside is a gray-bearded, kindly 52-year-old gentleman named Lauren Ochsner. He's in stained glass. A native of Nebraska, he returned to Sioux County shortly after graduating from Dordt College in Sioux Center in 1976 without a job. He found a way to open a business and raise five children, now grown.
"Business is not so much built around religion as intertwined," he said. "When you come home from church, you don't leave it there. You bring it home with you. It's a whole worldview. You have a lot of separation of church and state elsewhere, but they get intermingled here."
How does that help business?
"I suppose part of it is the golden rule. You treat other people fairly and honestly."
The horror! Obviously we should be frightened by this. Kilen certainly is:
This presents obvious problems to a skeptic, chief among them the fact that people don't all think alike, worship alike, look alike. And morality can be a moving target. What, some may argue, is the morality in overwhelmingly voting for a president who -- for a shifting set of reasons -- led the country into a war that has killed thousands? Some people interviewed said they simply trust the man.
Oh, please... let's do insert our own, obviously superior morality into this den of backwoods Bible thumpers. What a hell-hole they've created up there in northwestern Iowa, and it's high time we exposed it.
To some, it's a comforting place, relatively free of muggings and troubles, bound together by faith. To others, Sioux County is more like one giant gated community, where people are the same, grass the same length and the righteous and judgmental rule.
At the beginning of the article, Kilen notes that Sioux County has bucked the trend of most rural Iowa counties by gaining in population and by prospering commercially. Doesn't sound like a gated community to me.
Kilen's snide jabs at the "goody-two-shoes" of Sioux County are further evidence of the blue-state disconnect that so completely engulfs the vast majority of people who graduate from journalism school. He just doesn't GET it. Why is it bad to have a place with very low crime, where people are nice to one another and who put their faith into active practice? Has Kilen actually read the New Testament to find out just what horrible, subversive ideas we Christians are adhering to? Loving your neighbor as yourself is terribly dangerous, obviously.
Much more dangerous than adherents of the Koran, I'm sure.
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