All of the historical narratives that I’ve discussed so far have one thing in common—they are secular. They focus almost exclusively on the physical world, especially the progressive and declensionist narratives. And in my opinion, that’s one of the reasons why they ultimately fail to fully explain reality. They ignore the spiritual dimension, or even pretend that it doesn’t exist.
Spiritual narratives are an integral but seldom talked about part of organic farming history. Biodynamics, which was the first type of organic farming to come to the United States, was based on the spirituality of Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy. Another important spiritual narrative was the Catholic critique of materialism—the idea that the physical and spiritual were entirely separate and that social problems were solely physical.
Materialism, as Pope Pius XI defined it in his 1937 encyclical Divini Redemptoris, taught that “there is in the world only one reality, matter, the blind forces of which evolve into plant, animal and man.” The materialistic world view left “no room for the idea of God…strips man of his liberty, robs human personality of all its dignity, and removes all the moral restraints that check the eruptions of blind impulse.” Though it was opposed to all religions, the Pope noted that materialism had the especial goal “to destroy Christian civilization and the Christian religion by banishing every remembrance of them from the hearts of men, especially from the young.”
But it wouldn’t—and couldn’t—work. “The law of nature and its Author cannot be flouted with impunity,” the Pope warned. No matter how vehemently the materialists denied it, “above all other reality there exists one supreme Being: God, the omnipotent Creator of all things, the all-wise and just Judge of all men.” Humans weren’t the result of blind evolution; each individual was “a person, marvelously endowed by his Creator with gifts of body and mind…By sanctifying grace he is raised to the dignity of a son of God, and incorporated into the Kingdom of God in the Mystical Body of Christ.”
The solution to the world’s social problems would never lie in government, legislation, scientific progress, or even well-intentioned but secular good works. “As in all the stormy periods of the history of the Church, the fundamental remedy today lies in a sincere renewal of private and public life according to the principles of the Gospel by all those who belong to the Fold of Christ, that they may be in truth the salt of the earth to preserve human society from total corruption,” the Pope concluded. The crises of the 1930s could ultimately only be solved one way—by a return to Christ and the Gospel.
What if people rejected this advice and didn’t return to God? That’s where the Christian narrative differs from all the secular narratives, which predict catastrophe if their solution isn’t followed. God is still sovereign and omnipotent even when people reject Him; they end up only hurting themselves. “The Church of Christ, built upon an unshakable rock, has nothing to fear for herself, as she knows for a certainty that the gates of hell shall never prevail against her,” the Pope assured his audience in his 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. “Yet her maternal heart cannot but be moved by the countless evils with which so many thousands would be afflicted during storms of this kind, and above all by the consequent enormous injury to spiritual life which would work eternal ruin to so many souls redeemed by the Blood of Jesus Christ.”
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