Institutional Organization, Stewardship, and Religious Resistance to Modern
Agricultural Trends:
The Christian Farmers’ Movement in the Netherlands and in Canada
JOHN L. PATERSON
JOHN L. PATERSON is head of the Social Science Research Programme, Department of
Sociology and Social Policy, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, the University of
Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. This research, supported by a Commonwealth
Scholarship, was undertaken while the author was a doctoral student in the Department of
Geography at the University of British Columbia. Most of the material in this article was
first presented in a paper entitled “Resisting Secularization and Contending with
Modernism in Agriculture: The Christian Farmers Federations of Canada,” delivered at
the conference “Signs of Vitality in Reformed Communities Amid the Fragmenting
Forces of Modernity,” Free University of Amsterdam, 26 - 30 May 1997.
1
Modern agriculture is based on the ideology of economic efficiency and rationality. It is
characterized by increasing mechanization, reliance on the use of chemical fertilizer and
pesticides, biotechnology, and capital intensification, resulting in the imposition of a
simplified agro-ecosystem upon vast landscapes. Remote-controlled machines, high-rise
animal apartments, artificial environments, and a rural landscape largely devoid of people
and wildlife dominated the vision of the agriculture of modernity presented in an article
in the National Geographic in 1970. Since 1970, a number of commentators have argued
that this mode of agriculture is based on a series of reductionisms, reducing the complex
biological character of life to its physical-chemical components and reducing human
culture to a narrow set of economic considerations. People are viewed as separate from
nature, and the earth is but a factor of production. Such reductionisms are seen to
underlie the environmental crises and socioeconomic problems besetting modern
agriculture. Increasing attention is being paid to ag