Stewards of the Soil: Agrarian Life in a Calvinist Key

In recent years, agrarianism has reemerged as a serious subject of reflection among Christian thinkers. Publications from Plough to The American Conservative feature essays on rooted, land-based life. Wendell Berry still finds new readers, while Catholic writers revive distributism for both academic and popular audiences. Beyond the page, young Christian families embrace homesteading and household economies not as merely lifestyle choices, but as theological conviction. What was once a niche subculture is becoming a credible alternative to both technocratic liberalism and consumerist Christianity.

In short, the “back-to-the-land” movement of the early 2000s has matured. The Benedict Option proved too vague to satisfy, and agorism — a libertarian strategy of creating ‘black and gray’ markets to escape state and corporate control — too impractical to endure. Even the most self-reliant homesteader has come to admit what tradition already knew: no one is truly self-sufficient, and digital community can’t milk the cow when you have the flu.

Once the first excitement of discovery wears off, however, a deeper question presents itself: Is agrarian and distributist thought the sole province of Catholic social teaching? Much of the current material is, indeed, heavily Catholic, rooted in papal encyclicals, republication of works by proponents of the Catholic Land Movement, and a neo-Medieval aesthetic. The goal sometimes seems to be the recreation of Millet’s The Angelus in Carhartts and Anthropologie aprons.

Is there then no place in agrarianism for Protestants? Or might the Reformed tradition offer its own robust theology; one capable of grounding a life ordered around land, household, and community, in faithful stewardship?

The call to stewardship begins with Genesis. Chapter 1:28 says, “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’” The Hebrew word radah, often translated as “have dominion,” carries a more nuanced meaning, a combination of authority and tender care for those under that authority.

The call to stewardship in Genesis is not an open-ended license to dominate the earth but a charge to govern with care and responsibility. John Calvin makes this clear in his Institutes, where he explains that humanity’s authority over creation is a stewardship entrusted by God, meant to preserve and nurture rather than exploit. Similarly, Herman Bavinck says that, "...the earth and its plants and animals have been assigned to us, given for us to rule over and to use for God’s service." Meanwhile Francis Schaeffer argues in Pollution and the Death of Man that dominion is not a license to exploit nature but a call to care for it as God’s possession, treating creation as valuable in itself, rather than as merely raw material for human use. Together, these Reformed voices emphasize that dominion involves both authority and humble care, grounding agrarian life in a theological vision of covenantal responsibility.

Agrarian life is not the romantic aesthetic of homestead influencers, but the original manifestation of creational obedience—an engaged response to the divine call to steward wisely. We are neither to drain the fertility from our fields in the name of efficiency, nor to evade our responsibilities by proclaiming that “nature knows best.”

Modern society elevates "knowledge work," but all vocations are alike in dignity before God. Agrarianism views the household as a productive and moral unit, not merely a "domestic arrangement.” Stewardship of land and place is vocation. And work is not merely avocation or identity, it is a covenantal calling from God to serve neighbor and Creator. We are not "finding our bliss." We are finding our place in Creation's order. To quote Gene Veith, "God is hidden in vocations that bear authority. But that puts pressure on human beings to exercise that authority to act with God's justice and grace." Stewardship, rather than domination.

Reformed theology roots the call to agrarian life not in nostalgia, but in the structure of creation itself. Creation is not a neutral stage for human action; it is a cosmos, ordered by God’s law and sustained by His providence. To live within this order is to accept the goodness of limits and the dependence of creatures on their Creator. Calvin reminds us that all dominion is exercised under God’s hand, and that wisdom begins in acknowledging our boundaries. In agrarian life, these truths become tangible: the soil’s need for rest, the unpredictability of seasons, the patience of growth. Scripture’s own land ethic—gleaning for the poor, Sabbath for the fields, and the Jubilee’s return of land to families—speaks to God’s concern for justice in the ordering of fields as well as in the ordering of hearts. Covenant theology ties these realities together: land is not merely property but inheritance, a trust to be stewarded with the past and future in view. In such a vision, tending the earth is neither hobby nor ideology, but obedience to the Creator’s pattern.

This vision shares much with Catholic social teaching, yet it springs from different theological soil. Where the Catholic tradition often frames agrarianism through natural law and the common good, the Reformed tradition roots it in covenant, vocation, and the sovereignty of God over every square inch of creation. Both traditions affirm the dignity of work, the goodness of a moral economy, and the necessity of placing limits on industrialization.

But Abraham Kuyper’s concept of sphere sovereignty offers a sharper resistance to both state overreach and market absolutism than Catholic subsidiarity. “The local community is not a mere subdivision of the state,” Kuyper writes in Our Program. “It is an organic body with its own calling, its own rights, and its own duties before God. To undermine this by centralizing all functions in the state is to destroy the root from which all higher life springs.” This principle can be seen in the Dutch Reformed habit of speaking of things as onze—ours: onze school, onze church, onze business community. This is not collectivism, where ownership is dissolved into the state, but a covenantal sense of belonging in which each household and enterprise retains its own stewardship while contributing to the common life of the community.

Flowing naturally from this covenantal localism, Reformed agrarianism understands land, labor, and community not as interchangeable commodities, but as gifts entrusted by God to be stewarded within the bonds of place and neighbor. This is a lived agrarianism, where “neighboring” becomes an active verb. It looks very different from curated, individualist Instagram agrarianism and “Aesthetic Homesteading,” if I may coin a phrase.

The Jubilee, as outlined in Leviticus 25, embodies this vision of stewardship extending beyond the individual to the community and across generations. It calls for the restoration of land and relationships, ensuring that no family is permanently dispossessed and that the cycle of care and provision continues. In this way, agrarian stewardship is not merely about tending soil but about honoring the covenantal bonds that link past, present, and future—an ethos deeply embedded in the Reformed imagination.

Kuyper's framework of sphere sovereignty ought to inform a Reformed Agrarianism. Each sphere (family, church, state, economy) has its own God-given boundaries and responsibilities. Both must be respected. This means recognizing and rejecting the damage done by modern extractive agribusiness operations. They go past their rightful limits.

A family farm may incorporate for sound reasons of taxes, liability, or inheritance, and still remain firmly within the sphere of Family. But when corporations buy up such farms and vertically integrate them, stewardship collapses into contract labor. The hog farmer once grew feed, cared for animals, and balanced profit with the long-term health of land and community. Now the corporation owns everything—even the hogs—and the farmer is reduced to a wage earner, paid by the pound of pork leaving his gate. The same logic drives big-box retailers who acquire dairies, selling milk below cost to lure shoppers deeper into the aisles. Independent dairies cannot survive such predation. In both cases, economic power swallows other spheres, silencing the family and unraveling the community.

Rejecting the cult of efficiency at all costs does not, as critics claim, condemn us to famine. The problem lies not with farming itself but with the subsidy system, entrenched since the 1930s, which has bent agriculture into grotesque shapes. We live in a hall of funhouse mirrors, unable to recognize the path out—though it is marked. Farmers such as Gabe Brown, in Dirt to Soil, demonstrate how knowledge, grit, and providence can restore both land and livelihood. John Klar, in Small Farm Republic, sketches how policy itself could be reformed to set the spheres back in order.

Nor should stewardship slide into the opposite error of taking a very "hands off," "nature knows best" approach to the land, for this is a denial of our responsibility. Rightly managed, we will pass on our little patch of creation at the very least in the same state in which it came to us. Better still to have improved it in some way.

Neither corporations nor institutions are capable of understanding or respecting these limits. Such responsibilities belong first to the family, and then the local community. A well-managed farm functions as a microcosm of ordered liberty, under God.

This may sound, on the surface, much like the Catholic principle of subsidiarity. And indeed, there is common ground. Subsidiarity, articulated in Quadragesimo Anno (Pope Pius XI, 1931), teaches that higher orders of society should not usurp what lower orders can do for themselves. A problem addressed at the level of the household should not be passed upward to the community, nor the community’s problem to the state. Yet it remains a hierarchical principle. Subsidiarity guards against excessive centralization, but still assumes a ladder of authority in which higher levels may overrule the lower.

Sphere sovereignty, by contrast, sets each sphere on equal footing. Family, church, state, school, economy—all possess their own God-given calling, with authority that does not bleed into other spheres. It is not a ladder but a web, each thread answering directly to God. There are no inherently higher or lower orders, only distinct responsibilities.

Which vision better nurtures a local, distributed economy? Subsidiarity imagines small-scale elements operating under the watchful eye of higher levels, a managed hierarchy. Sphere sovereignty insists that every sphere is intrinsically dignified, each capable of flourishing without supervision from “above.” One wonders what Chesterton might have said in reply.

Now, to say that there are no “higher or lower” orders is not to deny that the spheres sometimes require some asymmetry in practice. Families and farms require the state’s rule of law and in some cases the state’s regulatory intervention. Mosaic law itself authorized Israel’s leaders to act for the protection of households. Similarly, the Lutheran model of welfare grew from the recognition that civil authorities could help families and churches in meeting material needs. Sphere sovereignty does not erase these real dependencies; it only insists that such interventions respect rather than absorb the God-given calling of each sphere.

Gene Veith captures the Reformed emphasis well: “God is hidden in vocations that bear authority. But that puts the pressure on human beings to exercise that authority with God’s justice and grace.” Sphere sovereignty requires such moral participation — authority carried out in humility, not compelled by a higher rung of power.

In a Kuyperian view, the family stewards land as inheritance, charged with maintaining intergenerational bonds and passing down both property and the practice of care. The agrarian church teaches stewardship as discipleship, encouraging members to support farm families as part of its own vocation. The local community treats land and labor as rooted enterprises, not commodities to be sold for a mess of pottage. The state, for its part, safeguards justice rather than boosting output or tipping the scales for agribusiness.

When these spheres collapse into the economic, the family becomes a mere consumer unit, the church a program provider, and communities unravel as corporations replace mutual dependence. Even the state, meant to uphold justice, serves economic power. Agribusiness thus represents not only failed stewardship but a disordering of creation—precisely the encroachment of one sphere upon another Kuyper warned against.

At the other extreme, Romantic primitivism pushes for "rewilding" of agricultural lands in a well-meaning, but poorly thought-out push to remediate the damage caused by industrial agriculture. If agribusiness consumes creation through exploitation, primitivism abandons it through neglect. It is freedom, abandoned.

Neither extreme reflects Calvin’s vision of Christian Liberty, which is freedom exercised in service to the Good. The first imagines freedom as license, exploiting land without restraint. The second mistakes freedom for withdrawal, neglecting the land until it falls into waste. True Christian stewardship finds its balance here: freedom shaped by love, order, and gratitude—tilling and keeping, neither domineering nor deserting.

Christian liberty is not boundary-less, but rightly bounded. Land is covenantal trust, with duties to widow, orphan, poor, and stranger. Hospitality and gleaning look different today than in Ruth’s time, but the call remains. Shaye Elliott, once called "the Gwyneth Paltrow" of homesteading, tells a story in one of her books. Not long after she and her husband had started their homestead, they encountered a crisis with some livestock, and a member of the wider community stepped in to save the day. He, in turn, told her that it was "neighboring," and it was what people did.

I think we should reclaim that word, as an integral part of what makes a Reformed vision of community stewardship work — neighboring. It is not a nostalgic vision. Rather, it serves as an eschatological hope. Stewardship anticipates the arrival of the renewal of all Creation as in Romans 8:21-22, "that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God." The farm, rightly ordered, is a signpost to the New Creation. Therefore, rather than being rooted in Catholic sacramentalism, Reformed agrarianism is rooted instead in covenantal eschatology.

Agrarianism is not nostalgia but discipleship; not a retreat, but a covenantal witness. In its fields and households we glimpse the web of creation ordered under Christ, where neighboring is essential, not optional, and every furrow points toward the harvest of the New Creation.