There’s No Such Thing as a Christian Prepper
It has been a year since I penned a list in my journals titled, “Things I’m learning watching a crisis unfold.” The crisis at hand involved my former employer, an apologetics ministry that was quickly coming apart at the seams. In my list of observations I asked myself the question, “What sins am I likely to commit while processing the sins of others?” My immediate response is scribbled beside it, “To circle the wagons.”
Hiding from the world, stuffing lights under bushels, and detaching in general from chaos has been a natural human response throughout time. Many people felt that inward curl during covid—a retreat to seclusion. The problem is that you still need to go out to find the necessities of life. It was a stark reminder to many that while the urban areas contain amenities, the rural areas have the necessities. I live in a rural section of the country where many people were interested in fleeing during the covid situation. The desire for a self-sufficient life is a desire for many, a reality for a small elite, and a goal of no serious Christian.
The fact of the matter is that I smirk at most YouTube preppers and self-labeled self-sufficiency gurus. Not only are their lives deeply dependent on a global shipping network, but even if you factored out material dependence it still takes a community for the diversity of production. The butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker are rarely the same person, even in a small community. My family enjoys keeping chickens for meat and eggs, keeping bees, hunting, and butchering locally raised animals. We have a 30’x96’ high tunnel in our backyard beside our garden where we grow over 46 types (not counting varieties) of vegetables and herbs. Sure, we grind our own homegrown cornmeal, make lye soap, and predominantly heat with wood, but we are under no illusion that that means we are anywhere in the neighborhood of self-sufficient. I’m not a prepper for crises; I’m just getting ready for winter, and I enjoy figuring out how things work. As someone who in some ways could tick the social media boxes and categories of what is considered “self-sufficient,” I’m throwing a yellow flag on the whole thing.
First of all, it takes community and generational knowledge to know how to successfully live well. Secondly, almost everything that we get involved in ends up receiving some friendly help or the loan of a tool or piece of equipment. We don’t even own the land that we live on. There are some economic benefits to our lifestyle to be sure, but we like what we do because of the way it embeds us in our community—not for the ways that it detaches us from others. Last fall I had the fun experience of driving down the road and passing three home gardens loaded with red tomatoes that started as seeds in our kitchen.
As a little boy, I remember my grandpa pointing to a herd of cattle grazing on the hill behind his farmhouse and then pointing to several barrels of corn and noting that if times got rough he had a lot of food on hand. But then he said that it wouldn’t really last him very long because there was no such thing as a Christian prepper. If you were hoarding a bunch of food for yourself, then you would have to be prepared to shoot your hungry neighbor, which obviously wouldn’t be Christ-like. The urbanite dream may be to find a little piece of land where you can work with your hands to take care of yourself. The idea is noble, if a bit romantic. But the biblical command is to work with your hands that you would have something to share with anyone who is in need. Our craving for self-sufficiency follows the same storyline as all other sins: I receive good gifts from God, intended for the benefit of others, and corrupt it by using it for personal gain and self-isolation.
Private property, as great as that can be—and I think it generally leads to the most responsible form of stewardship—is not a guarantee for Christ’s disciples. Spiritual self-sufficiency is a joke, and physical self-sufficiency is an idolatrous hoax. Please hear me carefully:This is not a treatise on freeloading. The biblical command is clear that you should work for your bread and carry your own load, but the purpose of that isn’t so that you can live in your own little world. The purpose of Christian production is for the sake of the other, not the self. The Christian life is to be deeply embedded in the lives of others, not absorbed in the self.