What Wendell Berry taught me about heaven
Christianity Today
September 2, 2026
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Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Image: Carnegie Center
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
When I heard that Wendell Berry had died, my mind flashed back to his kitchen table on a hot Kentucky evening about 15 years ago, where I was as nerve-racked as I have ever been. Since no writer in my lifetime has more shaped my life and thought—through short stories and novels and essays and poems I’ve read since I was a middle-schooler—I agreed with Mr. Berry on almost everything. Then he cleared his throat and brought up one of the only subjects where I thought he was going to give me a stern talking-to. That subject was heaven.
Like me, Berry was a Baptist Christian, although as he put it, he was more “at the end of the Protestant road.” He was a communitarian who was suspicious of organized religious institutions but went to church anyhow. He was skeptical of theological abstractions but could quote the King James Bible with conviction and affection. His problem with John 3:16 wasn’t Jesus saying it but preachers mishandling it.
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For instance, Berry rightly criticized a view of heaven in the service of a Jim Crow racist police state that ought to know better what the Bible says about the image of God. “But the churches, with their strong ties to the pocketbooks of racists, felt obliged to see it another way: the way to heaven was faith; one got there by believing,” he wrote. “And to this day that continues to be the emphasis of such denominations as the Southern Baptist: to be saved, believe!”
He wrote,
The mystical aspects of Christianity completely overshadow the moral. But it is a bogus mysticism, mysticism as wishful magic, a recipe by which to secure the benefits of eternal bliss without having to give up the benefits of temporal vice: corrupt your soul and save it too!
I told Mr. Berry that I agreed with him on the misuse of all of these things but that he and I saw the problems as coming from different directions. The predatory use of the gospel can sound otherworldly, but it’s often just a Machiavellian strategy for people who want very this-worldly power and possessions. The problem with that kind of heaven talk is not that it’s too mystical but that it’s not nearly mystical enough.
But Berry was right that the sundering in our imaginations of body from soul has horrific implications for the way we treat bodies. And he was right that the way we see bodies can have horrific consequences for the way we see the earth. “Divided, set against each other, body and soul drive each other to extremes of misapprehension and folly,” he wrote 50 years ago. “Nothing could be more absurd than to despise the body and yet yearn for its resurrection.”
For Berry, an overemphasis on the spirituality of the eternal could lead to exactly what we see: a time in which creation is seen as “the environment” and agriculture is seen as “food production” and land is seen as “natural resources” and wilderness is seen as “scenery.” To him, the problem is not just that this perspective hurts the land (though that would be enough) but also that it deforms human beings. As he put it, a society in which adolescents know how to make a baby but not how to grow a potato is in a crisis of meaning.
Sometimes, then, to some people, Berry could sound grumpy about heaven. His poem “The Wild Geese,” for instance, marvels at the sights and sounds of summer’s end and then concludes, “And we pray, not / for new earth or heaven, but to be / quiet in heart, and in eye / clear. What we need is here.”
But that’s not the whole story. Perhaps even more, Berry hated the division of heaven and earth, soul and body, from the other direction—that of scientific materialism:
The most radical influence of reductive science has been the virtually universal adoption of the idea that the world, its creatures, and all the parts of its creatures are machines—that is, that there is no difference between creature and artifice, birth and manufacture, thought and computation.
He wrote that the materialists have led us to see life as a machine, not a miracle. And the results are catastrophic.
A clue to Berry’s speaking to both sides of the fault might be found in his poem “The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer,” in which he wrote,
Going against men, I have heard at times a deep harmony
thrumming in the mixture, and when they ask me what
I say I don’t know. It is not the only or the easiest
way to come to the truth. It is one way.
Berry didn’t like the way some preachers used heaven, just as he didn’t like the way some scientists used nature. But he believed in both. He believed body and soul, heaven and earth, are meant to hold together. When they do not, the result is what Berry saw as the most fundamental crisis of the modern era: the disintegration of persons and communities.
The reason Berry argued so hard for locality and connection to land cultivated over many generations is not, as The New York Times’obituary headline so ridiculously put it, that he “Extolled America’s Agrarian Past.” It was because, among other things, Berry recognized that people cannot come to love the mystery of life the way they dissect a frog. Knowledge is rooted in imagination, he argued, and imagination is rooted in affection. We can only come to really know a person, a community, a plot of land, when we have come to love that person or place beyond utility or efficiency.
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Berry’s attack on the division of knowledge from imagination, community from freedom, body from soul, heaven from earth, is at its most polemic in his essays. In his fiction and poetry, though, he shows us how to imagine what it would be like to be members one of another, to be linked together in memory and hope.
One of Berry’s best Port William novels, Jayber Crow, is portrayed as the memoir of a disillusioned would-be preacher who is irritated at all the same aspects of American Christianity that Berry was.
“Everything bad was laid on the body, and everything good was credited to the soul,” Jayber says, reflecting on his Bible college professors and fellow students. “It scared me a little when I realized that I saw it the other way around. If the soul and body really were divided, then it seemed to me that all the worst sins—hatred and anger and self-righteousness and even greed and lust—came from the soul.”
Jayber stops his theological studies and becomes something about as earthly as possible: a barber cutting the hair of the men of Port William. And he goes to church where the preachers condemn the world—they have, he reflects, a “high opinion of God and a very low opinion of his works”—but they don’t stay very long.
The people who heard those sermons loved good crops, good gardens, good livestock and work animals and dogs; they loved flowers and the shade of trees, and laughter and music; some of them could make you a fair speech on the pleasures of a good drink of water or a patch of wild raspberries.
At the end, Jayber writes, “This is a book about Heaven. I know it now.” He concludes,
I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. One by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and are treasured up in our hearts. Grief affirms them, preserves them, sets the cost. Finally a man stands up alone, scoured and charred like a burnt tree, having lost everything and (at the cost only of its loss) found everything, and is ready to go.
At the end of the last Port William novel, Marce Catlett, Berry writes of the clarity that came to Andy Catlett with old age:
His remembering and his thoughts have carried him by now far outside the matter of fact of this world’s present age. He stands now with his father and his father’s father, and with others dear to them, in the presence of a longed-for beautiful land that … they have known and that they know, a love-made land.
This is more than just memory, if we think of memory in machine terms of stored information. In Remembering, Berry writes of Andy coming home. “His own place becomes palpable to him,” he writes. “Those he loves, living and dead, are no longer mere thoughts or memories, but presences, approachable and near.”
He adds,
Now they are coming to him again, those who have brought him here and who remain—not in memory, but near to memory, in the place itself and in his flesh, ready always to be remembered—so that the place, the present life of it, resonates within time and within times, as it could not do if time were all that it is living in.
That’s earth, and that’s heaven. That’s time, and that’s eternity. Somehow it all hangs together. And it all turns on affection. The membership goes on. The Sabbath awaits. Life is a miracle.
In one of his poems, “Testament,” Berry imagines his future funeral and offers a word to the family and friends grieving there: “Beneath this stone, a Berry is planted / In his home land, as he wanted.” He wrote about how he was going back to “my earth / That has been my care and faithful charge from birth, / And toward which all my sorrows were surely bound, / And all my hopes.”
And then he shifts, acknowledging that he is a traveler somewhere. He tells those who mourn him not to let the mystery of that dismay them. “Beyond reach of thought / Let imagination figure / Your hope,” he writes.
And then he writes, “So treat me, even dead, / As a man who has a place / To go, and something to do.” Count this as my little way of keeping that assignment.
Russell Moore is editor at large and columnist at Christianity Today as well as host of the weekly podcast The Russell Moore Show from CT Media.
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