Jesus is Lord Over Lenawee County
Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI
by Nathaniel Berry
Somebody painted Jesus is Lord Over Lenawee County on the barn off M-52; Dad and I used to drive by it on the way back from the Tecumseh Big Boy. He was proud of saying that the barn damned Jesus by faint praise. We were never among the godly folk of Lenawee county: Dad nurtured a knee-jerk, militant disdain of the Christian faith, while Mom maintained that the Scriptures should be read and understood for their cultural significance and rhetorical usefulness, and that the beliefs of our faithful neighbors should be tolerated.
After fasting forty days and forty nights, He was hungry. The Tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
Matthew 4:3-4
Rick Strawcutter is an extreme example of the type of Christian that Adrian breeds, but he does a lot, like his less-vitriolic siblings in Christ, to make a good neighbor of himself. Strawcutter hosts the Harvest Free Market behind his church on Bent Oak Highway. Vendors can arrive unannounced, and sell their wares without paying a fee. You can buy a dozen ears of corn for two dollars; you can enter a free raffle to win a gas card. Children are offered fifty-cent fair games, a prize guaranteed each time. You can get full on free barbecue which, in the Year of Our Lord 2020, is no small thing. Adrian is a struggling town in a poverty-stricken state in the middle of a pandemic, in the opening phases of a second Great Depression—Rick Strawcutter distributes the tools of survival.
Again, the devil took Him up on an exceedingly high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to Him, “All these things I will give You if You will fall down and worship me.”
Matthew 4:8-9
When the Heaven’s Gate cult killed themselves en masse in 1997, they sent their taped suicide letter to Strawcutter, the host of their favorite radio show. At the time, Strawcutter ran the pirate station Radio Free Lenawee from an antenna beside his church. In addition to his sermons, he syndicated Infowars, and other radio programs of the Tim-McVeigh-Era of right-wing conspiracist radio. I listened to Radio Free Lenawee with Mom when I was maybe way too young. It felt like listening to one of Mulder’s informants whispering desperate secrets in a parking garage (I also watched The X-Files with Mom when I was maybe way too young). Mom took care to explain that we were listening critically—not necessarily ironically—as part of a project to better understand our neighbors.
I learned from Strawcutter that New World Order tanks would roll down the streets of Lenawee County when Y2K shut down all the computers, but that was okay, because Jesus was coming back at the very same time. Strawcutter introduced his listeners to insurgency methods—like where to aim in order to kill the driver of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle—for those last great days when Christ would be counting on us to provide Him anti-tank support. His listeners were not to be nervous, because Jesus was coming back. I wasn’t nervous, because Mom told me it was bullshit, and I believed her because she fed me. Strawcutter took Jesus’ failure to show Himself at the dawn of the new millennium in stride. He prophesied, along with Alex Jones, that the government would execute a false-flag attack to overshadow Oklahoma City—a terrorist bombing that would give them the excuse to suspend civil liberties, and seize Radio Free Lenawee’s broadcast equipment. The feds shut down his radio station on September 12th, 2001.
And they worshipped the dragon, for he had given his authority to the beast, and they worshiped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?”
Revelation 13:4
Make no mistake about the kind of man Rick Strawcutter is. Over his forty years in the ministry, he has advocated for the death penalty for gay people and interracial couples, he has spoken at White Supremacist gatherings, sold video tapes featuring Holocaust Deniers and members of the Christian Identity movement. He ran for the US House of Representatives supporting a total ban on immigration and a total ban on abortion. Strawcutter lost the race to Republican Tim Walbergh, another minister, a man who shares most of Strawcutter’s important beliefs. The theocracy Rick Strawcutter would like to impose on America would see to my death, and the deaths of everyone I love, and I would gladly fistfight Rick Strawcutter on Har Megiddo’s summit any day between this day, and the last.
Strawcutter is dangerous, not so much because he spouts reactionary nonsense, but because The Church on Bent Oak is doing the most visible work to sustain the people of Lenawee County in a time of near total-abandonment by the State of Michigan, and the Federal Government. If you’ve ever wondered why people in the flyovers stand by Trump, and buy into conspiratorial epistemologies (Strawcutter dedicated most of last Sunday’s mass to praying for “illegal votes” to be discovered and discounted), it’s because charlatans and demagogues like him are using a tried-and-true playbook of meeting people’s material needs, and proselytizing only after they’ve gotten people’s attention. The IRA did this. So did the Panthers. Hezbollah and Al Shabab do this. If you’re trying to convince people of the righteousness of your ideology, ignoring this tactic is malpractice.
So Strawcutter’s Facebook, and his new radio station, advertise the Harvest Free Market to a county of hungry people. His beliefs are passed down, food is passed out. He tells them that you and I are living comfortably; that we who reside in liberal cities and make up liberal institutions hate the people of the country, that we would be happy to see them starve. Bellies and gas tanks full, the faithful listen, and they will see no reason to doubt him until we undertake the responsibility of being better neighbors in those counties where—despite His reluctance to return—Strawcutter’s Jesus is still Lord.
“Then He will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in…’”
Matthew 25:41-43
Nathaniel Berry is a writer and editor from Adrian, Michigan. He has an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, and is the 2020 Swan Quill & Lantern Lit Society Writer in Residence. He has a 2006 Pontiac Vibe with 250,000 miles on it, and there’s a highway curling just like smoke above his shoulder.
