The Hunting Christian

We hunted. When I attempt to trace the origins of this part of family culture back to the beginning, I do not know where it began. Perhaps it was because my father told stories of hunting the Tuscarora Mountain in Pennsylvania. How they would arrive at the foot of the mountain two hours before first light and spend two hours climbing, having their hopes dashed by each false summit and how, on their last hunt together, Dad carried Grandpa’s brush-nicked 30-30 all the way to the top because of Grandpa’s Multiple Sclerosis. There were the campfire stories, too, like the one about an acquaintance of my father who missed a deer on the mountain and got buck fever so badly that he tried to reload his slug gun with a handkerchief. Steeped in stories like this, it becomes a matter of destiny.

It didn’t help that we grew up on a hill farm with acres of woodland trenched with deep hollows, each hollow a wilderness of its own. We had no movies, no television, and therefore no reason to stay inside except to read books, and the books we had were horse and dog stories written by authors like Jim Kjelgaard.

There are worse ways to spend your formative years. Take a teen, have him (or her) rise before first light, send them into to the cold and wet. Let them climb a mountain and kill something, then process the meat and eat it. It’s an ancient cycle—ontogeny repeats phylogeny is the scientific term—which means the individual act repeats the cycles of its ancestors. Hunting is an atavistic and elemental experience, if you’re the type to care about such things.

I have, however, become increasingly uncomfortable with both my own and my culture’s attitudes about land, nature, and hunting. According to my observations, Anabaptists have more outdoorsmen per capita than most cultures, barring, perhaps, indigenous cultures. While this does not strike me as something to lament, it does make the subject worth addressing. It matters.

We could make this problem out to be on a continuum, with stereotypical hippies at one extreme, the archetypal exploiter on the other. If we did that, we might posit that all we need to do is find the sweet spot where the qualities of both shade into each other. But this involves too many stereotypes and generalizations to be useful and in turn raises a set of odd questions. Is nature sacred? No? Is the “sweet spot” then just a little bit sacred, but not very much? Should we extract just a little, but not more than we must? Should we all go vegan, or is the flora and fauna just something to dispose of as we please?

Or is there a respect for nature without lapsing into animism or pantheism? I suggest that there is, and it involves a different perspective than we are commonly taught. It is not a new one, only obscure. I think this is because it is too uncomfortable. It goes against our no-nonsense culture.

I remember standing with my father beside a freshly killed whitetail. Dad and I would take off our hats and thank God for the gift of a life and for a steady hand to make a clean kill. It seemed like The Thing to Do. Was this sensible? A little too schmaltzy for your tastes?

I have a few guiding questions for us to consider. I am quick to hear if you are inclined to answer me.

Should hunting be a sport?

I dislike like the term “sport” because it’s the same word we use for fast cars and basketball, the term we use for activities that teach fewer life skills. And yet I would be lying if I did not admit I enjoy the blend of skill involved in stalking, strategizing, and performing under pressure. About the time we pull the trigger, however, we cross the threshold into a different type of activity. I wouldn’t call it sport, but it is a skill, and it can be a satisfying one.

Still, the word “sport” serves us in another way. Hunting in the twenty-first century, without some technological restriction, is like “playing tennis with the net down,” like a poet once said. You could use a drone with a thermal imaging device to locate your quarry, poke a howitzer out the window of your techno-utopian hunting blind complete with a charging port for your light saber and pluck fleeing impala off the horizon. There was a time in human history when the level of technology limited our ability to do damage. Today, we are the most efficient killers in the world, and for a wildlife population that is losing habitat daily, this is no boon for game or sportsman. I suggest a sportsman is defined as much by what he does not take into the woods as by what he does, by what he does not do than by what he does.

Voluntary limits to level the playing field puts most activities securely in the realm of sport because we now have the luxury of too much advantage. I accept the term “sport.” How else will we do it?

Should we hunt for trophies?

This is ultimately a personal question, but here is one way of thinking about it. Many big game populations are declining or holding steady by a slight margin, and some populations of wild game are at a sustainable level because of conservation ideals, seasonal restrictions, and even trophy hunting. Protecting some of the animals, whether by antler size, bag limits, or age, can be a useful social idea to preserve and conserve wild things. I do not deny that big antlers or horns can become idols and that this should be guarded against, but I would hate to see the discipline we use for trophy hunting disappear. If I took the first yearling whitetail I came across each fall, it would seem like cheating. Am I ungrateful?

What about our Christian legacy as stewards of the earth?

In the Christian story, God created man and then gave the earth to the humans. He gave it to us alongside a dictum: take care of it. Genesis uses the word dominion when speaking of our relation to nature, but to base our entire relationship on that single utterance is to ignore other passages. I am inclined to believe that the Genesis account is pointing out our position as apex gardener, a privileged position bestowed on us by God, but not as apex predator with carte blanche.

“You can’t make land use or hunting habits out to be a moral issue,” I’ve been told. I differ. I have heard several Sunday morning messages that make the stewardship of money to be the mark of character, and they were wonderful and insightful, and I needed them. But I have never heard a message about the stewardship of land, at least not one that took the same integrative reasoning as money stewardship. Both are resources. Why the division?

But to get back to hunting: I have heard gruesome tales; unapologetically bad shooting, stabbing salmon with a pitchfork (an illegal action, if not borderline barbaric), flouting game laws because it is “my land.” These are isolated instances, of course, but they serve as an extreme. These types of stories are rooted in a narrow concept of ownership and an illiteracy of what Aldo Leopold would call “ecological education.”

As stewards, our goal should be the health of the land and health of the people, which is usually the same thing. Therefore, our goals should be sustaining and maintaining a healthy ecosystem. There is a quote by Aldo Leopold that I love, which has implications that run the gamut from soil to racism: “…quit thinking about land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is both ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

I am not digressing here. We were talking of hunting, and this feels like a tangent because hunting and fishing are rooted in a larger conversation of land use. Hunting falls below it as a sub-point. When we frame our hunting (or farming) inside a larger picture of conservation, ethics, or culture, we suddenly see the community develop.

This, in turn, demands that we as individuals look past ourselves and care not only for ourselves and our pride and trophies, but also that we see predators and prey outside the good-animal/bad-animal dualism and view them in a broader light of God’s scheme of nature, seeing that a balanced ecosystem includes us, too.

God has given us a great gift. We might spend all of it. Or we might cultivate it, and revel in the beauty of it, and watch the miracle of life and death, and participate in it with humility and respect and an awareness that, all modern illusions aside, we are directly dependent on nature. Our meat comes from God, indeed.

Further Reading

1.     A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

2.     Great Possessions by David Kline

3.     “The Gift of Good Land,” by Wendell Berry, an essay that can be found in the book of the same name.