There is a growing genre of television dramas focused on the lives of the uberwealthy that has received significant public attention. Shows like Succession, Billions, and White Lotus, to name few, seem to have captured the imagination of many by revealing the extravagances of extreme wealth and the misery it creates. For instance, HBO’s four-season drama, Succession, chronicles the Roys, a media tycoon family, apparently loosely based on the Murdochs, as the siblings—Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), Roman (Kieran Culkin), and sometimes Connor (Alan Ruck)—incompetently and furiously jockey and betray each other, and anyone else in their way, in an effort to take over the family business from their father, Logan Roy (Brian Cox).1 They fight with an astonishing level of deprivation given that the stakes of failing seem so low—the winner inherits the family business and all its billions and the losers inherit billions of dollars without the headache of running a family business. 

Part of the appeal of the show seems to be the assurance that many aspects of uberwealth are absurd. For instance, the show spawned commentary describing the “Succession era” phenomenon of  “stealth wealth” or “silent luxury.”2 That is, luxury clothing that signifies its expense by being discreet, plain, and without branding. This was epitomized in the significant attention that Kendall Roy’s plain black $625 cashmere baseball cap received.3 I might be missing something here, but the joke seems to be on the uberwealthy, for there is no possible way a $625 cashmere baseball cap is near twenty times better than my (arguably overpriced) $30 Boston College wool baseball cap.

But most of the appeal of the show, I suspect, is a kind of schadenfreude we viewers take in watching the myriad ways that money leads to misery. For why else revel in the downfall of the Roy family except to be assured that life is worse with private jets and yachts? Although the show is wildly crass and often audacious, the characters are developed with enough nuance that is easy to imagine how the family dynamics could have gone a different way had the Roys not been cursed with all that money. 

The characters treat each other in awful ways that easily map onto behaviors that Kate Ward warns about in her book, Wealth, Virtue, and Moral Luck.4 There is the unforgettable balcony argument scene in season 4 where the harsh exchanges between Shiv and her husband reveal that fidelity was always impossible given that money and power are the primary objectives for both of them.5 And the brothers, Kendall and Roman, display a complete lack of fortitude when they pressure their network to falsely call a presidential election in favor of the candidate who they believe will serve their interests at the expense of society.6 In numerous ways, the Roys typify Ward’s warnings about how money “as an end itself” and hyperagency can malform the wealthy (133–70). As a result, the Roys are anything but happy.

But Ward’s well-researched and insightful book uses the lens of wealth to make much more trenchant and challenging societal critiques than what is possible by simply criticizing the uberwealthy. Ward affirms the dignity of the poor and challenges a large swath of readers to recognize their own wealth and the negative moral effects it has on themselves and society. It may be entertaining and satisfying to watch the Roys crumble under the weight of their wealth, for as the blithely cynical German phrase goes, revealing a likely widespread moral failing, “Schadenfreude is the best type of freude.” But instead of falling into that mode, Ward does the hard work of challenging many readers of her book to introspect on how our relationships with money might be harming ourselves and those around us. It is laudatory and brave to raise these points and I admire Ward’s prophetic voice in this regard. 

A central insight of Ward’s book is that in a capitalistic society one’s wealth (or lack thereof) determines one’s position to a range of choices/access to power, goods, activities, and opportunities. And that relationship to goods, services, opportunities, etc., is likely to encourage or thwart virtue in particular ways that may or may not be obvious. For Ward, this orientation to the world predicated on the moral luck of one’s economic situation has serious moral implications that have generally been overlooked.

To make her point, Ward works with two primary categories that are intentionally broad, wealth and poverty:

Throughout this book, I define wealth as ‘having more than we need,’ and poverty as lacking the goods necessary for a life worthy of human dignity, or being able to secure those goods only through constant and precarious struggle (118).

She defends these definitions for numerous reasons (118–32), and if her definition of wealth makes many academics uncomfortable, that is by design. She quips, “Perhaps attempts to define wealth feel especially fraught as specialists confront the risk of self-implication” (124). And she specifically wants readers of her book to consider that they might be wealthy, even if they are not in the 1 percent, and that this matters for virtue:

I suspect that many 1 percenters, those living on half a million dollars a year or more, give little thought to how their wealth affects their virtue, conscious though they may be of giving from that wealth to support the common good. Perhaps more controversially, I argue the same about most of the people who will read this book: relatively educated Westerners whose households live on income(s) from work, people who would agree that they have more than they need but who would likely never self-define as rich. The next chapter demonstrates how such people wield hyperagency over and compared with the poor and how wealth affects virtue in their lives as well as those of the 1 percent (127).

She joins David Cloutier and Sondra Ely Wheeler in criticizing Christian theology for permitting a “middle class exemption” that allows many of us to ignore the tradition’s admonitions against wealth (127). Ward boldly states:

When middle-class readers in wealthy societies hear scriptural warnings to “the rich,” perhaps we imagine them directed at the richest 1 percent, nothing for us to worry about—and perhaps that is a mistake (126–27).

Following this, Ward offers a brilliant description of the hyperagency of the wealthy that presents a challenge to middle-class and upper-class readers of the book by applying it more broadly than her source materials does. Ward writes that Paul Shervish defines hyperagency as such:

‘What is different for wealth holders is that they can be more legitimately confident about actualizing their expectations and aspirations because they are able to directly effect the fulfillment of their desires’ (134).

Wards explains that Shervish applies this to people with millions of dollars, but she thinks it applies to all people who satisfy her definition of wealth, that is to everyone with more than they need (134).

In this way, Ward presents a profound challenge to middle-class and upper-class readers, myself included, who might easily enjoy a critique of the Roys but who might let themselves off the hook when thinking about the ill effects of wealth. Ward’s sympathetic but unrelenting insistence that anyone who has more than they need is vulnerable to the vicissitudes of wealth and its relationship to the virtues of prudence, justice, solidarity, fidelity, humility, self-care, temperance, and fortitude (140–64) made reading her book not only academically edifying, but also personally challenging. 

Furthermore, the urgency of Ward’s analysis is made especially clear in her attention to the ways that the demands of poverty can impinge on agency, forcing moral agents to choose between important obligations, such as caring for one’s own family and caring for others (175, 183), and result in “burdened virtues” (a concept from Lisa Tessman that Ward powerfully expands on, 171–208). Ward is clear that this is not victim-blaming (171–76); rather she calls our attention to the ways that economic imbalances put people in morally precarious situations that we can no longer ignore. 

While I appreciate the demanding ethic Ward proposes built around her broad definitions of wealth and poverty, I do wonder whether utilizing only two categories is, ultimately, limiting. There are different levels of poverty and wealth and this seems to greatly affect what kind of moral luck (99–112) people are dealt. There seems to be a meaningful difference between the hyperagency that one is able to wield from having a surplus that allows one to spend on the occasional latte and fresh berries (which Ward is quite critical of, 136–37, 161) versus a Costco membership and Costco-sized boxes of berries versus surplus enough to save for retirement and sending children to college versus the Roy-level of surplus that allows one to buy political campaigns. 

But while we can debate the definitions of wealth and poverty and a taxonomy of the possible subsections, this does not take away a central point of Ward’s work that also makes Succession so compelling—our interest in whether it is true that money doesn’t buy happiness, even though it is clear that a certain threshold of money is required to obtain the goods necessary for flourishing in this life in our capitalistic society. And Ward raises the stakes of this truism showing how money also does not buy virtue. Ward uses the contexts of wealth, poverty, and inequality to reveal challenges in the moral life because her ultimate concerns are individual and communal flourishing, what she describes as “human excellence” (47). Her references to inequality are generally related to economic matters, while at the same time calling us to view the human person and society in much more than economic terms, such as when she persuasively argues for a broader view of societal prosperity than GDP (18–19), and how she persuasively elucidates the many ills that income inequality causes (15–20). By bringing moral formation into the purview of analysis of inequality, Ward invites us to broaden the ways we understand inequality and prosperity. 

Following this, I would like to consider the value of theology taking seriously individual and communal measures of well-being with special attention to the problem of “well-being inequality” and the prospects for this kind of data to guide public policy.7 There is a vast and growing literature in psychology, public health, and beyond on how to evaluate individuals, communities, and societies in reference to what is often called “well-being,” “life satisfaction,” “happiness,” or “flourishing,” all of which are meant to point to objective or subjective holistic assessments of life.8 Such measures provide a broad picture of people’s lives, and when considered at the level of communities and societies, can guide public health policies to work toward supporting the flourishing of individuals and society.9

There are numerous ways to measure well-being in the social science literature and a discussion of these is beyond the scope of what can be addressed here. To name one useful measure, the Flourishing Measure was developed at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard where I am a post-doc. The Flourishing Measures is a twelve-question survey asking respondents to report on the following six domains of their lives: (1) happiness and life satisfaction; (2) mental and physical health; (3) meaning and purpose; (4) character and virtue; (5) close social relationships; and (6) financial and material stability.10 Using these areas to assess the flourishing of individuals and society offers a holistic and robust assessment that address various areas that are of concern to Ward and others.

Importantly, this kind of data paints a complex picture that, commiserate with Ward’s concerns, indicates that promoting well-being requires supporting numerous aspects of peoples’ lives. For instance, from this data it becomes clear that social connectedness is critical to well-being. Canadian economist, John Helliwell, explains the findings from the World Happiness Reports, based on Cantril’s ladder life satisfaction question: 

In recent World Happiness Reports, six factors have been found to explain three-quarters of the differences in average life evaluations among countries and over time…GDP per capita and healthy life expectancy. The other four factors, all reflecting some aspect of the social fabric widely construed, are having someone to count on in times of trouble, a sense of freedom to make life choices, generosity, and a trustworthy environment, as proxied by the absence of corruption in business and government.11 

This also highlights the need to expand how we assess inequality within a society. Helliwell explains the importance of emerging work on well-being inequality or “happiness inequality”:

Most previous studies of inequality have relied on income inequality when studying the effects of inequality on health (Pickett & Wilkinson, 2015) and happiness (Alesina, Di Tella, & MacCullough, 2004). But recent research (Goff, Helliwell, & Mayraz, 2018; Nichols & Reinhart, 2019) has shown that inequality in the distribution of life evaluations is more powerful than income inequality in several explanatory roles where inequality is thought to be a factor. This is an important finding. If average life evaluations are an appropriate measure of community welfare, then the effect of happiness inequality on life evaluations provides an empirical measure of a society’s aversion to inequality (Helliwell, 2020).12

Thus, attention should be given to how well-being or flourishing may be experienced unequally within societies and across nations, and public policies should work towards rectifying this. Studies have started to look at the problem of “flourishing inequality,” but more work must be done.13 For instance, one global well-being study shows that life satisfaction is higher in wealthier nations, while nations with less wealth score higher on meaning and purpose.14 So then, there are lessons about how to cultivate meaning and purpose that less wealthy nations can offer and that should be investigated further. The Global Flourishing Study, a five-year longitudinal study using the Flourishing Measure, will look into flourishing inequality in more depth.15

Policy aimed at addressing flourishing inequality is a hopeful way forward because it would be holistic in nature and would address not only economic and health factors, which absolutely must be addressed, but do so in a way that supports the whole person and communities. Such policies would likely complement many of Ward’s policy suggestions (216–17). Work in this vein could highlight the strengths of marginalized communities that could be instructive for promoting flourishing cohering with many of Ward’s reflection, such as how those in poverty may embody the virtue of solidarity (184–87). Importantly, policies that come out of this data can be led by the voices of the poor and vulnerable, as Ward suggests solutions should be (220). This is because many of these measures, such as the Flourishing Measure, are based on self-reports. And such data-led policies could both support the flourishing of marginalized communities and learn from their strengths. Policies that come out of flourishing inequality research are also likely to be better equipped to address the harms of wealth given that prosperity is assessed much more broadly than by economics alone. For as Helliwell explains, using well-being inequality as a guide “in turn suggests, but does not necessarily require, a policy framework that explicitly targets those most in misery.”16 

I don’t know what the Roys would score on the Flourishing Measure, but I do like the idea that this kind of data zooms out to offer a robust view of prosperity where money is not an end in itself and where the struggles and strengths of the poor and marginalized can drive social policy in innovative and profound ways. And I am grateful for Ward’s prophetic voice challenging us to reexamine the moral implications of wealth and inequality, thus prompting personal and social change. 

One of the most important but least appreciated essays on the virtues was penned in 1960 by the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg. Born of a Jew and a Catholic, raised an atheist, Ginzburg’s sensitivity to the subtleties of moral life is nearly unmatched—as is the elegance of her prose. Ginzburg begins her essay “The Little Virtues” by asserting that often we approach moral education with a focus on inculcating prudence in the narrow sense: thrift, caution, tact, and shrewdness. She charges that, instead, we ought to be focused on the “great virtues,” those that make for an exceptional life rather than a competent life, virtues like courage, generosity, frankness, and neighbor-love. The little virtues aim at coping with the risks of the world; the great virtues point beyond the world.

At the heart of Ginzburg’s essay is an account of what virtue looks like with respect to money. She reflects on the child who spends months saving up for an expensive item he covets. When he starts saving, money is just like any other object he favors, like rabbits or flowers. But as he saves, money takes on increasing significance. Finally, when he has enough money to buy the item he wants, he is inevitably disappointed – and lonely, without the money he grew to cherish for the potential happiness it represented. Compared to the potential of the money, the actual object it purchased seems quite dull. The child begins to prefer money over things.

Instead of encouraging a child to save up for a coveted object, Ginzburg suggests that “we should give him money to spend when there is money—because then he will learn to part with it without worrying about it or regretting it.”1 If tomorrow the child is poor, it will not be such a hardship, for he has not learned to worship money but rather he knows “how quickly it runs through our hands.”2 In sum, Ginzburg’s prescription is this: “The money we give our children should be given for no reason; it should be given indifferently so that they will learn to receive it indifferently; but it should be given not so that they learn to love it, but so that they learn not to love it, so that they realize its true nature and its inability to satisfy our truest desires, which are those of the spirit.”3

I take Kate Ward to be aspiring to an account of the virtues that is related to that put forward by Ginzburg. For Ward, having insufficient money to meet our basic needs leads to vice and having more money than required to meet our basic needs also leads to vice. Having just the right amount of money, somewhere around lower-middle-class status in the US, is the ideal context for the cultivation of the virtues. Ward suggests that everyone, and especially Christians, ought to be concerned with growing income inequality because it has detrimental effects on the moral health of the nation: inequality means more poor people and more rich people, so there are more vicious people. Drawing on social science research as well as the Christian tradition (in its liberal, North American, Catholic flavor, which now incorporates insights from liberation theologies), Ward makes the case that income inequality out to be addressed as an ethical issue, not just a political issue.

While Ward offers many examples of causal links between vice on one hand, and poverty and wealth, on the other, it strikes me that her project might be productively redescribed in Ginzburg’s terms. If the right relation to money is indifference and the wrong relation to money is to mystify it, to give it god-like power, poverty and wealth tend to promote the latter. Having about as much as one requires to meet one’s basic needs is the precondition for indifference to money. While sometimes one will be short and sometimes there will be extra, when the amount of money approximates needs it is possible, with effort and grace, to become the sort of person who does not fixate on money, as is the habit, in different ways, of both the poor and the rich. And indifference to money, Ginzburg observes, is the prerequisite to genuine generosity, allowing us to be attentive to and responsive to the needs and desires of those around us. 

This strikes me as correct, and I appreciate Ward leading us toward an implication of this point for those in the academy: while there is a great deal of conversation about adjunct labor being under-compensated, there is not enough conversation about tenured faculty labor being over-compensated. If we want our educational institutions to cultivate the virtues but faculty are either too poor or too wealthy to develop the virtues themselves, the enterprise is bound to fail. We might say the same of religious communities in which the culture is set by the rich or upper-middle class: these will struggle mightily to become virtuous communities. 

When I taught Ward’s book last year to a group of theology masters students, mainly with pastoral interests, the students treated her thesis as essentially uncontroversial. Wealth and income inequality are problems—to such an extent that they could fittingly be labeled moral crises. Students were appreciative of how Ward filled out the meaning of “moral” in this context. But about a third of the students were dissatisfied. They wanted to hear more about the need to transform our current economic system, and they worried that Ward’s focus on the virtues distracts from what they take to be the root causes of inequality.

This concern points to a general problem that I worry does not receive sufficient attention in our conversations about ethics, and particularly Christian ethics. How do we navigate the difference between the register of ethical analysis and that of political analysis? It is too simplistic to see these two registers as disjunct. There are cases where the politics of a context means that ethical analysis, while possible, is not apt. It might be possible to examine how memorializing war heroes promotes the virtues in the case of both heroes from the Confederacy and the Union, and to do that in a highly sophisticated way, using cutting-edge tools of ethical analysis. But such an enterprise is not apt because of the political context. That political context means that what appears to be virtue (in this example, developed by the Confederate monuments) is actually the simulacrum of virtue: particularly pernicious vice. It is only by shifting to the political frame that the true nature of supposed virtue becomes visible. The analogous worry, in the economic case addressed by Ward, is that the apparent virtues of the lower-middle class are simulacral given the political context (say, capitalism). 

Put another way, it strikes me as more plausible that Ward’s analysis is correct when it is put in the following terms: a near-match between capacities and needs is the prerequisite to cultivating virtue. But adding money into this proposition, as shorthand for capacities, muddles matters. In the Communist Eastern bloc, in medieval Europe, or in pre-colonial North America, for example, it is plausible that for many people there was a near-match between capacities and needs—for many more people than holds today in the US and around the world. In such contexts, at least as they are romanticized, capacities are more relational than monetary: when someone has a need, that person can draw on a web of relationships to meet that need (rather than on an income stream). Calculating the per capita gross domestic product in such contexts obscures the relevant features of the near-match between capacities and needs—and also obscures political structures, forms of domination, that can block that near-match.

I think that the context of virtue that Ward identifies, what Ginzburg might call the necessary context for the cultivation of the great virtues, is aspirational, maybe eschatological

After systems of domination are overthrown, we will live in a way that our capacities nearly match our needs. Marx talks about this in terms of the end of alienation and the realization of species-being. Christians call it the land of milk and honey. And it strikes me as a grave confusion to talk about virtue as it manifests at the end of time in the same way we talk about virtue as it manifests in time, during the world. 

Let’s identify a third species of virtue, neither small nor great. Let’s call these virtues grand. Small virtues tie us to the world. Great virtues are exercised after the world; when they are exercised in the world, they offer a foretaste of the eschaton. Grand virtues are those which we can only cultivate as we work together toward transforming the world. As Marx says somewhere, through struggle we become fit to govern ourselves. In a theological idiom, through struggle against domination, against false gods, we orient ourselves toward the one true God. Through struggle against domination—against racial domination, against patriarchy, against colonialism, and against capitalism—we discern the machinations of the powerful, we learn how to tap into the capacities of our community to respond to mastery, and we become attuned to the meanings of justice, care, prudence, solidarity, and fidelity when those virtues are stripped of the distortions imposed upon them by ideology, by the interests of the wealthy, powerful, and white. The grand virtues whither in those who accede to domination, from both sides of the relationship of domination. But no one fully accedes. Just as it is our nature to dominate, it is our nature to struggle against domination. When those struggles are amplified and when we join together in such struggle, in collective movements against domination, the grand virtues develop.

One worry I have about Ward’s argument is that it is precisely in the petite bourgeoisie, in the class where capacities and needs are most closely aligned, that struggle against domination is most often muted. Among the poor, with little to lose, it is natural to struggle against the systems that impoverish them—they are hindered only by bandwidth deficits (and by ideology, though ideology filters down to the poor only imperfectly, given the friction created by unmet needs). While the wealthy are obviously invested in preserving their wealth, excessive capacity to meet needs also opens space for a few of the wealthy to become artists and intellectuals, and for a few of these to align their interests with those of the poor, that is, to struggle. It is just the lower-middle class who can cultivate an indifference to money, and so an allergy to struggle. In sum, where the great virtues can be cultivated, the grand virtues are inhibited; where the grand virtues can be cultivated, the great are inhibited.

But this may not be the case anymore. Today, it is not clear that even the great virtues can be cultivated in the lower-middle class. Classically, the lower-middle class referred to small shopkeepers and family farmers. (For a couple decades after the Second World War, American factory workers imagined themselves to have ascended from the proletariat to the petite bourgeoisie, but as Gabriel Winant has recently, brilliantly shown, this was always illusory.)4 Today, the occupations of the lower-middle class, the seat of virtue according to Ward, increasingly involve small-scale management; they are the bureaucrats of the public and, especially, private sector. Middle managers, marketing specialists, project supervisors, and a whole lot of people in financial services and insurance back offices. They occupy what David Graeber analyzes as “bullshit jobs,” jobs that fulfill no social needs or are detrimental to society, jobs whose uselessness is perfectly evident to their holders.5 For those who work in “bullshit jobs,” their income may nearly meet their basic needs, but the jobs themselves are soul-draining and create deep moral damage, the result of realizing you are spending eight hours a day doing, essentially, nothing. This moral damage imposes a bandwidth tax that may have effects as significant as that imposed by poverty. In short, it is not clear that there are a substantial number of jobs left in the US and Europe that would create the conditions for the cultivation of the great virtues. On the contrary, as the wave of protest movements from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter demonstrates, we are seeing increasing opportunities across the classes to cultivate the virtues of struggle.

Finally, reading Ward’s book makes me wonder whether there is a sort of second-order virtue that has to do with appreciating moral luck, with attending to the ways fate puts us in situations that ease or hinder the cultivation of the virtues. Even after we have ended income inequality, fate will still play a role in determining how rocky the road is to flourishing, and this is something we ought to be ever-mindful of in ourselves and in the lives of those around us. Ward’s book helps to build our capacity for attentiveness in this regard. And it helps us notice how strong the ideology is that ties goodness to monetary success, poverty to failure. 

Natalia Ginzburg, once again, has advice on how to cultivate this sensibility. Counter-intuitively, she argues that those charged with moral formation need to stop rewarding success and punishing failure:

Life rarely has its rewards and punishments; usually sacrifices have no reward, and often evil deeds go unpunished, at times they are even richly rewarded with success and money. Therefore it is best that our children should know from infancy that good is not rewarded and that evil goes unpunished; yet they must love good and hate evil, and it is not possible to give any logical explanation for this.6

In a sense, we are back to the primal point that Nietzsche famously makes and Elettra Stimilli has recently elaborated, about the connection between debt and guilt, between money and morality. The problem may not only be income inequality; deeper down, it may be about income itself, about the tendency of money to solidify and mystify a system of rewards and punishments that obscures the paradox at the heart of faith.

Coming from a thought-space of rural contextual theology, I engaged this work from Kate Ward with the hope of gleaning some wisdom about how to better conceptualize moral luck in contexts that tend to resist discursive or even narrative definition. “The rural” is often a contested concept, particularly in the United States, where the rural is a context home to multiple competing definitions and narratives that range from the rural as social crisis and decay,1 to the rural as idyllic country homeland,2 to the rural simply as a non-concept.3 How can one speak lucidly of moral luck—the idea that “life circumstances … affect moral development” (86)—when life circumstances themselves push against the coherence of a description and yet simultaneously call for one? What the rural United States is cannot easily be defined, but nevertheless its influence on politics, economics, and religion in the U.S. can hardly be overstated. As such, Christian social ethics (roughly 73–83 percent of rural Americans identify as Christian)4 is ripe for rural contextualization, a small part of which is the goal of this brief article. What follows is something of a rural reading of Ward’s book, particularly as her insights illuminate the purpose of moral luck as a concept, its interaction with community and God, and the role of scarcity. 

To begin, a brief word is warranted about what the rural United States is, as well as why such a word is necessarily inadequate: On the surface, it may seem relatively straightforward to suggest a definition of the rural. In the minds of many people, rural areas are those places where lots of people are not. Cities tend to be densely populated, suburban areas, while more sparse than cities, nevertheless hold many people, and whatever is left over—the space where lots of people are not—is the realm of the small town and the rural. This isn’t necessarily an awful definition, but in the United States the word “rural” does not only carry connotations of population. It also carries diverse cultural connotations, often political connotations, and sometimes also religious connotations. Herein lies the problem. If I speak of “rural America,” those terms conjure up myriad competing images and narratives that each hold lesser and greater shares of truth. Agrarian rural America can look quite different from mining rural America, which can look quite different from manufacturing in rural America, and many more could be listed. And that is just with respect to economic engines of rural places; the list gets more complex when one adds histories of prosperity and decline, religious history, physical location and climate, political history, racial history, and other contextual factors. To lean on a popular phrase, “if you’ve seen one rural place, you’ve seen one rural place.”5 Nevertheless, the idea that there is a “rural America” is stubbornly resilient, to the degree that it’s become something of a norm for folks who write about rural issues to do so with full vigor, and yet include pointed acknowledgments such as “there is no such thing as ‘rural America.’”6

That said, understanding the rural United States is not necessarily a lost cause. Like many other endeavors, it is complex, and attention to complexity can yield helpful models of understanding even when definitions remain elusive. To my eyes, the most helpful model for understanding rural and small-town America (and, as I see it, the one best situated for a conversation with Ward’s work) comes from sociologist Robert Wuthnow, who argues that rural America tends to self-organize into what he calls “moral communities.”7 For Wuthnow, a moral community is “a place to which and in which people feel an obligation to one another and to uphold the local ways of being that govern their expectations about ordinary life and support their feelings of being at home and doing the right things.”8 While rural America may not have a monopoly on this communal self-understanding, it takes on a particular character and cultural importance when enfleshed in places where many people are not. Put differently, what rural America is may resist definition, but what it means to be a rural American very often includes having one’s identity tied to the life of a concrete, geographically local community. Obligation and home are integrated with one another in this; ordinary life and doing the right things are subjects of geographically local discernment. In a sense from this rural perspective, “moral luck” hardly needs a name; identity and home (life circumstances) nearly self-evidently constitute the womb of moral development. 

This is exactly the place where Ward’s work is particularly helpful. Recognizing a reality (like moral luck) is not the same as understanding its function or potential. A Christian theological approach to moral luck sheds light on the subject in a way that can resonate with many (though not all) rural American contexts. For Ward, “what is unique in a Christian concept of moral luck is its use: to recall agents’ dependence on God for their pursuit of virtue and to hold out hope for redressing moral luck’s fragmentation of selves with the help of God and community” (87). Others have pointed out the significant role that Christian faith has played in the social history and context of rural America,9 and to understand moral luck as a way to re-emphasize dependence upon God for moral development in the context of one’s community is a very helpful cornerstone in constructing social ethics from a rural perspective. 

This resonance runs deeper with the second half of Ward’s definition of moral luck, regarding fragmentation of selves. Much can be said about the values common to much of rural America, and while they are not monolithic, they tend to include things like independence, responsibility for one’s self and neighbors, and accountability to family and/or tradition. In fact, taking agrarian rural America as an example, research suggests that values like these are both what draw persons into the practice of farming, and what constitute the vision of what farming is or ought to be.10 That said, such emphasis on the agency of an individual and surrounding local community tends to splinter when faced with the realities of global market competition, hyper-industrialization of agriculture, and the necessity of working with social and governmental entities beyond one’s own moral community. Agency becomes less and less local, fragmented by larger contextual factors that demand satisfaction in order for an agricultural enterprise to remain viable. As the locality of agency fragments, so also does the coherence of the local moral community, and consequently also the coherence of the particular rural person’s agency. Put simply, local and individual rural identity can be at risk of dissolution in a sea of non-local forces, but a Christian account of moral luck can move in the direction of reimagining life in and as a moral community. Taking inspiration from Ward’s work, I’d like to gesture toward one possible (but certainly not the only) way this may function.

Ward’s book is especially illuminative in its treatment of scarcity and poverty in relation to the power of others. In her words, “to be poor means to be at the disposal of others and to be treated in society as disposable” (124). This attention to the meaning of poverty, rather than simply its definition, opens a possibility to include reflection on experiences of scarcity with regard to human resources in addition to financial resources. While it is true that rural areas of the United States include some of the most economically distressed,11 it would be a mistake to wholesale equate “rural” with “poor.” However, if we were to acknowledge that scarcity (and even poverty) can include less-than-adequate human resources and the services that are dependent upon them (e.g. healthcare access requires healthcare professionals, education access requires teachers, religious access often requires ministers, etc.), then to be rural in the United States very often includes some (or many) experiences of scarcity. In a world whose structures tend to shift talent and expertise toward the areas of highest-volume demand or most lucrative compensation, human resources tend to take flight from rural areas that can often offer neither high volume of demand nor lucrative compensation. This has sometimes been called the “brain drain” problem,12 and while some have contested the accuracy of this narrative,13 it remains a powerful animating myth of rural social reality.

Part of what makes the rural “brain drain” problem so damaging is that absence of high-volume demand does not mean absence of any demand. For essential services such as healthcare and food access, there is a massive and important difference between low-volume demand and no demand at all. While a large hospital may be unsustainable in a rural area, that does not negate the very real need for reliable access to medical care. While massive grocery superstores may not be sustainable in many rural areas, that does not negate the very real need for access to healthy food sources. And of course, if a rural area cannot sustain a school or church according to the most common contemporary models of such things, that does not negate the very real need for education and religious ministry in rural contexts. Put differently, there are relatively few reliable safeguards against rural access to these and other essential services simply plummeting to zero when talent and expertise are drawn away to higher-volume demand and compensation, which means many rural areas and small towns tend to experience a near-constant state of precariousness, or feelings of being under threat.14

This experience of precariousness, or scarcity of human resources that leads to diminished access to necessary goods and services, places many rural areas and small towns “at the disposal of” forces and agents outside the moral community. Will the church stay open? That often depends on the good will and support of the diocese/bishop/synod (read: external governing body). Will the grocery store remain? That often depends on whether the town can sustain sufficient volume of demand to keep one open and attract someone to run it. Will the school close? That often depends on the discernment of the political centers of power. The list goes on. 

This is where I find Ward’s work most helpful. In contexts where access to necessary services is consistently precarious or even absent, virtue can often be re-imagined in order to achieve some level of that access. For example, elder care and nursing home access are significant needs in many rural areas and small towns in the United States. However, it is a perennial problem to find sufficient human resources to staff these needs. In response, values of sufficient staffing (and the virtues related to it) are in direct competition with values supporting necessary care and quality of life for an aging population (and of course the virtues that interact with that). In Ward’s words, “poverty [in this case lack of human resources] burdens virtue especially when two virtues conflict” (171). A common coping mechanism in response to this problem is for rural nursing homes and elder care facilities to operate at understaffed levels, because the stakes in fending off the alternative (closing the facilities) are extremely high; alternative facilities may be many miles away or effectively unreachable for those who need them. Politically speaking, this can translate into rural opposition to what may seem to others like common-sense staffing mandates (for example, bipartisan rural opposition to the federal staffing mandate for nursing homes proposed by the Biden administration in 2023).15 Virtue is not necessarily absent in such opposition; often it is burdened by the pairing of scarcity of human resources and the necessity of access to services.

There is much more that could be explored here in relation to Ward’s work and rural approaches to Christian ethics, and I look forward to further discussion. For example, Ward’s drawing from the wisdom of womanist theologians to regard communities “as fertile grounds where virtue can grow” (108) certainly invites dialogue with rural contexts as moral communities. Additionally, Ward’s three-part understanding of exactly “how life circumstances function as moral luck” (110–11) provides a useful hermeneutic by which to read particular contexts, including the rural. In sum, Ward’s work holds a good number of implications and applications ready to be drawn out further.