Asking "What is the connection between churches and barns?" is the wrong question to the extent that it implies an essential difference that must be remediated by an explanation. The assumption implicit in the question then is two-fold: the assumption of an already given dissonance or disparity between the two things and the further assumption that an explanation, that is a transform from a social to an intellecual account, is necessary to render valid any assertion of a relation. With the division of the academic turf into many fractured specialties, even within single departments, and with the bias of the academic establishment, particularly within the liberal arts, to traditional text-based intellectual history, it becomes difficult to understand the nature of rural life and the complementarity of the primary institutions with it. In the academy, churches and barns have nothing to do with each other.
The history of American religion, and within this broad field Southern religion, is distortatively skewed by the bias toward traditional printed sources: bibles, hymnals, psalters, prayer books, collections of homilies, and tracts. The fundamental hypotheses of interpretation then converge upon the limited set of ideas that texts of this sort reflect. Left out of the account of religion are the social and ritual elements that often were as real and in many cases more real than the stated doctrines but which were not preserved by print. Because such materials are more difficult to access and because they require different research techniques, these materials often count for a minor or non-existent component of the history of American or Southern religion, and the forms of experience represented in these materials are disparaged in reference to the "normative" concepts derived from printed sources. African American--slave--history, culture, and religion, for instance, until recently have been slighted and distorted because so few text-type materials survived.
Much rectification of these distortions of African-American history has been accomplished by the researches into oral history, by means of new methodologies for analyzing slave narratives, and by the convergent application of studies of material and folk culture. At the same time, the last three decades have seen the disclosure of an enormous amount of written if not printed material in the form of letters, notes, and diaries from slaves, women, and non-privileged whites; these written materials are now generating a new documentary basis for the assessment of the intellectual content of American and Southern religion across a wider spectrum of social, economic and cultural lines than has been possible before. Members of the groups just mentioned wrote out their thoughts on a wide range of issues and were also engaged in reflection upon creedal and other intellectual issues.
We must keep in mind, however, that no culture is defined by its written materials, and the imposition of the test of textuality is a bias denoting largely the privileged estate of traditional inquiry. Certainly we know much about the Harappan Culture of the Indus valley even though the "script" has never been definitively decyphered. We know much about the Amerindians and other so-called "primitives" even though these cultures did not produce textual materials. And we know about these and other similar cultures because we rely upon methodologies other than those associated with the interpretation of printed texts. Were not the American academy so biased against the poor of Appalachia and the South and against rural life in general, we would understand that these same methodologies that have brought to light the riches of these other non-print cultures can reveal much about the culture of rural America and Southern religion in particular.
The rural life of America, Appalachia, and of the South has a richness and integrity in itself and a cohesiveness among its forms and institutions that escapes the bias toward intellectual history and printed-source research. It is only the most absurd misunderstanding that would ask for an account of the relation of barns and churches as if the two were comparable or as if barns somehow were related in some cryptic manner to the creedal content of the churches. Rural people did not worship either their barns or their agricultural way of life any more than they worshipped their churches. Nor were the barns part of an extended creedal or doctrinal system derived from the churches. Churches and barns alike have an anterior, a more primitive, a prior rationale that cannot be elucidated within an extended creedal or ethical system.
The anterior rationale of churches and barns--along with stores and shops of various sorts along with a myriad of places and activities occurring on the landscape--is the existence and persistence of a common, cohesive culture that is the matrix of all these things. This culture is the experienced meaning of a shared way of life that is somatically known and lived before any articulation of creed or differentiation of functional components of rural life is made. People live upon the land, doing what the living requires, and out of this living upon the land, many related processes and institutions emerge. The emergence of these processes may physically detach the store from the house or the shop from the barn, but this detachment only serves to locate these functions for the sake of convenience of access; it does not break the prior fabric of life from which the processes arise or from which they have any such meaning as they possess.
Today, as we look at the country-side, we see the effects of the "breaking" of the order of rural life: decaying houses and barns, over-grown cemeteries, stores sitting empty and vine-covered, and other remnants such as silos, dams, windmills, farm machinery scattered across the land in a loose array which is only partially suggestive of a former coherence. What we see are monuments of decline and decay, not the former order of which these were the manifest tokens. So decayed are these physical remains and so fragmented the social order, so in eclipse the way of life these remains once pointed to, that it becomes a near-impossible conceptual feat to imaginatively re-enter this rural world and appraise the order of these things. We cannot understand these things because we cannot indwell the entity, the whole, the gestalt, of which these particulars were simply parts. And we cannot indwell the gestalt of rural life because the entry is not via text or diagram, not via explicit knowledge, but via a kind of experience that is acquired only by hewing and drawing and pulling and hoeing and singing: that is, by living the life.
This is not to say that this way of life is forever and systematically elusive: it is not. It is rather to say that any approach to it must abandon the conventional categories and methods of inquiry and begin anew with such remnants as there are of material object and social fabric and engage those remnants in a primary somatic encounter: lift the rocks of the wall, smell the mustiness of the grain bin, hear the wind sift through the battens of the barn wall, hear the weighted squeak of the barn roof loaded under heavy wind. Nor is this romance and nostalgia for quaint and by-gone things. Rock walls whether at the edge of a field, on the perimeter of a cemetery, or in the foundation of a barn or church were bought at a price, a measured value of labor, familiar to all rural people and estimated as part of the human cost of helping a neighbor with a field or a community raise a church. The subtle difference between dry and wet mustiness in the grain bin made the difference between good corn and rotten long before digital moisture meters ever made their way to barns. Wind load on a roof and the experienced modification of barn design to lessen lift made the avoidance of disaster possible long before aerodynamics was ever a word in use among engineers.
Churches and barns, along with the other material artifacts of rural life, arose from a common culture: from a nurturant under-condition much like the soil itself. This culture was a direct, primary culture in that it did not require nor did it typically give rise to second order experience or reflection. Rural life did not require its members to think about it. The reality of the life and the place of people within in was acquired before birth in roles and relations already ordered and measured by the work it took to live on the land. To see this order as necessity is to break it by reflection, by the distance of conceptualization and analysis. If most rural people died believing what their grandparents were born believing, this is not a token of necessity nor of stasis but a manifestation of continuity, of familiar life lived and passed on. Nor is it even the case that it was a matter of belief as if that can be distinguished from the labor or the laughter. Rural people lived as the people there had lived before them and this living bridged the generations.
In this common culture, held by life and experience not by thought, church raisings and barn raisings were the same kind of event: each was an expression of the unity of life among people who knew that the part at whatever point implied the whole. Life was a clothpiece, a fabric threaded together going and coming, and nothing fell outside of this unity. This life was sacred at every turn and sacramental as much at the stall or the forge as at the altar rail. Nothing fell outside of this sacrality and was left unconsecrated; nor was this religion a matter of Sunday only and of sermon or lesson. The essence of rural religion is not belief or doctrine, not ritual or morality, not the polity of the congregation; the essence of rural religion is the consecrated life. It was in the literal sense, liturgy: the work of the people--the entirety of life from the table to the stall, from the field to the store, from the cotton to the quilt.