There was a time when Wendell Berry was a passionate and even amusing critic of Christianity. This is seen perhaps most explicitly in one of his earliest published essays, “The Long-Legged House.”
In the essay, Berry describes the experience of repairing an old cabin built by a relative of his. That cabin would become the home that he and his soon-to-be wife would move into it after their wedding. (For long-time readers of Berry’s work, the cabin by the river that Jayber Crow moves to in his dying days is the fictional imagining of this actual cabin where Mr. and Mrs. Berry began their married life together.) Much of the essay is taken up with the meaningfulness of the work of restoring such a place, the ways in which that work tied Berry to his place and his people, and how the preparing of that place for his wife would also set something of a course for their life together.
Then Berry turns to the church, an institution about which he had virtually nothing to…