In A Prairie Faith: The Religious Life of Laura Ingalls Wilder, historian John Fry invites readers into a detailed exploration of the celebrated author of the Little House on the Prairie series. His goal is evaluating the nature of her Christian faith—a significant and humbling task for any scholar.
While other Wilder biographers have either ignored this topic or simply assumed that she wrote from a Christian perspective, Fry aims to address the question of Wilder’s faith in all its complexity. As historian Mark Noll points out in his foreword, the findings in this book “can supplement, modify, or, in some cases, overthrow what everyone thought they knew about an author whose books are still much read and, by many, much loved.” Thus, “fans of the Little House books eager to enlist the author for ‘their team’ may be disappointed with Fry’s persuasive conclusion.”
John E. Miller, an earlier biographer who wrote about Wilder in a series of books, concluded that faith was central to her life and outlook. By contrast, Fry argues “that while Christianity was important to Laura’s life, it was not central.”
In this multifaceted analysis, Fry explores several questions, including the following: What sort of Christian was Wilder, who regularly attended church but never joined any as a member? How did her parents influence her faith journey? What should we make of the affiliation she and her husband, Almanzo, shared with Freemasonry? And how can we square her Christian belief with demeaning references to Native Americans and African Americans in the Little House series?
As Fry evaluates possible answers, he paints a vivid portrait of the American frontier as it changed over the course of Wilder’s lifetime, which spanned the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. Readers learn about her experiences of traveling through the Midwest in covered wagons, living amid what Fry calls the “Christian landscape” of the region’s small towns, and even discovering the emerging world of air travel.
Fry organizes the book chronologically, devoting detailed attention to each successive Little House book. Beyond the narrative itself, he includes a wealth of helpful material, including regional maps and an appendix on pastors serving in the churches of Mansfield, Missouri, where Wilder began her writing career and lived for most of her adult life.
Fry’s afterword, which describes his own journey in studying Wilder’s life and thought, is interesting in its own right. Having grown up on a farm in Western Pennsylvania, Fry has a deep affinity with and commitment to studying its history. One cannot help thinking that this background leaves Fry ideally suited to offer insights that scholars in more urban contexts might neglect.
On the book’s central matter, categorizing Wilder’s faith, Fry’s scholarship aims to help readers guard against what he describes as the “tempt[ation]” common in contemporary America (and beyond, I might add) “to make assumptions about other people’s spirituality.” There are certain histories, he observes, that tend to classify believers of Wilder’s era as either fundamentalist or modernist, in keeping with the dominant theological fault line of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But Wilder, he argues, cannot be easily placed into either camp. Rather, he regards her faith as “conventional across a great range of moderate Protestantism” and “entirely typical for many Protestants, especially in rural areas.”
Wilder’s parents raised her on morals informed by biblical principles, respect for the Bible, quiet observances of the Lord’s Day, and nightly prayers. She memorized Scripture, regularly went to church when not traveling, and attended Sunday school with Almanzo even when there were no preaching services, which weren’t always weekly occurrences in rural communities. As a teenager she wrote poetry that shows evidence of having internalized the Christian faith, and prayer was important to her in adulthood. Inside her Bible she kept a handwritten list of verses, copied from a 1943 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, on facing life’s most difficult moments.
In weighing the evidence for Wilder’s personal faith, Fry underscores the overlap between her brand of Christianity and mere stoicism. As he writes, both Laura and Almanzo devoted themselves to the virtues of “frugality and hard work.” The Little House novels depict the hardships endured by nearly all rural Midwesterners in the late 19th century, but they focus more on themes of self-reliance than on God’s role in permitting the hardships or offering deliverance from them.
Fry notes that Wilder’s representation of Christianity “is oriented toward God’s rules for behavior and right living, not the gospel of God’s free offer of salvation in Jesus Christ.” In a 1936 talk, she listed the values that she hoped her books would convey to children: “courage, self reliance, independence, integrity and helpfulness.” As Fry emphasizes, there is no mention here of the church or the Christian faith.
Wilder was typically reserved in how she expressed her faith. She was not comfortable with others’ public testimonies of their experiences with God. In her words, “It someway offended my sense of privacy. It seemed to me that the things between one and God should be between him and God like loving ones [sic] mother.”
By and large, Fry suggests, Wilder “nurtured [her] faith by what Reformed Christians call the ordinary means of grace: reading God’s Word, praying, and attending worship.” But her attendance wasn’t always consistent. It is noteworthy that Laura and Almanzo chose to attend the Methodist Episcopal Church not only because she disliked the Presbyterian doctrine of predestination but also because she disdained any expectation of strict Sunday observances. And Fry makes a noteworthy comparison of Laura’s limited church involvement with the full-on commitment of her Baptist friend Neta Seal.
Another eye-opening theme is Laura and Almanzo’s Freemason roots. Fry traces the Ingalls family’s lifelong involvement, observing that while Laura’s parents were church members as well as Masons, Almanzo and Laura never held church membership anywhere. Almanzo was a master Mason until his death, and until the 1930s, Laura was a leader in the Order of the Eastern Star, a Masonic auxiliary organization.
As Fry notes, however, Masonic membership was common for residents of small towns in the late 19th century. He observes, too, that leadership positions were not available to women in the Methodist Episcopal church that the Wilders attended. All this suggests that Wilder probably regarded her Masonic work not as incompatible with church involvement but as part of her civic duty.
Fry brings a thoughtful and nuanced perspective to critical controversies surrounding Wilder’s representations of Native and African Americans in her books. While concluding that some of her portraits are indefensible, he provides context.
In the Little House books, white settlers sometimes refer to members of the Osage Nation as “savages.” But the book’s settlers lived with a realistic fear of being massacred, given real-life memories of episodes like the 1862 Dakota War, when tensions with the federal government and newly arriving settlers precipitated a wave of killings. As Fry concludes, “there are no obvious winners and losers” in Little House on the Prairie. There is “no simple story line leading to the wilderness being tamed by the farmer or American Indians being driven away by whites. At the end of the book, in fact, both the Indians and the Ingallses have left their homes behind.”
Another book in the series, Little Town on the Prairie, shocks modern consciences by including a blackface minstrel show. Fry notes, however, that such forms of entertainment were regrettably popular during the period in which the story was set. Moreover, he finds no evidence that Wilder harbored any personal prejudice toward Black Americans.
In Fry’s judgment, the books’ depictions of the Native American and Black characters “show that Laura did not understand the Bible’s injunctions to love one’s neighbor in the same way that we do today.” Ultimately, however, he writes not in condemnation for his subject but in the “hope that having a greater understanding of Wilder’s actual life and beliefs will enable us to love her and others of our neighbors who lived in the past better.” In this, he has amply succeeded, producing a highly readable account of great value to scholars and Little House fans alike.
Monika B. Hilder is professor of English at Trinity Western University, where she is also codirector of the Inklings Institute of Canada. She is the author of Surprised by the Feminine: A Rereading of C. S. Lewis and Gender and Letters to Annie: A Grandmother’s Dreams of Fairy Tale Princesses, Princes, & Happily Ever After.
