The heartland of America has changed.

This week my actors and I had a one day tour to central Iowa.  Our route from St. Louis took us through Hannibal, Missouri, home town of Mark Twain.  In my youth, Missourians were proud of Twain, the curmudgeonly author whose Huckleberry Finn remains a masterpiece of American literature.  He was an icon.  People would imitate him.  He was part of our fiber, the Will Rogers of the 19th Century, the Abraham Lincoln of humor and letters; he was an image of Americana, as were Tom and Huck and so many of his characters.  He was sort of the Dickens of the West, and his life – from gold prospector to Mississippi riverboat pilot to international celebrity – was a kind of American Everyman’s life.  And Hannibal was a tacky tourist town, where busloads of school kids would go on field trips, where you could tour the Sam Clemens boyhood home, where you could buy odd little Mark Twain souvenirs, and where the spirit of the great funny-but-sad man could be always be enjoyed.

Now Hannibal sits oddly empty.  School groups avoid it like the plague.  Mark Twain was politically incorrect, you see – and the greatest novel ever written against slavery is seen as racist because of its use of “the N word”.  Not only that, Hannibal is not cool.  Surely, it never was; it was always a down-home family friendly destination.  But now it caters to childless yuppies on day trips (since the family market is not what it was, and what’s left of it is effectively illiterate).  At least half of Hamlet’s downtown has now become a faux arts center with arts and crafts shops, trying to draw the NPR listeners up from St. Louis.  This simple little river town has now put on airs, and the airs smell funny.

But I’ve known about this for years, as my travels often take me through Hannibal.  What I did not know is the change to be found in central Iowa.

Think of Iowa and what comes to your mind?  Silent farmers, Norman Rockwell settings, “The Music Man”, “Field of Dreams”.  But what should come to your mind?  Mexican restaurants, Spanish language Masses, poor Hispanics living in dilapidated houses.  The demographic downturn that has resulted from the family farm morphing more and more into the corporate farm and that has much to do with  contraception and the capitalist magnet of the cities, is transforming the heartland.

Iowa’s population gains, if any, now seem to come from Hispanic immigrants.  And since these immigrants are at least nominally Catholic, the Church may benefit, for the native Catholics who are left on the plains are , in effect, anything but Catholic.  Catechesis no longer exists, especially in Catholic schools and religious education programs.  The young Catholics we meet, most notably in rural America, even those who are on the verge of confirmation, do not appear to know even such basic things as who St. Paul was or who King David was.   This varies parish to parish and diocese to diocese, and the homeschooled kids always know more than the parochial and public school kids, but the young native Iowans know as much about the Bible and the Faith as they do about Mark Twain.

And if asked, they’d tell you both are politically incorrect and should be avoided.