A Community of Faith
By Chris Weinkopf
It was on a Sunday morning a few years ago, just after Mass at St. Sebastian’s, our local parish, when my wife and I got the unmistakable sense that our new hometown of Santa Paula, California, is a different kind of place. Standing out on the church patio, we found ourselves charmed by a friendly couple and their cheerful, impeccably mannered children. “How many kids do you have?” I asked, making conversation. The response, from both husband and wife, came in unison: “Only four.”
Only four?
We were 50 miles north of Los Angeles—where no one, except maybe recent Latin American immigrants, has four kids, let alone more. But looking around our parish in this sleepy, agricultural town, it’s easy to see how four children might seem like a relative few. The place is bursting with kids. Big families dressed in their Sunday best pack entire pews. The back wall of the church is invariably lined up with dads jostling impatient toddlers, hoping to keep them quiet.
While this spectacle might evoke horror at the Southern California chapter of Zero Population Growth, here it’s just normal. Not all Santa Paula families are large, of course, but no one seems to think there is anything strange about those that are. Nor does anyone think it odd that many of the families in town homeschool, or don’t watch TV. Why should they? You would be hard-pressed to find a more cheerful, more generous, kinder group of people anywhere.
Santa Paula is a different kind of place. Deep in the heart of Blue-state, secular, mightily individualistic California, it’s an oasis of conservative-minded Catholics for whom faith and family are the highest priorities. The community embodies some of the trends that Rod Dreher identifies in his new book Crunchy Cons. “Crunchy conservatism,” Dreher writes, “is not…a political program; it’s a sensibility, an attitude, a fundamental stance toward reality, and a pretty good road map to a rich, responsible, fulfilling, and above all joyful life. It’s about living a life mindful of honoring the wisdom in tradition, and in so doing building a tradition to pass on to one’s children and to future generations. It doesn’t aim to make folks wealthier, except where it counts: in their relationships to each other.”
The only difference is that in Dreher’s book, these earthy folks are a lonesome lot scattered far and wide across the country. But in Santa Paula, a sizable cluster of them live happily within a few square miles. Here, their countercultural values permeate the entire community, such that they’re not really countercultural at all. They’re just, well, normal.
How did this city of 30,000 come to be this way? The source can be found in the foothills just north of town, six miles up the windy, two-lane Highway 150. There, in the shadow of the mountains of the Los Padres National Forest, sits a small collection of mission-style buildings that make up the campus of Thomas Aquinas College.
TAC, as it’s known, is a different sort of school. Dead white males aren’t despised; they make up the bulk of the great-books curriculum. Faith isn’t considered the antithesis of reason, but its foundation. Young couples date with an eye toward marriage, not “hooking up.” And the moral teachings of Christian faith aren’t sneered at, but held up as models for living a meaningful life in the modern world.
Comfort in numbers
Thomas Aquinas College is a tiny school, with just 359 students, but in Santa Paula, it looms large. Between its faculty and alumni who stay in the area after graduation, it has created the critical mass necessary to make the sort of people who fill the pews at St. Sebastian’s not the eccentrics they might seem to the jaded mainstream American culture, but just—normal. And Santa Paula suggests how religious institutions might remake America one small community at a time. “We were living in Vermont and I was getting my master’s degree,” says Justin Schneir, recalling the decision that led him and his wife, Hope, to move across the country to Santa Paula in 2002. The Schneirs liked Vermont well enough, they just felt alone in trying to live out their faith there and create the family life they envisioned for themselves. “We started this Catholic group at our college,” Hope recalls. “I was the president, Justin was the vice president, and there were like two other people in it.”
Then Hope became pregnant with the couple’s first child, their son Elijah, and that sparked “a conversation about what kind of environment and culture” they wanted to raise their children in. As undergraduates, the couple had attended Ohio’s Franciscan University of Steubenville, another hub of Catholic family life that Justin likens to a cultural womb—“a place where you’re nurtured and prepared to live in the world.”
“That’s something we wanted for our children,” says Justin—an environment that would support their values, while shielding their kids from many of the excesses of today’s hardened, cynical, hyper-sexualized culture. On a trip visiting family in California, they were introduced to several like-minded young families at a Santa Paula dinner party. That convinced them this was where they wanted to be. Months later, without a job and with a six-week-old baby in tow, the Schneirs moved to town.
They took up residence in an apartment complex with three TAC alums and their young families for neighbors. Soon, through an informal Catholic professional network that operates in the area, Justin was able to find a job selling insurance for a Catholic-owned firm that covers most of the local Catholic owned businesses. Four years and two more children later, they couldn’t be gladder about their move.
Pasquale Vuoso, the pastor at St. Sebastian’s, describes the TAC-spawned Catholic subculture of Santa Paula as having “a certain seriousness about liturgy and the Catholic faith that is very refreshing and encouraging, and has a hopeful future.” It’s a faith that spills over into every facet of life, most notably in the way people treat each other. The members of this community, he says, “help people on a very practical level—there’s a very practical dimension to their works.”
In times of need, people here look to the communion of believers. As David Shaneyfelt, a local lawyer and TAC alum who served several years as the college’s director of development, puts it, “Whether it be major bad things like a death in the family, or inconveniences like the birth of a child, you’ve got an immediate network of people you can count on to bring you meals, watch your kids, help with the chores, and ease you through the bad times. And people in general don’t have that.”
When my wife and I moved here, we knew nothing of the local subculture—we came because we had family nearby and property was cheaper than in some of the neighboring cities. Yet when our first child was born, meals came nightly—literally for weeks—from people we’d never even met before. “It’s just part of living,” Shaneyfelt explains. “When your neighbor is down, having a problem, you pitch in and help out.…When people see that, and experience that, they see the beauty of it and want to be a part of it.”
Paying a price
Not only do they want to be part of it, they’re willing to sacrifice to make it happen. Michael Van Hecke is a TAC alumnus who returned to the area several years after his graduation to become headmaster of St. Augustine Academy, a local independent Catholic school. “I had offers from schools all over the country,” he says, and “a number of them would have paid better…but we really wanted to be part of the community here.” So the Van Heckes accepted a more modest lifestyle in exchange for a richer family life.
They aren’t alone in making that tradeoff. Were it merely a matter of real estate, there would be few powerful reasons to choose Santa Paula as a place to live. Although surrounded by natural beauty—mountains to the north and south, miles of fruit orchards to the east and west—the town itself is rather plain and modest. Its heyday as a rail, oil, and citrus center was brief and long ago. By the early 1900s, deeper oil reserves had been discovered elsewhere, and a coastal rail route relegated the Santa Paula spur of the Southern Pacific Railroad to secondary status. The city never fully recovered. Today, other than some fancy old homes along the main street, the valley floor is dotted with small, 1960s-era tract houses and run-down apartment units that largely serve migrant farm workers. Santa Paula has more than its share of crime and gangs, and the public schools, like those in most of Southern California’s less affluent areas, are weak.
Even so, it’s not a cheap place to live. Housing prices have more than doubled since 2001, and a modest three-bedroom commands upward of $500,000. But many families consider the smaller houses and California’s high taxes a small price to pay for all they get in return. So families eat out less; they don’t go to so many movies; they buy clothes at thrift shops; they forego travel and other perks. They also tend to either homeschool or educate their kids privately, at great personal inconvenience or financial cost.
It’s possible, of course, to live this kind of life anywhere, and millions of family-oriented Americans do. But in many places it is harder. Here, no child will be teased for wearing handme-down clothes, or think it odd that he has to share a bedroom with his siblings. Here, moms aren’t made to feel as though they’re “wasting” their education by choosing to raise their kids full time. Here, homeschoolers aren’t considered freakish, unsocialized outsiders; they’re some of the brightest, nicest kids in town.
The anchor
The role of Thomas Aquinas College in creating and sustaining this community can’t be overstated. TAC was founded in 1971, a time when most colleges were doing away with faith and many traditional standards of education, behavior, and virtue. In this environment, a group of Catholic educators decided to create a liberal-arts college with a fixed curriculum in which students read the great works of Western Civilization, not textbooks, and learn the material in Socratic seminars, not lectures. A rigorous study of science, literature, and philosophy, with an emphasis on Aristotle, would culminate in a rigorous study of theology, with an emphasis on St. Thomas Aquinas.
The result was TAC, which, shortly after its founding, moved to the hills above Santa Paula. Over the years, as the college has grown, so has its faculty and staff, increasing its influence in town. Then there are alumni like Michael Van Hecke and David Shaneyfelt, who, after studying here, decided to raise their families in the community. Each year, more alumni follow in their footsteps. So, too, do people with no official connection to the college—like the Schneirs, or my own family—who are nonetheless drawn to the subculture that’s sprung up around it.
Part of that subculture is the collection of businesses and social organizations that sustain it. A local construction company owned by a TAC alumnus and staffed by Catholics handles most of the community’s home remodels. There’s a Catholic-owned law firm and a financial-service company, which, while doing plenty of business in the broader marketplace, meet a special need for those who want to hire businesses that share their values.
Most impressive of all are the tremendous education resources that have evolved to serve local parents. Santa Paula and the surrounding towns of Ojai, Fillmore, and Ventura boast a rich network of homeschooling families that put on park days, field trips, dances, plays, and sporting events to provide ample opportunity for enrichment and socialization. The homeschooling group offers cooperative classes, in which parents who are gifted in a particular discipline—say biology or Latin—offer instruction for the rest of the group. Homeschooling families can also enroll in Mother of Divine Grace School, a locally-based institution (founded and run by the wife of a TAC founder) that offers nationwide curriculum and teaching assistance. And for those who prefer not to homeschool, there is Van Hecke’s St. Augustine Academy, which offers an authentically Catholic education from fourth grade all the way through high school.
In a sense, Santa Paula is a massive support group for people who want to create a more traditional family life. It offers all the necessary social, economic, and cultural resources and, more important, affirmation. “In terms of living a Catholic life, there’s just no substitute for seeing other people do it,” explains Jen Dunlap, a recent TAC alum who lives in town with her husband David and their daughter, Isabel. “You see how doable it really is.”
For all the opportunities, there are obvious potential pitfalls in such a community. Shaneyfelt observes that there’s a latent danger of becoming “Catholic-Amish…where you help each other but you don’t help anybody else.” Father Pasquale at St. Sebastian’s acknowledges the possibility of his congregation becoming divided. The TAC/homeschooling crowd, he says “take their faith so seriously that perhaps others who aren’t so serious feel as though they’re second-class citizens, and they say, gee, we’ve been here all our lives and we feel like we’re on the outside looking in.” More generally, some would argue that the insular, escapist nature of this sort of community is both unrealistic and at odds with the Christian ideal of going out and evangelizing the world.
Certainly no community is perfect. Everyone I interviewed for this article stressed that Santa Paula, idyllic though it may seem, is every bit as subject to human fallibility as other communities. Provincialism, false pride, and intolerance are natural temptations in any community that tries to set itself apart. And yet, in a society of believers actively pursuing personal spiritual growth—and one given to the debate and dialogue fostered by TAC’s pedagogy—these are concerns that are often discussed and actively addressed.
A part of real-life America
For all the possibilities of this community trying to turn its back on the world, there are many clear ways in which it is reaching out. On Friday nights, families gather at St. Sebastian’s to make sandwiches for the poor. A children’s dance troupe performs regularly at nearby old-age homes. Many in town actively support a regional crisis-pregnancy center.
The large families may also encourage tolerance. As Shaneyfelt, a father of seven, notes: “You start to see with your own kids that some have individual needs that are different from your other kids. And so when you hear somebody is doing something different, you think, ‘Well, makes sense to me. Far be it for me to judge them because they’ve got to do what they think is best.’”
Meanwhile, the successes of religious communities like Santa Paula have the potential to inspire other citizens to have the courage to build their own families and communities in accordance with their moral values. Santa Paula is only one of many such towns with a strong religious flavor that exist all across America. There are other Catholic communities in places like Steubenville, Ohio; the area around the University of Dallas;
northwestern Virginia; and Ave Maria, Florida. Evangelical Christians have carved out flourishing countercultural communities in places like Grand Rapids, Michigan; Moscow, Idaho; and the environs of Wheaton College in Illinois. Indeed, most American cities now have strong family-oriented traditionalist communities clustered around certain of their churches. Still, the size and density of these oases of faith vary widely, and for many religious, tradition-minded families, living a countercultural life in today’s world remains a difficult, lonely burden.
But over the last generation, many places have sprung up in America where, to a surprising and growing degree, living in a community of faith is just—well, normal.
TAE contributing writer Chris Weinkopf is editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Daily News.
