ABSTRACT
Ruralites are portrayed as either very, very good or very, very bad. Rural people are either saluting the flag, saying their prayers, or eating a hearty breakfast, or they are lurking behind billboards in unmarked sheriffs’ cars. One of the outcomes that may be credited to our inability to agree on the nature of rural-urban differences is the contemporary difficulty in producing a usable definition of ruralism. In the past the problem was solved by defining “rural” not only in terms of the most obvious quality of rural life, low population density, but also in terms of the life-style, economic status, and attitudinal and behavioral qualities of the people who lived in the sparsely settled areas. A well-documented entry in the catalog of rural-urban differences is that rural people feel differently about social issues—matters concerning religion, sex, marriage and the family, feminism, and so forth.
