Workism and the Gospel

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Today, we find ourselves in the midst of the “Great Resignation,” a massive job-hopping movement, the endpoint of which is far from clear. Indeed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, even before the pandemic, resignations had been rising steadily for over a decade, and much of what we are seeing now may be a continuation of that longstanding rise. Identifying the big stories of why workers are increasingly prone to switch jobs is no easy task, but according to one narrative, we are seeing nothing less than a referendum on the toxic values of the contemporary American workplace. Before the pandemic, so the narrative goes, workers were personally experiencing the moral bankruptcy of never-enough work culture. The pandemic has only brought these experiences into greater clarity as so many, shaken out of their normal routines, have taken a step back to ask themselves what they really want and truly care about. The result: lots of dissatisfied workers voting with their feet. 

In 2019, Derek Thompson of The Atlantic coined the term “workism” for a value system that gives work the highest place of honor in human life, and Thompson believes it is this value system against which many workers are rightfully rebelling. Per Thompson, workism is “the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.” An interesting feature of Thompson’s definition is that it identifies not merely a de facto value system (i.e., show me where you spend your time, and I’ll show you what you love) but an aspirational one. No one aims to become an alcoholic or set the high score for hours devoted to screen time, but someone who has embraced workism may well aspire to be called a “workaholic,” take pride in regularly clocking seventy-hour work weeks, and think nothing of saying to himself every year, “I was productive, but how can I get even more done next year?” 

Thompson explicitly suggests that workism is one of our nation’s secular religions, one especially prominent among college graduates and elite men. And he is not alone in his depiction of work values among at least large swaths of Americans. Like Thompson, Erin Griffith sees a “cult of work” among her Bay-area peers and ties this cult to the decline of traditional religion. Griffiths compares the “hustle-harder” “hymns” of tech culture to “Soviet-era propaganda, which promoted impossible feats of worker productivity to motivate the labour force.” Interestingly, the casualties of this culture include not only those who fully embrace the work-is-everything way of life but also those who do not fall into step and subsequently feel guilty or even ashamed, as suggested by the title of Griffith’s piece, “Why are Young People Pretending to Love Work?” Lyman Stone and Laurie DeRose of the Institute for Family Studies have looked at the question of how attitudes toward work influence family lives, particularly when it comes to issues of fertility. They found that workist values (Stone and DeRose explicitly employ Thompson’s language) depress fertility at both the individual and social levels. Most recently, Sarah Jaffe’s book, Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, takes aim at the emotional demands of modern employers (e.g., “passion for sales required”). While a labor-of-love sounds enticing, Jaffe warns, “[i]t is not a victory to have work demand our love along with our time, our brains, and our bodies.” 

The Gospel and Workism

What might the Gospel have to say to an (alleged?) culture of workism? Thompson and company paint a depressing picture, but it is not hard to find Christian discussions of work that sound rather workist, even if those discussions are embedded within theistic rather than secular frameworks. Consider Dorothy Sayers’ scathing essay, “Why Work?” which is perhaps the single most influential piece of the past hundred years when it comes to a Protestant theology of work.

“Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do,” writes Sayers. “It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.”

When I have taught Sayers’ piece to undergraduates, my students almost always initially interpret her as endorsing the sort of “do what you love” mantra that Thompson (and others) are critiquing. 

To be sure, there is much in Sayers’ piece that is out of step with workism. Perhaps most importantly, the focus of Sayers’ piece is not in fact the need for Christians to work harder and thereby experience subjective fulfillment in whatever job they might find themselves. Rather, Sayers’ emphasis is on the theological importance of investing our talents and labor into making things worth making and making them well. And Sayers is abundantly clear that not all things that businesses produce are well-made things worthy of human labor in the first place. Indeed, says Sayers, the economy of pre-war England was one built on “trash and waste.” Feeling passionate about marketing plastic knick-knacks and pulling 80-hour workweeks to move to the top of the corporate ladder are quite clearly not the things Sayers has in mind when she writes of work as the thing “one lives to do.”

If we turn to Wesley (who, it should be noted, does not have a developed theology of work), we likewise find some workist-sounding rhetoric. His sermon most cited in such discussions, “The Use of Money,” exhorts listeners to observe three rules when it comes to money: (1) gain all you can, (2) save all you can, and (3) give all you can. The remainder of the sermon is dedicated to clarifying these rules. Regarding the first rule (the one most relevant for our purposes), Wesley says that although we should strive to make as much money as possible, some crucial limits must be observed in how we acquire this money: we should not sacrifice our own life or health, deprive ourselves of needed rest, or engage in any business that is inherently sinful or that hurts our neighbor. Notably, Wesley’s uses of “health” and “hurt” are quite broad, cutting off the options for legitimate employment more narrowly than might first be obvious. For instance, to Wesley, one ought not attempt to “entice away” another’s employees, since that would harm another’s business. Also out of bounds is any business that directly or indirectly “tends to impair health” or encourages or preys on intemperance. 

Wesley’s sermon, like Sayers’ essay, is a hard-hitting piece. Certainly, no one will come away from Wesley thinking that a crushing 80-hour workweek is to be admired. This is a matter of simple math: an 80-hour work week combined with a weekly Sabbath and eight hours of nightly sleep leaves less than three hours a day for all other needs and obligations—including hygiene, prayer, and time with family and non-work friends. Still, at least at first blush, the maximizing rhetoric of Wesley’s rules sounds eerily like hustle-culture, albeit now explicitly aimed at serving the good of others and ultimately glorifying God.

Isn’t This All So Impractical?

When I have my (mostly Christian) students read theologies of work, by far the most common objection I hear is something along the lines of, “This is just completely impractical in the real world.” While it is tempting to brush this complaint off as the standard undergraduate criticism of all-things-theoretical, we would do well to consider the possibility that my students are on to something. Yes, we all affirm: God works; God created us to work; an implication of the fall is that work involves toil and frustration, but work does not cease to be good, God-ordained, and a part of human purpose. We may go on to identify all the good functions of human work: care of creation, culture-making, creation-restoration, and the ushering in the kingdom of God in all its glory. But when we are done making our lists many of us are left wondering to what extent we can realistically expect to accomplish these purposes through our paid work. And let’s be clear: most of us need the paychecks and health insurance that paid work provides. The point is not that only “caring” or “spiritual” professions are legitimate forms of Christo-centric culture-making or kingdom-bringing. Rather, the point is that, even recognizing the dignity of manufacturing a good copier or writing a thought-provoking blog post, much paid employment in the present economic environment is deeply morally complicated. (On this issue, it is fascinating to note how many of Wesley’s examples of “hurting our neighbour” have clear parallels in common business practices of today). Moreover, individual workers often have little to no control over the policies and decisions at the root of the moral complexity in which they find their labor embedded.

My students have no trouble understanding Sayers’ comment about an economy founded on “trash and waste.” Like Ben Witherington, they understand that “[o]ur economy is based on demand, on desire, on lusts and longings, and on need, not all of which are either good or good for us.” (Witherington’s example of a product whose demand far outpaces its worth is sugary soft drinks, but other examples are not hard to find). Certainly, there are companies that deal almost exclusively in goods and services that are good for people and the planet and that market these wares in ethically responsible ways (as opposed to, say, simply seeking ever-increasing market saturation). But many companies do not operate in this manner or else have other ethical drawbacks, such as an anti-rest work culture. Nor do most of us have the luxury of simply naming our preferred employer and finding ourselves with a job offer. In light of these realities, both Sayers’ and Wesley’s directives can feel impossibly burdensome. 

A Way Through: Hope and Lament

Ten years ago, while I was teaching a unit on the ethics of work, a student of mine made an observation that I found striking. “When the Israelites were slaves in Egypt,” she said, “their work included shoring up the wealth of the Egyptians and building houses of worship for the Egyptian gods. That was part of the Israelites’ oppression.” Certainly, the enslaved Israelites are not to be criticized for materially contributing to the worship of false gods or their own oppression. At the same time, my student’s point was that an honest theology of work will both acknowledge and lament what their work actually accomplished.

I think of my student’s wise words whenever I encounter approaches to work that insist that “all work is equally loved by God” or “no job is better than any other.” Such platitudes are typically well-intended, the speakers motivated by a desire to break down the hierarchies that humans have created, but they can also be dismissive of peoples’ informed reflections on their own less-than-ideal work situations. To bring this point to the present-day United States, when a person confesses that she cannot see much meaning in her job, we would certainly do well to make sure that she is not presupposing an overly narrow definition of “meaning.” We would likewise do well to help her consider ways her job might have a place in God’s kingdom. But we should also listen to her to find out why she feels this way. We should consider the possibility that she is right to lament some—even many—of the uses and fruits of her labor. Such lament can be appropriate even if no better options exist for her at present (given, say, the realities of familial responsibilities and the job market). Indeed, we can lament with her while also hoping with her—in the near term, for opportunities to make a positive difference in whatever spheres of influence she has, however small, and in the longer term, for a job more aligned with God’s kingdom. It is here that Wesley’s “as you can” may be most relevant: the call to serve God in one’s work never requires the impossible and is always incarnational. It is worth noting that this dual response of lament and hope only makes sense within a framework that, with Sayers, insists work should be a source of human fulfillment. To lament is to say, “it should not be this way.” 

Claire Brown Peterson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Asbury University.