It Could Be Worse: Two Cheers for the Faith and Work Movement
Andrew Lynn’s account of the faith and work movement covers both its highs and lows.
Review by Charlie Clark
It’s hard to stay mad at the creative class. You can only rail against the liberal elite so long before those Patagonia fleeces—so stylish, so practical—win you over. Even if the rise of Category X has sparked some populist discontents, in terms of material culture, MAGA-world and the goblin-moders of Gen Z are just a few years behind the curve. The have-nots just want to have. They already love lattes and iPhones and reclaimed wood. A little flag-waving here, some performative wokeness there—everyone comes around to IPAs and Brooklyn barbecue eventually. That’s the thing about Upper-Middle-Brow, bourgeois-bohemian culture—even its downstream, democratized form—it’s Actually Good. Granite countertops are beautiful. In the soft glow of an Edison bulb, who could long for CFLs?
Sure, occasionally, we worry that something eldritch and horrible underlies creative class prosperity. “What black heart beats at the nexus of BlackRock and Blackwater?” we might reasonably ask. Creepypasta about Tom Hanks aside, Mohammed bin Salman is absolutely real. But overall, the creative class is everything you could ask for in an elite, certainly a marked improvement over every known predecessor: non-violent, socially conscious, occasionally self-critical, relatively willing to share. They valorize education and good taste. Above all, they celebrate Work—or at least Career. Their heroes are entrepreneurs and artists and change agents. Their values are human values. Our overlords are well-aligned.
You see Andrew Lynn struggling with this dynamic in his new book, Saving the Protestant Ethic: Creative Class Evangelicalism and the Crisis of Work. The purpose of the book is to describe the emergence of the evangelical faith and work movement—the creative class at prayer—and to read that movement through the sociologist’s hermeneutic of suspicion. It’s tough. On the one hand, the creative class are begging to be taken down a peg: they’re rich, they’re in charge, and they’re smug as hell. On the other hand, the creative class are doing their best—and their best ain’t bad. Do you really miss the old boss with his gray flannel suits and his fox hunts and his droit du seigneur?
So in Lynn’s critiques of the faith and work movement, suspicion tends to remain suspicion and in lieu of denunciation he offers faint praise. Reporting on one interview about the movement, he writes, “The phrase ‘it could be worse’ was used four times in the span of two minutes.” (The topic of the interview, with a female subject, was the male dominance of the faith-and-work space—the “male-dominated space” being a locus classicus for the sociologist’s hermeneutic of suspicion.) For a movement centered on accompanying the creative class, “It could be worse.” might serve as both summary and slogan.
In short, greedy institutions want your soul. And since you only have one soul to give, what is a creative class evangelical to do?
But what is the “it” that could be worse? In search of a definition, Lynn looks at the faith and work movement historically, institutionally, and theologically, and the three-dimensional perspective his book offers should be helpful and clarifying for anyone trying to understand contemporary evangelicalism. Indeed as someone who has spent the entirety of his adult life engaged with ideas and institutions that Lynn identifies with the faith and work movement, I found the reading experience downright cathartic; I felt like a fish reading a book on water. Specifically, Lynn identifies the core of the faith and work movement as a “re-integrationist” theology of work, one of five evangelical theologies of work that probably co-exist in all evangelical times and places, but four of which have also waxed and waned in a historical procession, while the the fifth waits in the wings.
Following Lynn’s historical narrative, in the beginning (that is, at the turn of the twentieth century), there was the fundamentalist work ethic. Believing in Christ’s imminent return and a swiftly approaching end to the life of the world, the fundamentalists viewed economic activity with indifference shading into disdain. How one earned one’s daily bread was unimportant, what mattered was winning souls for Christ. It helped that most evangelicals were poor.
The next stage in the evolution of the evangelical work ethic was the discovery of “the workplace as mission field.” Lynn labels this the “re-commissioning” theology of work, with reference to Jesus commissioning the apostles to “make disciples of all nations.” This theology reinfused your work life with spiritual significance, because work brought you into close contact with your lost neighbors. Being a good worker was a form of witness to your coworkers. The nature or conditions of your work didn’t matter much—even the quality of your work product was secondary—work was just a relatively propitious context in which to share the gospel.
As the twentieth century wore on and examples of rich, successful evangelicals multiplied, the re-sacralizing theology of work had to be invented. Other Christian traditions had long ago discovered ways to widen the eye of the needle, and evangelicalism would do the same: business acumen was a spiritual gift like any other; you weren’t serving Mammon if you gave ten percent to Jesus. Re-sacralizing theology focused on the need to fund charity and missions, as well as the personal witness of the Christian businessman, whose combination of integrity and high-visibility, his status as an aspirational figure, was a good fit for an attractional model of evangelism. (The proximity of re-sacralizing theology to the Prosperity Gospel as well as its gaucheness, the ick factor around talk of personal wealth, accounts for its least-favored status in the contemporary faith and work movement.)
This brings us up to the present day and the “re-integrating” theology of work: its urtext is Dorothy Sayers’s essay, “Why Work?” and its most influential contemporary expression is Tim Keller and Katherine Alsdorf’s Every Good Endeavor. Whereas the classic Protestant work ethic, as described by Max Weber, grew out of the Protestant’s anxiety about justification, the evangelical work ethic described by Lynn grows out of the evangelical’s anxiety about integration. Lynn somewhat belabors the already-belabored-by-evangelicals Sunday/Monday dichotomy: the anxiety that your Monday morning work is insufficiently related to your Sunday morning worship. For evangelicals who have long stressed an “authentic” spirituality achieved through “whole-life discipleship,” any area of dis-integration is cause for concern. This anxiety is only heightened among evangelicals who have gained admittance to the creative class. In Lynn’s analysis, both the evangelicalism that demands whole-person allegiance to Christ and the creative class careers that demand long years of education followed by long hours at the office are what he calls “greedy institutions.” In short, greedy institutions want your soul. And since you only have one soul to give, what is a creative class evangelical to do?
Re-integrating theology extends the theological concept of vocation beyond clergy, missionaries, and other religious workers to every worker and every kind of work. It affirms that work is, in Lynn’s words, “a channel for participation in a larger cosmic narrative of restoration,” and that, generally, “the already present ends and logics of work [are] entirely appropriate to loving and serving God through work.” Re-integrating theology emphasizes that your primary contribution through your vocation is in the quality of the work itself, not in evangelizing your coworkers or funding foreign missions. It retrieves doctrines of providence and common grace found in Luther, Calvin, and other Reformers: God uses all human work to sustain and extend His good Creation and to supply human needs in particular. As Luther had it, “God is milking the cows through the vocation of the milkmaid.” Today, this theology demands that the Christian entrepreneur operate not just ethically but “redemptively.”
While faith and work movement leaders may talk a lot about idolatry, there are few, if any, commonly agreed upon restrictions to the work-ization of the whole of life.
This brief summary surely fails to capture the depth and breadth of Lynn’s extraordinary descriptive project. He does a masterful job of separating the different theological threads that are woven together by the faith and work movement and contextualizing them in socioeconomic terms. Adherents of re-integrating theology will find the portrait of themselves and their views recognizable. In many of Lynn’s criticisms, they will see reflected their own residual anxieties. What about those criticisms (and anxieties)?
First, while re-integrating theology purports to flatten the vocational hierarchy—for example, by affirming those who “clean toilets for Jesus”—Lynn supplies ample evidence that the faith and work movement is overwhelmingly white, male, educated, and wealthy in its constituency and concerns—a fact which many participants in the movement freely acknowledge and lament. Arguably, the resources re-integrating theology offers only apply in situations where the worker is highly agentic. (Lynn contrasts agentic creative class professionals and entrepreneurs with non-agentic warehouse workers whose every bodily movement is dictated by algorithm.) Pressed as to what it means to pack Amazon boxes “redemptively,” faith-and-work leaders will fall back to a re-commissioning theology focused on your witness to your fellow warehouse drones.
Second, Lynn suggests that re-integrating theology could be stretched into a form of “religious syncretism or accommodationism” with the culturally dominant (among the creative class anyway) religion of workism. Lynn defines workism as “the pursuit of identity, transcendence, and community by way of unyielding devotion to one’s job” and links it to the long hours, unused vacation days, and self-sacrificial mentality that is often more characteristic of creative class professionals than working class laborers. He writes that “faith and work efforts appear to be optimized for crafting a religious identity that can make peace with the workism-shaped worlds [inhabited by the creative class].” While faith and work movement leaders may talk a lot about idolatry, there are few, if any, commonly agreed upon restrictions to the work-ization of the whole of life.
Lynn clearly sees the final entry in his five-fold typology, the re-embedding theology of work, as a possible answer to re-integrating theology’s unresolved problems. Re-embedding theology aims to build on the achievements of its predecessors—denying compartmentalization, flattening the vocational hierarchy—while refusing the work sphere its autonomy, confronting employers and other economic agents with substantive, theologically grounded demands for workers’ dignity and liberty, among other extra-organizational ends.
What Lynn’s book demonstrates above all is that the faith and work movement has not fallen far from the creative class tree. The millennial hustle culture’s Business Grindset is no less toxic (nor less cringe) when it comes carrying a cross. Yet much of what re-integrating theology has to say is Actually Good. No one wants to go back to the fundamentalist work ethic. Everyone wants their Monday to matter to God.
Now if the faith and work movement would be perfect, what would it need to do? First, it might recognize that if its precepts only work for highly agentic workers, then perhaps that’s because God meant all workers to be highly agentic. Perhaps there is a Christian duty to oppose the domination of workers by algorithms and other inhuman systems. Second, if its adverbial prescriptions are leaving room for workist syncretism, (Once again, what would it mean to speculate in credit default swaps “redemptively”?), then it should start making some nounal, verbal judgments about what constitutes justice and what constitutes idolatry. The faith and work movement could embrace proposals that would be signs of contradiction to the modern economy: demand a family wage for toilet cleaners, put a human-scale limit on both executive compensation and executive hours, ban usury or at least Sunday brunch. All this could happen. In the meantime, it could be worse.
Charlie Clark is a writer and retractor. He lives in New Hampshire.
Saving the Protestant Ethic: Creative Class Evangelicalism and the Crisis of Work was published by Oxford University Press on April 7, 2023. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of an advance copy for our reviewer. You can purchase your own copy here.
