Re-membering Labor & Religion

Kerry Danner

March 25, 2021

Faith, Class, & Labor: Intersectional Approaches in Global Context, edited by Jin Young Choi and Joerg Rieger, explores past and present connections between labor and religion, arguing that a wider recognition of this relationship can curb income-inequality and move us to better care for the earth. While this collection came together prior to the pandemic, its contributions are even more important in its wake. Some of us have recognized our privilege in being able to work from home with healthcare and sick leave. Others have confronted health and economic precarity. Our shared human vulnerability has been on full display for those willing to notice. It is not clear if this awareness will remain as vaccination rates rise and economic recovery begins. Here I highlight aspects of two chapters within the collection that point to how the relationship between labor and religion can be further strengthened.

Jin Young Choi reinterprets the story of the widow’s offering (Mark 12:38-44) in her chapter “People’s Money, Women’s Precarious Life, and Empire.” She argues that Jesus watching the widow offer more than she can afford at the Temple was likely recounted by Mark during a time of active resistance, probably after the destruction of the Temple. Read in this historical context, the story is a statement on the exploitive practices of empire: “While there were portions of money that should be distributed to widows, our story depicts the poor widow putting two copper coins into the treasury.” (94). The poor widow is every woman who does what needs to be done, knowing the system harms “her nation, her temple, her people, and her life.” (99). This line in particular captures the plight of most workers today. It is the labor of a long-term adjunct with no benefits and of a mother in a country that offers little to no support for working parents. We do what needs to be done, knowing the higher education system (or the healthcare or educational system) is unjust, because we need to feed and shelter our families.

The widow is a member of the ochlos or the multitude of those “exploited by imperial and local ruling classes,” and Jesus’ remembering of her ensures she remains in collective memory of the people (98). The chapter demonstrates how a tradition can remember—or forget—the laborer, whether underpaid and near powerless in their formal work for wages or invisible in their care work. The desire for stable work, retirement savings, health care, daycare, and agency at work is part of the shared human condition that Covid-19 has brought into focus. Most of us, the modern multitude, experience precarious employment. Johann Baptist Metz famously described the anamnesis of remembering in the Eucharist as dangerous when it calls us to act in solidarity. Church communities shoulder significant responsibility in ensuring labor is remembered and must re-member the worker.

A well-tested mechanism to lessen exploitation and the precarity of laborers is unionization. It is one of the few mechanisms that legally requires employers to negotiate with employees and, I suggest, is necessary in our current system. Nonetheless, as Karl James E. Villarmea describes in “Transcendence in the Time of Neoliberalism: A Theological Reflection non the Employer-Employee Relationship and the Theological Struggle for Everyday”, contract negotiations expose the limits and agency of the worker. He writes,

[negotiating] is ultimately about finding a way where there seems none—a negotiated settlement satisfactory to parties involved in the meantime. A praxis of constant negotiation and improvisation of engagements with powers based on labor demands, in the end, is an instantiation of what is possible at present. Theologically put, this is prayer-in-praxis (253).

My experience negotiating adjunct faculty contracts affirms Villarmea’s experience. It is critically important work that yet, by its legal and delimited terms, always has aspects of exclusion and risks reifying the employer-employee relationship. It forces those negotiating to look at the precarity of themselves, their colleagues, and the way institutions withhold the dignity that is due them, whether that be in better pay, full inclusion in the life of the institution, access to basic benefits, or more security in being able to voice their concerns. It also burdens managers to rationalize decisions that they themselves may not support. Yet, it also can breathe newness and hope for both when it builds relationships and affirms dignity. “[P]erhaps it is also about time to cross the table and together look for alternative ways of being and doing . . .” (258). Contract negotiating and labor organizing reminds us of both what could be and of the not-yetness of the Kingdom of God (or in Villarmea’s terms the messianic possibilities of the Pauline communities) and, thus, makes the importance of the practice clearer.

How might we better remember our shared vulnerability and nurture the kind of deep solidarity of praxis called forth in the collection? First, we must remember today’s ochlos who have little power over the conditions of their work and create spaces in which vulnerabilities can be named. Christians can discuss the stories of labor in Scripture, reflecting on the context and agency of the laborer. Christians can understand the economic and cultural factors at play in Jesus’ time to better understand his message of inclusion and critique of the Roman Empire. Second, church communities can educate their congregation on income-inequality and the historical role of unions. Union leaders might be invited to explain their work. Currently, only 10.8% of American workers are unionized. In my time organizing with SEIU, I discovered most people, even those with PhDs, don’t understand how unions work or their ability to raise wages and increase worker protections. Third, we cannot wait for church leaders to address these issues. They may see it as too controversial or worry it invites discussion of a church’s own labor practices. Insecurity and strict hierarchies in one’s work experience can seep into congregations too. But, we are all free to discuss these issues in informal and formal ways. Fourth, Christian discourse often does a good job urging care for impoverished and marginalized people. Elisabeth Hinson-Hasty argues that it’s time for all Christians to begin talking about the The Problem of Wealth and the need to promote alternate visions of an “ethic of enough.” Finally, we know that talking about wealth, exploitive labor practices, and the power structures that keep them in places is not easy. It is uncomfortable and we often confront our own complicity and structural limits. Yet, we are also called to new ways of being that includes transformation of self and the world. Cultural and economic structures have normalized patterns of exploitation and obscured our shared vulnerability; these structures are hard to identify and even harder to be free from without collective action. Perhaps this will be the silver lining amidst the death and despair of Covid: the birth of an intersectional movement of people empowered to re-member the well-being of each other and all of creation.

Kerry Danner, PhD, teaches in the Theology & Religious Studies Department at Georgetown University and currently serves as a Faculty Fellow for the Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching & Learning. She is a member of SEIU-500 and former co-chair of American Academy of Religion’s Academic Labor and Contingent Faculty committee. She is raising three children.

Creating Democratic Miracles:

A Pro-Labor Ethical Vision for Christians

Rosetta E. Ross

March 25, 2021

During 1964 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, there was what ethicist Ron Neal calls “a democratic miracle in America” when Mississippi sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer played a leading role by testifying before the Democratic National Convention’s Credentials Committee in the debate over seating a delegation from the state of Mississippi. Concurrent with the miracle there also was a failure to imagine democracy in the United States as capable of embracing and responding to all America’s citizens, especially working people most excluded from the benefits and decision-making processes of our society. The gap between what ordinary working people in a variety of stations face and capitalist norms that occupy U.S. legislators and social elites makes Christian ethical reflection and advocacy for working people is intensely important.

In 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (the MFDP) challenged the national Democratic Party to respond a claim that the MFDP authentically represented Democrats in Mississippi, based on exclusion of poor people, in general, and black persons, in particular, from state Party processes. Comprised of diverse cross-sections of the Mississippi Delta population the MFDP enacted a “democratic miracle” by accomplishing the unlikely feat of presenting a formally recognized claim in one of the highest points of the country’s political life. Their “democratic miracle” not only challenged Party politics, but also challenged the meaning of American democracy, as well, through Hamer’s poignant question during her testimony, “Is this America?”

Going into the 1964 convention, Freedom Democrats expected to fully participate in the Atlantic City gathering. Orchestrated by former Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) administrator, Ella Baker, in collaboration with local Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) workers, the Mississippi NAACP as well as civil-rights advocates around the country, pre-convention discussion signaled that Freedom Democrats could unseat the traditionalist, all-white Mississippi delegation. Fannie Lou Hamer’s riveting, nationally-televised testimony about the conditions she faced in Mississippi quickly turned the Credentials Committee’s deliberation on what would happen to Freedom Democrats into public discussion of the exclusion and invisibility the civil-rights vision sought to overcome.

Outside committee deliberations, there was an orchestrated negotiation to find a resolution by “elites,” primarily men, including Hubert Humphrey, Minnesota senator pursuing nomination as vice president; Minnesota state official and Humphrey protege Walter Mondale; Martin Luther King, Jr., president of the SCLC; Bob Moses, Mississippi organizer for the SNCC; labor attorney Joseph Rauh; Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers; and Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP. The two persons most central to the debate and who best symbolized the categories “elite” and "working class”—Lyndon Johnson and Fannie Lou Hamer—never spoke to each other and did not participate directly in these outside negotiations. Johnson chose an indirect role. Hamer was deliberately omitted. In one discussion Hamer told Humphrey, “[Y]ou’re a good man, and you know what’s right. The trouble is, you’re afraid to do what you know is right.” After that direct chiding, Hamer was excluded.

As President, Johnson was at the center of power, making him the most visible and, formally, the most elite citizen in the country. In contrast, MFDP vice president and spokesperson, Fannie Lou Hamer, was almost invisible to the Democratic Party and the country. As a member of an alternative group challenging traditional political practices, as a poor, sharecropping, deeply intelligent, but poorly educated black woman from the rural South, who only recently had obtained the right to vote, Mrs. Hamer epitomized the “working class,” as she sought recognition and full citizenship in the United States.

Apparently believing Freedom Democrats would threaten his bid for president, from almost 200 miles away Johnson “rejected as ludicrous the idea of seating both delegations.” He gave instructions to identify and target MFDP supporters on the Credentials Committee and stayed in Washington until the Freedom Democrats were defeated. In contrast, Hamer had traveled almost 1,200 miles with others from Mississippi to be present at the convention but could not significantly affect the outcome of deliberations.

The “outside-negotiated” compromise proposed seating two men representatives, not chosen by the MFDP, in a special section near the regular Mississippi location. Interestingly, the two men—Aaron Henry, a black Mississippi pharmacist, and Ed King, a white Methodist Minister—could be viewed as elites selected from among the non-elites. Freedom Democrats voted to reject the compromise. “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats,” Hamer said of the proposal. As the president exerted pressure by proxy, MFDP support started to shift and the democratic miracle began to turn into a democratic failure. Walter Mondale untruthfully announced unanimous acceptance of the compromise while Credentials Committee deliberations still were in progress. The effect was to secure a boundary between “elites” and the "working class” and accomplish what Senator Humphrey stated as Johnson’s intention to “not allow that illiterate woman to speak on the floor of the convention.”

In spite of important victories and changes that followed, the legacy of this 1964 democratic failure later was coupled with intensified market values, patriotism, individualism, amplified elitism, hardened class cleavages, and more, the result of which is that in “many respects, political elites are neo-segregationists.”

This reality presents an opportunity for Christians to interpret the Gospel by identifying and working with pro-labor thinkers and activists; imagining and creating new methods and religious economic narratives; inventing equitable models of development and labor. Similar to actions of the MFDP, such work—practices that are both testimony and witness—may be generative for all religious people who seek insights and models to help create new avenues to meaningfully connect the life of faith with class realities people experience every day and to enact new democratic miracles again, and again, and again.

Rosetta E. Ross is professor of religion at Spelman College. She pioneered scholarly work on religion and Black women’s activism in the U.S. civil rights movement. Ross was an early proponent of womanist theology. Her research explores religion and women’s social action; Christian ethics and society; and religions in the lives of Africana women. She is author of "Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights," co-author of "The Status of Racial and Ethnic Clergywomen in the United Methodist Church" (with Jung Ha Kim), and co-editor of "Unraveling and Reweaving Sacred Canon in Africana Womanhood" (with Rose Mary Amenga-Etego).

Selection from Introduction to Faith, Class, and Labor

Jin Young Choi and Joerg Rieger

March 25, 2021

What is gained when activists and scholars of religion, theology, and the Bible begin to address matters of economics, labor, and class? Despite the fact that 99 percent of us have to work for a living and even though our work shapes us to the core, labor and class are topics that are underrepresented in the work of scholars of religion, theology, and the Bible. In recent decades, labor and class have rarely been addressed in-depth even in the growing number of explorations of theology, religion, and economics. One way to frame this conversation is to observe that labor relations impact, and are impacted by, all other relations. This includes religion, which can also be defined in relational terms, as relationships among people, religious traditions, and the divine.

With this volume, an international group of scholars and activists at various stages in their careers is presenting a concerted effort to bring issues of labor and class back into the discussion. The twelve contributors have roots in eight different countries including (in alphabetical order) Germany, Hong Kong, South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, the U.S., and Zimbabwe. They currently reside and work in five different countries and are connected through various academic, ecclesial, and activist networks. Some are in positions to provide long and deep assessments of their fields, others are making provocative statements about how things might be different if the next generation of scholars would pick up one of the key topics of our age.

While each of the various contributions covers new ground, taken together they provide even deeper layers of insight and inspiration. One reason for this synergy is that matters of economics, labor, and class affect virtually everything, both people and the planet: no one and nothing can exist for very long in a vacuum. Many of the other struggles that mark our age (race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, colonialism, etc.) are also negotiated here. Labor relations—relationships of power at work—are inextricably tied to race relations, for instance, so much so that leaders of African American emancipation in the United States such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. articulated in their own ways that the organizing work done by labor unions in the U.S. was of essential in the struggle against racism. In the fight against gender oppression, long traditions of socialist feminists and some African American womanist scholars have emphasized the importance of liberation along the lines of class. And a good deal of the pushback against ethnic minority groups is linked to the challenges of labor migration in the U.S. and elsewhere, which is why efforts to welcome immigrants without paying attention to labor issues are so limited.

Another reason for the synergy that emerges in these chapters is that the authors themselves are deeply involved in matters of labor and class and are genuinely interested in engaging and learning from each other. What can activists learn from scholars and scholars from activists? What can biblical scholars learn from theologians and theologians from biblical scholars? What are the implications for the study of religion and theology, and what are the implications for activism and organizing? These questions and concerns, brought together in this volume, are the foundations of intersectional, transdisciplinary, transtextual, transactional, transnational, and transgressive work in our time.

In this book, historians and theologians investigate how new images of God, people, and the world emerge and what difference they can make, in conversation with traditions and practices both ancient and contemporary. Biblical critics develop new takes on ancient texts that are not only unexpected and surprising but lead to the reversal of readings that are seemingly stable, settled, and have been taken for granted in past decades. Activists and organizers are identifying fresh sources of power and energy that have been neglected in recent history but have never gone away and are returning in new force, and they are reporting about results and transformation that are happening but often go underreported.

Focal points

The efforts to address matters of labor and class in this volume have two focal points. One has to do with analysis and a deeper understanding of how labor is part of our being human, affecting and being affected by all other areas of life. Since most people are spending the bulk of their waking hours at work—this includes those who are casually employed, in the Gig economy, or even those who have not given up looking for work—labor shapes us more deeply than is commonly realized. While it may come as a surprise to some that labor also shapes, and is shaped by, religion, we are only beginning to understand what that actually looks like and all that might be implied. How might labor shape religion, and how might religion shape labor, for good and for ill, for better or for worse?

The second focal point has to do with the question of agency. Working people, no matter how exploited and oppressed they may be, continue to maintain some agency in their lives, however limited. Unlike certain types of colonization in both past and present, capitalism still cannot do without people who do the work, because even in a time of increased automation it remains true that without working people “not a single wheel can turn.” How does the power of working people shape up today, how is it being organized, and how might it be making a difference in the world?

To be sure, the reflections on the importance of labor and work offered in this volume do not mean to suggest that work is everything. In a climate where work continues to be the ground of exploitation and where work allows the few to build their fortunes on the basis of the labor of the many (why else would labor and work be policed so consistently and harshly around the world, despite the gains of financial capitalism?), we also need to acknowledge the problems and limits of work. So-called anti-work theory has made the point that work under the conditions of capitalism needs to be questioned and some of it perhaps cannot be redeemed.

Nevertheless, we maintain that labor is not merely the place of exploitation and oppression but remains a prime place of resistance, agency, and the fertile ground for the construction of alternatives. Labor movements, both past and present, cooperative enterprises and businesses, and the growing development of economic democracies all over the world speak for themselves. Religious scholars and communities overlook the generative combinations of labor and religion at their own peril. Picking up on those dynamics, the contributors intend to demonstrate what theological discourses and religion-involved engagements can do to promote another world that is shaped by the values of human dignity, justice, and genuine creativity that brings together the divine, people, and the world.

Jin Young Choi is Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins and the Baptist Missionary Training School Professorial Chair in Biblical Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in New Testament and Early Christianity at Vanderbilt University and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Louisville Institute as part of the Institute’s Vocation of the Theological Educator Initiative.

Joerg Rieger is Distinguished Professor of Theology and Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair in Wesleyan Studies at the Divinity School and the Graduate Program of Religion at Vanderbilt University. He is also the and the Founding Director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School. His work addresses the relation of theology and public life, reflecting on the misuse of power in religion, politics, and economics. His most recent book publications include Jesus vs. Caesar: For People Tired of Serving the Wrong God (2018), No Religion but Social Religion: Liberating Wesleyan Theology, with contributions by Paulo Ayres Mattos, Helmut Renders, and José Carlos de Souza (2018), and Unified We are a Force: How Faith and Labor Can Overcome America’s Inequalities (with Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger, 2016).