Religion as labor control: Corporate chaplaincy and the privatization of risk under H-2A

Introduction

Contemporary capitalism does not rely on contracts and markets alone; it endures by converting inequality into common sense. Temporary labor migration schemes are among its most effective instruments. In many regions, including North America, Australia–New Zealand, much of Europe and East/Southeast Asia, Singapore and Israel, and the Gulf, temporary labor schemes are largely employer-sponsored and frequently limit job changes. Despite country-specific exceptions and recent reforms, these programs tend to render workers mobile and deportable while offloading risks and costs onto racialised workers and their families. In the United States, the H-2A program is a prime example of this. More than 380,000 workers entered on H-2A visas in 2024, nearly triple a decade earlier, making it the largest agricultural guestworker program in U.S. history (US Department of Labor, 2024a). H-2A authorizes agricultural employers to fill temporary/seasonal jobs when they attest that no “able, willing, and qualified” U.S. workers are available. Employers must provide housing, transportation, and a guaranteed minimum wage. Contracts are employer-tied: workers generally cannot change jobs without restarting the process, and termination can trigger immediate loss of status. Although recruitment fees are formally prohibited, brokered hiring can still shift costs and risks onto workers. The program has expanded rapidly and is overwhelmingly filled by men from Mexico and Central America (Escalante, 2024). This produces a legally authorized yet tightly controlled workforce whose rights are contingent and mobility regulated through the constant possibility of expulsion, what migration scholars theorize as deportability (Bauer and Perales Sánchez, 2020; De Genova, 2002). Critical migration scholarship shows how such architectures institutionalize racialized precarity by ensuring that the hazards of recruitment debt, termination, and deportation are borne by workers while employers remain insulated (Bauer and Perales Sánchez, 2020; De Genova, 2002; Martin, 2009).

Much of this literature has rightly emphasized legal architecture and political economy: how employer control over contracts and mobility generates compliance. Yet these explanations leave open a central question of ideology. By what cultural means do regimes of coercion come to feel morally necessary, even virtuous, to those who endure them? Law and policy set the terms of vulnerability, but they do not by themselves explain how insecurity is normalized, moralized, and lived as an obligation. This article addresses that gap by analyzing a religious apparatus, evangelical corporate chaplaincy, that helps translate structural exploitation into personal responsibility (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Glenn, 2004, 2011; Robinson, 2020).

Fresh Harvest, Inc. is a farm labor contractor (FLC)—a firm that recruits, transports, houses, and supervises H-2A workers while supplying their labor to multiple growers—making it a major coordinator of the employment relationship rather than a single-site employer. As one of the largest H-2A petitioners nationally and the largest in California (US Department of Labor, 2024b), its FLC status matters because it centralizes control over hiring and everyday discipline, diffuses liability across growers, and extends managerial reach across dispersed camps and worksites. In 2015, the company instituted a chaplaincy program for its H2A farmworkers. At the time of its implementation, Fresh Harvest owner Steve Scaroni noted, “The chaplains are going to be here to give support in your spiritual lives, your relationship with God, your family, your co-workers, and your relationship with the employer. Because all of that has to be in balance” (Fresh Harvest USA, 2015). Fresh Harvest recruits heavily from Mexican sending regions, where nearly 80% of the population identifies as Catholic (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía [INEGI], 2020), and chaplains described the workforce they serve as overwhelmingly Catholic (one estimating roughly 95%) (Chaplain interview, Santa Cruz, September 10, 2025). At the same time, the chaplaincy program is staffed entirely by Mexican-American Protestant evangelical men affiliated with Pentecostal, neo-charismatic, or non-denominational Christian traditions, an institutional mismatch that shapes how pastoral care is delivered and received. Three of the chaplains work for Fresh Harvest full-time, and two of the chaplains serve part-time while also working as pastors with predominantly Latinx congregations in California. The chaplains have not received graduate training in theology, although some have studied at American Bible colleges. Each of the chaplains has completed at least one course in Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), however, none of the chaplains is board certified (see Cadge, 2022). Their responsibilities span a wide range of activities, including housing outreach, financial literacy workshops, marital counseling, and crisis response. In 2021, the Fresh Harvest owner approached the chaplains and asked them to begin monthly pastoral broadcasts via Facebook Live so that more of the farmworkers could be reached on a regular basis. These broadcasts now circulate across the U.S., Mexico, and Latin America and regularly reach viewings of more than 10,000 for each livestream. Far from a neutral ministry of care, in the livestreams chaplains articulate a moral economy of endurance, where family separation, bodily wear, and financial insecurity are narrated not as products of a racialized labor market but as occasions for gratitude, self-discipline, and fidelity. In this arrangement, religion performs ideological work at scale, rendering a disposable workforce governable by sanctifying compliance and privatizing risk.

I theorize Fresh Harvest’s chaplaincy as pastoral power operating within racial capitalism. Pastoral idioms of blessing, stewardship, and sacrifice fuse care with control, enjoining workers to treat the visa as a gift to be “stewarded,” the body as capital to be disciplined, and provision as proof of masculine devotion. These moral demands dovetail with neoliberal rationalities of self-management, producing subjects who interpret endurance less as exploitation than as spiritual maturity (Brown, 2015; Lorey, 2015; Ong, 2006; Rose, 1999). The point is not that religion merely masks domination; rather, religious discourse actively manufactures consent by recoding structural vulnerability as an ethical vocation, making capitalist discipline feel like a moral duty.

Situated at the crossroads of migration studies, sociology of religion, and critical political economy, the article contributes in three ways. First, it relocates explanations of migrant precarity from legal design alone to the cultural and religious forms that make insecurity intelligible and acceptable (Bhattacharyya, 2018; De Genova, 2002). Second, it clarifies how neoliberalism’s privatization of risk is carried forward through pastoral idioms that compel workers to govern themselves, and their families, as entrepreneurial projects (Brown, 2015; Lorey, 2015; Ong, 2006; Rose, 1999). Third, it extends debates on racial capitalism by showing how spiritual discourse helps reproduce a stratified labor regime that is at once indispensable and disposable (Glenn, 2004, 2011; Robinson, 2020). Finally, by connecting workplace chaplaincy in agriculture to wider studies of religion at work, the analysis resonates with research on corporate chaplaincy and faith-inflected labor regimes (Miller, 2007; Nabhan-Warren, 2021; Sullivan, 2020).

The argument unfolds as follows. I develop a framework for understanding chaplaincy as a cultural–ideological apparatus within racial capitalism, integrating pastoral power with critiques of neoliberal governance. I then outline methods, drawing on 38 Facebook livestreams and interviews with chaplains. The findings are organized around three ideological functions—blessing/responsibility, discipline/foresight, and the responsibilization of precarity—through which insecurity is sacralized. The discussion elaborates how these dynamics stabilize a racialized labor regime while illuminating the limits and ambivalences of ideological control. The conclusion turns to implications for analyzing capitalism’s cultural apparatuses and for imagining forms of collective redress that refuse the sacralization of disposability. This article therefore asks not only how contracts coerce but also how hegemony is built in everyday life through religious idioms that align care with control (Althusser, 1971; Gramsci, 1971).

Theoretical framework

I conceptualize corporate chaplaincy as a mechanism that moralizes precarity and helps organize compliance. Drawing on Fassin’s (2012) account of moral economy, I treat pastoral discourse as a register through which suffering and endurance are rendered intelligible and even virtuous, translating structural exposure into narratives of responsibility, gratitude, and fidelity. Crucially, this work does not depend on direct managerial scripting. At Fresh Harvest, chaplains report no formal censorship or pre-packaged messaging; the themes of their online interventions are shaped primarily through informal visits with workers in hotels, shared housing, and labor camps. This responsiveness strengthens chaplains’ moral authority and makes their counsel appear authentically grounded in workers’ lived concerns, even as the chaplaincy program remains institutionally anchored in the employer. Accordingly, I do not treat chaplaincy’s effects as the product of deliberate organizational design. I analyze them as emergent outcomes of pastoral practices embedded in employer-controlled conditions of precarity, where care can render domination morally intelligible.

Chaplains’ own understandings of their work further illuminate this mechanism. Interviews suggest that chaplains do not conceive of labor camps or worker housing as substitute congregations, but as mission fields requiring forms of pastoral presence adapted to workers’ mobility, isolation, and institutional constraint. Pastoral authority is grounded not in ecclesial membership or formal church structures, but in proximity, accompaniment, and responsiveness to everyday crises. This self-understanding is analytically consequential: it allows chaplaincy to appear non-institutional and morally authentic, even as it remains structurally incorporated within the corporation. In this sense, chaplaincy exemplifies pastoral power’s capacity to govern through care without presenting itself as governance.

To specify the governing mechanism, I draw on Foucault’s pastoral power and governmentality. Chaplaincy operates as a “conduct of conduct” that binds care to rule-following, translating organizational requirements such as productivity, punctuality, and sobriety into personal duties of stewardship and self-discipline (Foucault, 1982, 2007). Rather than removing exposure to harm, pastoral techniques normalize and administer it, individualizing risk and reframing compliance as ethical growth (Foucault, 2007).

Because chaplaincy is an institutional practice, I locate it in literatures on institutional spiritual care and the spiritualization of work. Chaplains function as boundary-spanners who convert organizational priorities into everyday moral grammars (Cadge, 2012, 2022). At the same time, managerial projects harness spiritual idioms to align selves with performance, recoding discipline as inner vocation and “right attitude” (Bell and Taylor, 2004). Read together, these lenses clarify how care does managerial work: spiritual counsel translates management goals into virtues, lowering overt supervision while deepening self-regulation (Bell and Taylor, 2004; Cadge, 2022).

Crucially, these dynamics unfold within bordered labor regimes analyzed by critical migration scholarship. The H-2A complex exemplifies what de Genova terms deportability: a legal-administrative condition that renders workers available and compliant by tying presence to employer sponsorship (De Genova, 2002). Comparative work on state-managed temporary migration shows how rights are traded off against admissions, producing calibrated precarity as policy design rather than policy failure (Anderson, 2010; Basok and Bélanger, 2016; Hahamovitch, 2011; Ruhs, 2013). In this frame, pastoral messaging becomes part of the operational politics of temporary migration—complementing legal dependency and spatial enclosure by sacralizing endurance and privatizing risk.

To situate religion in the workplace beyond this case, I draw on studies of spiritual care and religious labor governance across sectors. Nabhan-Warren (2021) shows how faith practices in Midwestern meatpacking intersect with migration, corporate demands, and local politics, illuminating how religious idioms both stabilize shop-floor order and channel migrant aspirations. Likewise, Schmalzbauer (2015) links mobility, gender, and family governance in the U.S. West, helping frame how chaplaincy’s appeals to sacrifice, providence, and responsible manhood intersect with transnational family economies (for ex., remittance discipline, long-distance caretaking). These works underscore how religious vocabularies do not merely console; they organize time, obligation, and aspiration across workplace and household.

Finally, I retain but de-center the familiar governance idioms of neoliberal responsibilization (Brown, 2015; Ong, 2006; Rose, 1999) and precarization as a governing condition (Lorey, 2015). These name the macro-logics, however, the analysis here emphasizes how they materialize: through pastoral techniques (Foucault, 1982, 2007), institutional interfaces (Cadge 2012, 2022), the spiritualization of labor (Bell and Taylor, 2004), the structured dependency of temporary migration (Anderson, 2010; Basok and Bélanger, 2016; De Genova, 2002; Hahamovitch, 2011; Ruhs, 2013), and religion’s role in coordinating work and family obligations (Nabhan-Warren, 2021; Schmalzbauer, 2015). Together, these strands explain how chaplaincy manufactures consent in a deportable, racialized labor market—while leaving analytic room for ambivalence and reinterpretation in how workers take up, resist, or repurpose these messages.

Methods

Results

Analysis of the livestreamed pastoral talks and chaplain interviews shows a patterned discourse that reframes structural vulnerability as moral duty. Chaplains acknowledge restricted mobility, separation from families, low and intermittent pay, and the constant threat of expulsion, yet these are recast as tests of faith, occasions for gratitude, and prompts to self-management. Three recurrent formations organize this reframing—“Blessing and Responsibility,” “Discipline and Foresight,” and “Precarity and Responsibilization”—through which pastoral care is tied to neoliberal governance. While the idioms are devotional, their practical effect is to cultivate workers who interpret racialized precarity as vocation rather than injustice (Brown, 2015; Lorey, 2015; Melamed, 2015; Rose, 1999).

Discussion

The findings show how religious care is drawn into the ordinary reproduction of a racialized labor regime. Naming the visa a blessing and pairing it with responsibility translates contractual precarity into a moral field where continued work and renewal of status depend on punctuality, productivity, and rule observance in fields and housing. Read through pastoral power, chaplaincy operates as a “conduct of conduct” that binds care to rule-following, individualizing risk and moralizing compliance (Foucault, 1982, 2007). In agriculture, employer control over recruitment, placement, housing, and return compresses labor costs and limits collective exit; institutional spiritual care then translates those organizational priorities into everyday grammars of virtue (Cadge, 2012, 2022). By recoding compliance as gratitude and stewardship, chaplaincy helps secure punctual, low-friction labor across peak seasons—lowering overt supervision while deepening self-regulation in line with the spiritualization of work (Bell and Taylor, 2004; cf. Burawoy, 1979).

The discourse on discipline and foresight deepens this alignment. Savings, punctuality, bodily endurance, and plan-keeping are taught as inner virtues rather than as responses to external compulsion. The seasonal parable of storing in summer for winter naturalizes the link between aging bodies, intermittent earnings, and the need to self-insure. Fassin’s moral economy clarifies the effect: injunctions to save, endure, and steward convert exposure to harm into ethical proof of responsibility and care for kin (Fassin, 2012). Mechanistically, this is pastoral governmentality at work: structural hazard is rendered intelligible as a test of character; failure reads as a lapse of foresight rather than as a predictable outcome of employer-tied status (Cadge, 2022; Foucault, 2007).

At the same time, the mechanisms traced here do not require a fully centralized or “scripted” organizational strategy to generate employer-aligned outcomes. Fresh Harvest’s decision to institutionalize chaplaincy and extend it through livestreams can be read as an intentional investment in spiritual care as part of managing a dispersed, deportable workforce. But interviewees consistently emphasized that day-to-day pastoral content is not delivered as a set of corporate talking points; rather, it is assembled through the relational work of visiting workers where they live and recovering what matters to them in the aftermath of workdays (room-by-room housing visits, informal conversations, crisis response) (Chaplain interview, Santa Cruz, August 22, 2025). In this sense, pastoral practices can operate as an emergent moral economy in Fassin’s sense. Suffering, endurance, and obligation are made ethically intelligible through care, while the ethical solutions that “make sense” inside that moral world can still channel workers toward discipline, prudence, and quiet compliance rather than collective claims on employers or the state.

This is also visible in how chaplains describe their own work. Across interviews, chaplains most often framed what they do as caregiving and accompaniment. They emphasized trust-building, confidential listening, and walking with people through hardship as a calling grounded in relational presence rather than managerial authority. They described continuity and investment, and they presented their value as the ability to absorb stress, mediate everyday pressures, and provide emotional and spiritual support to workers separated from their families. This self-understanding matters analytically because it helps explain why pastoral discourse carries moral authority. It is experienced and presented as responsive ministry rather than overt organizational governance, even while it remains structurally embedded within an employer-controlled labor regime.

Yet the interviews also reveal moments where care and organizational discipline explicitly converge. For example, chaplains discussed housing and work rules, such as substance policies, and described being present in sites where violations were anticipated, framed not as surveillance but as prevention, alternative-making, and de-escalation. In parallel, chaplains were aware that employers value chaplaincy partly because it stabilizes the labor process by reducing conflict and strain, what one interviewee described in terms of workforce well-being and “practical benefits” for companies when workers feel supported. (Chaplain interview, Santa Cruz, September 10, 2025). These accounts do not show chaplains narrating their role primarily as “labor control”; instead, they illustrate how pastoral labor can produce labor-disciplining effects through the ordinary, morally compelling practices of care (listening, counsel, crisis intervention, and conflict mediation) that also reduce friction, quiet disputes, and normalize compliance.

The interviews also indicate awareness of role tension, if not always as an explicit ethical dilemma. One chaplain described his contractual position outside the company as a deliberate way to avoid a conflict of interest when hearing workers’ concerns. This kind of boundary work is itself revealing. It signals that chaplains recognize the tensions produced by providing confidential care to workers whose legal presence and livelihood are tied to the organization funding that care. At the same time, these boundary practices do not resolve the political problem identified in the discourse analysis. They can help chaplaincy appear ethically credible and non-managerial, which strengthens the moral force of pastoral instruction even when it aligns with employer interests.

The discourse on discipline, foresight, and responsibilized precarity deepens this alignment. Savings, punctuality, bodily endurance, and plan-keeping are taught as inner virtues rather than responses to external compulsion. Structural hazard becomes intelligible as a test of character, and failure reads as a lapse of foresight rather than a predictable outcome of employer-tied status (Cadge, 2022; Fassin, 2012; Foucault, 2007). These religious idioms sit inside a bordered labor regime shaped by deportability and managed migration. Deportability makes the workforce legally provisional and easily replaceable (De Genova, 2002), while calibrated precarity is produced as policy design rather than policy failure (Anderson, 2010; Hahamovitch, 2011; Ruhs, 2013). Chaplaincy complements this structure by sacralizing endurance and privatizing risk, converting employer command over time, pace, and renewal into a worker obligation to deliver reliability on demand.

Digital infrastructure helps these techniques travel. Facebook Live carries brief, repeatable lessons across shifts, camps, and borders; liveness attracts attention, comments create visibility, and archiving extends messages beyond a single season. Platform mediation builds a translocal moral community oriented to saving, patience, and quiet reliability, stabilizing expectations of unsupervised compliance at work and in housing (Campbell and Connelly, 2020; Evolvi, 2022; Srnicek, 2017). Borders and deportation practices operate in this mediated field as labor regulation rather than pure sovereignty, tightening the link between moral instruction and employer power (Walia, 2021).

The dynamics identified here also appear in other migrant workplaces where faith-based outreach intersects with employer control, including meatpacking. Nabhan-Warren (2021) shows how religious idioms in Midwestern plants both soothe and sort shop-floor order under rapid line speeds and injury risk. In such settings, devotional language links blessing to rule observance, translates savings and bodily restraint into markers of worthiness, and narrates insecurity as personal responsibility rather than program design. Similar logics surface where movement is restricted and authority structures daily life, including immigration detention. Faith programs can channel discipline and foresight into individualized projects of self-management presented as care, converting structural hazard into ethical obligation to comply, plan, and prove worthiness—often with family stewardship as the horizon of meaning (Cuéllar, 2019; Erzen, 2017; Stoddard, 2021).

There are also openings for contestation. The emphasis on family well-being and dignity at work provides a language that could ground collective claims. The same values used to commend stewardship could anchor demands for portability across employers, caps on recruitment fees and debt, enforceable third-party housing inspections, paid travel and rest days, and protections that allow refusal of unsafe work without loss of status. Faith leaders in some settings have accompanied worker education and legal aid. Future work should examine where chaplaincy aligns with employer priorities and where it might be reoriented toward worker-led goals, including partnerships with worker centers and rights organizations. Two limits matter for this next step. First, the analysis centers chaplains’ discourse and does not trace how workers take up or contest these messages. Second, while platforms extend pastoral reach, they may also host counter-publics through which workers circulate critique, share rights information, and build solidarity.

Taken together, the findings specify how religion operates within racial capitalism, not as external comfort but as part of the organizational technology that governs labor. Care is real; prayers, greetings, and counsel build recognition and belonging. The political effect is to convert structural exposure to loss into personal projects of stewardship and self-control, narrowing the horizon of remedy to individual prudence and family thrift. A different allocation of risk would locate savings, downtime, and safety within contracts and public regulation rather than in the worker’s self-discipline. Framed through pastoral power, institutional spiritual care, the spiritualization of work, and critical migration accounts of deportability, the case clarifies where leverage for change is likely to be found.

Conclusion

This article has traced how evangelical chaplaincy helps reproduce a racialized agricultural labor regime by translating program risk into moral obligation. Calling the visa a blessing and pairing it with responsibility links contract renewal to punctuality, productivity, and rule observance in work and housing. Sermons on discipline and foresight promote savings, bodily restraint, and plan-keeping as inner virtues. Cautionary tales about returning with nothing resolve into appeals to self-management and careful remittance use. Together, these elements convert structural hazard into personal duty and relocate the costs of insecurity onto workers and households. The analysis shows precarity working as governance and risk moving from firms and states to migrants who must buffer volatility through prudence and endurance (Brown, 2015; Lorey, 2015; Ong, 2006; Rose, 1999).

Read through racial capitalism, legality, housing, and recruitment are organized to secure a disciplined yet disposable workforce. Deportability makes status provisional, while pastoral speech renders compliance virtuous and endurance grateful (De Genova, 2002; Robinson, 2020). A moral economy of responsibility, dignity, and care gives this arrangement ethical shape, coding bodily wear and financial restraint as worthiness and love for kin (Fassin, 2018; Holmes, 2023; Melamed, 2015). Digital delivery matters as well. Platformed broadcasts carry short lessons across camps and seasons, building a translocal audience oriented to thrift, patience, and quiet reliability, which stabilizes expectations of unsupervised compliance (Campbell and Connelly, 2020; Evolvi, 2022; Srnicek, 2017).

The contribution is twofold. First, the findings specify how religion operates within labor control as more than consolation. Chaplaincy supplies language that makes exploitation look like responsible caretaking and limits solutions to personal prudence and family saving. Second, the case links on-the-job demands to household reproduction. Framing remittances and budgeting as tests of fidelity shifts the costs that sustain production onto families in sending communities and normalizes this transfer as virtue rather than necessity (Fraser, 2016). The care that chaplains offer is real and valued. Its political effect is to bind workers to conditions that injure them, while presenting endurance as maturity.

There are implications for research and for change. Future work should center workers’ interpretations and follow how they take up, revise, or refuse pastoral messages across seasons and across borders. Comparative studies with meatpacking and detention chaplaincies can test whether the same moral pairing of blessing, discipline, and responsibility travels and with what consequences for injury, turnover, and household debt (Cuéllar, 2019; Erzen, 2017; Nabhan-Warren, 2021; Stoddard, 2021). For policy and organizing, the mechanisms identified here point to concrete levers: portability across employers, enforceable third-party housing inspections, caps on recruitment fees and debt, paid travel and rest days, and protections that allow refusal of unsafe work without loss of status. Partnerships between faith leaders, worker centers, and legal aid can redirect familiar idioms of stewardship toward rights education and collective claims rather than only personal prudence (Miller, 2007; Sullivan, 2020).

If precarity functions as governance, then addressing it requires shifting risk away from the individual and back onto employers and the state. Contracts and regulations should carry the costs of safety, downtime, and mobility, rather than locating them in the worker’s self-discipline. Attending to moral life is not a detour from political economy. It is a way to see how domination is stabilized and where it can be unsettled.