Abstract
About halfway through this book, Andrew Lynn, a research fellow at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, recalls an aphorism of G.K. Chesterton. The great old English apologist noted that Christianity is often ‘reduced to the “encouragement of small virtues supporting capitalism [and] the discouragement of the huge virtues that defy it”’ (p. 153). Lynn does not short-circuit his careful assessment of the ‘Faith and Work’ movement that has emerged in American evangelicalism in the last generation by describing it as the institutional effort to enact Chesterton's adage, but I suspect it would not be inaccurate.
Over eight chapters, Lynn goes beyond describing the movement—its origins, developments, and future prospects—to using the movement as a means to describe American evangelicalism more broadly. The Faith and Work movement intends to invest ordinary working lives with vocational significance, so that Monday is as much a concern of our religiosity as Sunday. Christian ethicists should always be alert to useful research being conducted by our cousins in the Sociology of Religion and it seems to me that for those working in a number of fields, taking time with this fine book would be a useful investment.
The Faith and Work movement has a lineage going back generations but has exploded in popularity since the 1990s. Saving the Protestant Ethic seeks to explore why this is the case: ‘Why does work suddenly “matter” to God?’ (p. 4). Lynn demonstrates that the movement can be understood ‘as a highly organized and well-resourced effort to renegotiate creative-class evangelicalism's place and relation to power within the institutions and social structures that make up American society today’ (p. 17).
In the first chapter, Lynn establishes the foundations for his argument, describing the emergence of this movement in conversation with the unavoidable work of Max Weber. He proposes a useful breakdown of the different ways religious communities can relate to work—frameworks that subordinate or ‘shirk’ work (p. 28), frameworks that sacralise work, and frameworks that subvert work. Faith and Work sits largely within the middle strand. ‘At its most basic level’ the movement ‘represents an effort to mobilize material and organizational resources that steer more of the evangelical populace toward sacralizing and stabilizing frameworks’ (p. 29). The ‘creative class’ referred to in the book's subtitle indicates the social shift that has prompted the emergence of this movement—an ‘embourgeoisement process’ (p. 25) which means that the previously more withdrawn approaches of born-again believers were no longer fit for purpose. The whole book can be read profitably as one concrete example of the truth of John Wesley's claim that as religiously serious communities are conducive to ‘industry and frugality’, the wealth that accrues becomes the cause of the ‘decay of pure religion’ (quoted on p. 230).
Chapter 2 maps out the shape of that earlier fundamentalist approach to work, which in an important way diverged from the stance of magisterial Reformation positions. Luther famously collapsed the hierarchy of vocations, insisting that every job that can serve the neighbour can be done as if it is a priestly ministry: ‘In this life we never can be idle and without work toward the neighbor’ (Martin Luther, Freedom of a Christian, Fortress, 2008, p. 79). Nineteenth-century American evangelicals never formally repudiated this, but ‘with the dire state of unsaved souls looming large in the imaginaries of the laity, those who dedicated their full-time work to spreading the gospel seemed to exhibit a higher and holier Christian life than those constrained by full-time non-ecclesial work’ (p. 69). Lynn charts how a version of this evangelical missionary-clericalism persisted with the emergence of modern evangelicalism including Billy Graham and his peers.
Chapters 3 and 4 account for the shift whereby the prioritisation of full-time ministry, especially ministries of evangelism, was challenged by the idea of a Monday-to-Friday ministry for lay people. Successful evangelical businessmen (they were all men) initiated this process by establishing ‘para-church’ ministries seeking to evangelise and disciple other business leaders and professionals. From these small beginnings, the movement blossomed in the 1980s, no surprise in the era of Reaganism and Thatcherism. A boom in books published in this field both testify to its growing popularity and accelerated that popularity. Lynn also traces the rise of ‘conferences’, the events where the movement wins and forms adherents. The third chapter is quite forensic in how Lynn details the funding sources and institutional collaborations that structure what can appear to be an organic upswelling of popular Christian interest. The fourth chapter proposes that there are four different, overlapping theologies to be found in the movement. The discussion of ‘Re-Commissioning’, ‘Re-Sacralizing’, ‘Re-Integrating’, and ‘Re-Embedding’ approaches to work (pp. 128–43) are not just illuminating in regard to Faith and Work initiatives but would serve as a useful introduction to contemporary American evangelical preoccupations.
Chapter 5 considers the question ‘Whose work matters to God?’ because while the Faith and Work movement presents all work as equally amenable to vocational description, the demographics of those engaging with events tend towards the male professional class. The best that the movement can offer those doing more menial work is a kind of stoic consolation that God recognises their efforts towards excellence. And the lack of representation for women, either among the speakers and authors or the participants, may in part be because the movement is a response to ‘a specifically male status anxiety’ (p. 171).
In the sixth chapter, Lynn again demonstrates his journalistic virtue as he exposes some of the efforts by right-wing lobby groups to influence the movement. Various libertarian projects, including those funded by the Koch brothers, have underwritten projects in this movement in the hope of attaching their cause to this Christian understanding of work. In a very precise argument, Lynn proposes that the motivation for these ‘politically driven forces’ to encourage the movement (p. 178) are three-fold. They intend to ‘lower the ethical floor of dignified labor’ (p. 184), ‘channel evangelicals away from progressive activism’ (p. 187), and to ‘sacralize laissez-faire capitalism’ (p. 189). An element of this fascinating chapter that deserves to be communicated widely is just how difficult it has been for the ideologically-committed funders to break in to the discourse. Hayek’s economic vision features within the movement, but almost as an afterthought. It is easy to caricature American evangelicalism as a sort of plaything for political actors, but Lynn discovers that groups like the Acton Institute, the Kern Foundation, and the Institute for Faith, Work and Economics ‘find themselves swimming upstream in terms of appending a political message onto the movement's message’ (p. 197). This is not to suggest that the Faith and Work movement exists in some apolitical vacuum. Lynn's extensive immersion in the various programmes on offer demonstrates how the movement functions to naturalise contemporary capitalism and the resources weave the Christian message in and around the norms of the corporate world. But beyond this general affirmation of the status quo, achieving some intentional political instrumentalisation of the movement is difficult.
In the penultimate chapter, Lynn carefully describes the most recent turn in the movement, which is theological in nature. Drawing on the nineteenth-century Dutch Reformed thinker, Abraham Kuyper, evangelicals have turned towards understanding their engagement with workplaces as a means of cultural stewardship. Kuyperian ‘sphere-sovereignty’ (pp. 211–12), where the Christian is freed to engage in the life of culture and society on its own terms without the need to overtly baptise culture and society or take them over, might explain why the movement which is so in line with capitalist thought is still resistant to being overwhelmed by libertarian ideas. With a cultural magnanimity underwritten by these theological resources, ‘at least some portions of the faith and work movement’, concludes Lynn, ‘aspire to serve as an off-ramp to the culture war’ (p. 216).
Other modes of engagement with the workplace exist beyond those inspired by Dutch Reformed thinking. In the final chapter, Lynn ‘fleshes out relationships and points of intersection with these remaining “contender” orientations for imbuing Monday with significance’ (p. 232). He considers how Faith and Work movements have or could express themselves in Anabaptist and other low church settings, how they have been adopted by what he calls ‘Dominionism’ (pp. 237–41) (which is a form of Christian nationalism) and by the Prosperity Gospel (pp. 241–44). The final word is given to what he calls Communitarian responses. All of the different approaches that Lynn encounters are individualistic but he sketches out how there are traces of an alternative possibility that embeds consideration of work within common good thinking and that reaches for structural reform as against simple individual, subjective transformation. But any such response faces arid ground in terms of the raging culture war that surrounds this topic and the intrinsic individualism of wider American evangelicalism. Commenting on how difficult it is for evangelicals to get distance from common-sense capitalism, Lynn concludes ‘It is rare that “Protestant ethics” are able to critique a system purportedly built on “the Protestant ethic”’ (p. 247, emphasis original).
Lynn identifies a surprising central source for many of the leaders of the Faith and Work movement: Dorothy Sayers. Her 1941 radio address, ‘Why Work?’ is widely cited. With her customary clarity, she laments that the church ‘has allowed work and religion to become separate departments, and is astonished to find that, as a result, the secular work of the world is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends, and that the greater part of the world's intelligent workers have become irreligious, or at least, uninterested in religion’ (quoted on p. 135). The movement that Lynn introduces and describes is one that seeks to remedy this mistake. Lynn's genre is more restrictive than Sayers’, but this is a well-written book. It stands as an exemplary work within the Sociology of Religion that will particularly inform Christian ethicists whose work overlaps with the concerns of labour, the ethics of capitalism, or ecclesiology.