Ora et Labora 2.0?

But they maintain the fabric of the world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer -- Eccl. 38:34

I've said it in these pages quite recently, but George Barna literally defines the American Evangelical Christian. His eponymous Group is not so much a market research firm as a change agent in certain segments of the Christian church. So I noted with interest "a Barna Update" on "Faith, Work, and Calling." .

The key point of the Barna Update is that American Christians, still a significant proportion of the population, have the same anxieties as everyone else. I'll put it bluntly: the American labor market is now shaped by: (1) the reduction of labor costs through offshoring and automation; (2) the over-credentialing of about half of the population (note I do not say overeducating); (3) the expansion of jobs in the service industry, particularly in health care; and (4) a small number of highly compensated jobs in the areas of automation, offshoring, higher education and training, and the financial services necessary to keep the capital flowing; (5) the parallel bureaucratization and growth in scale of public, private, and ecclesial structures (I'm not blaming anyone, just making an observation); and (6) the demand for intense specialization in occupations that are likely to be economically sustainable for much less than the duration of an adult's working life.

Some of this is obvious in the Update, and some of this shrouded under the pall that neo-liberalism casts over all of us. Yet if you talk to relatively well-educated Americans of around 30, you soon find yourself in a competition to determine who is most miserably in debt, engaged in the most meaningless or frustrating work, and under the most bureaucratic control. As you might imagine, I almost always lose.

A common critique of this attitude is that my generation are incurable whiners whose precious self-esteem cannot handle the reality of labor as drudgery. However, in many cases, they describe contradictions between a service and the economic transaction beneath that service. The young social worker may be told, "It is not how well you serve a client, but how many clients you serve and justify with paperwork, no matter how poorly." The young banker may be told, "We're not here to increase liquidity unless it makes us the most money to do so." The young pharmacist may be told, "Steer the customer away from the generic and don't worry if they might not be able to afford a full month's supply. That's not our problem."

At the same time, the dynamism and tightness of the present labor market presents the appearance of greater freedom and yet attendant anxiety. The geographic reach of the labor market expands in proportion to greater specialization as over-credentialing saturates specialized labor pools. McDonald's is always and everywhere hiring the unskilled, but the skilled are constantly seeking the market in desperate need of them. This is true of "blue collar" as well as "white collar" jobs. The young specialists imagine they can live anywhere but often end up bouncing from place to place, straining relationships.

Nowhere is there the freedom of the mid-19th century American labor "market", where an adult white male could know and practice the basics of everything from navigation to blacksmithing to agriculture to political oratory. Our ancestors, too, moved, changed jobs frequently, and often failed, but their skills were more general and their failures less destructive (barring addiction). And if you were lucky enough to succeed, you could settle somewhere happily for life. These days we are frightened that our choices might leave us destitute, alone, and far away from "home."

What I hear from the anxieties expressed in Barna Group polling is the desire for a new theology of work or a new emphasis on the theology of work. They are a bit skeptical of that over in Charlottesville (i.e. David Zahl of Mockingbird ). And I'm skeptical, too. There's plenty of theology of work here and there. The passage in Ecclesiasticus I cite at the beginning of this entry has an interesting perspective on the work of the learned professions versus the farmers and craftspeople. Dorothy Sayers has a nice essay . Jesus has a few things to say about being a soldier that I've always found interesting.

Nevertheless, the desire for more thought about the theology of work may have the wrong end. There is a strong tendency in American Protestantism to see the mere assent to belief as the root of all accomplishment. In this case, if I believe the right things about work, I will make the right choices and find fulfilling, impactful, significant, and perhaps even remunerative work so that I can happily bestow my surplus on the church of my choice. Or as the Mockingbirds would say, You're turning work into a focus for the law. If believing the right things about work achieved anything, everyone without such great work must be believing the wrong things. And thus the vicious cycle of anxiety would continue. Or perhaps, a theology of work is only demanded to make the structural evils of our labor market more bearable.

There is an alternative. The origins of Christian monasticism in both East and West lie in the economic and political turmoil of the 3rd-6th centuries A.D. on the shores of the Mediterranean. Offshoring was not quite the issue it was today, but there is some parallel in the contracting of Germanic tribes by the Roman government to execute military functions. Social mobility, always a tenuous but not unheard of concept in Greco-Roman society, was greatly reduced, as the symbolic extension of citizenship to all free inhabitants of the Empire ironically coincided with a reduction in the supply of slaves. By the end of the 3rd century, many humbler Roman citizens were finding themselves in a condition little different than an agricultural slave in the days of Spartacus: the beginnings of serfdom.

Matters were little better for the Roman lower and upper middle classes. Their privileges in all areas of law had gradually eroded. Prices were fixed. Occupations were transmitted by inheritance. A lower middle class Roman of the Republic had a good life. Playwrights wrote (sadly lost!) dramas involving marriage plots between young men and young women seeking to make their way in the world in the small craft workshops of Italy. By 300 A.D., that world was forever lost to bureaucratic control of economic life. The upper middle classes likewise inherited their jobs. Tradition held that some portion of public expenditure came from the private means of officeholders, but either the proportion grew with a declining tax base and/or the wealthy families in town were not doing so well anymore. Whatever the cause, holding public office became so financially ruinous that the people who were once the most ruthless political campaigners of the ancient world became the people who had to be compelled into public service by the draconian force of law.

The ancient situation I describe is much different than the modern one, but both, I think, are broken all the same. The response of the institutional Church was to become a parallel institution to the public institutions and eventually parallel to the Emperor himself. However, for Greco-Roman Christians of all classes, there was another option: the wilderness.

Going into the wilderness was not a new thing, nor just a Christian thing, but it was equal opportunity. We mainly hear of the rich ones. Antony of Egypt saw himself as the young man of the Gospels, but sought the perfection of giving away his possessions rather than mourning the counsel. We hear of a former imperial tutor who lives slightly more comfortably than a monk of humbler origins, who complains of it. He is told that this man is used to fine foods and silk sheets, so he is equally ascetic to the complainant, if not more. Benedict and Pope Gregory, both high Roman magistrates, long to live in the mountains of Italy.

Monks go into the wilderness, because they can do no other to pursue the Christ in an utterly broken world. They know that others can. We hear of a doctor in Alexandria who gives away his services for free and keeps the sick in his home, finding new patients by wandering the streets and listening for their moans. The angels tell a monk that this man is greater than all monks.

And the irony of this all is that the humbler among the monks maintain their craft. There are blacksmiths in monasteries, for instance, anything to keep them self-sufficient. Yet the learned or the once rich do the simplest, least skilled, but most attentive of crafts: the weaving of reed mats, literally making fabric to center their prayer.

So if we want work to work for us, we may need to give up control and let the deceptive freedom of opportunity pass us by: to seek sufficiency rather than abundance, the simple and humble rather than its opposite, maintaining the fabric of the world in prayer rather than seeking to improve it.