Did the Puritan work ethic work itself to death?

 

I’ve seen an Atlantic article pop up in my feed sometimes, and I don’t have a subscription so I can’t read the article, but the little summary suggests that one of the primary reasons people are leaving the church is that the average person is too busy with work to have time or energy for communities that aren’t directly related to furthering their own careers or the career prospects of their kids. It also uses the term “workism”, which apparently was also coined by the Atlantic a few years ago to describe people getting their identity and purpose from their jobs rather than from things like religion.

There are, of course, other reasons – the obvious absence of a good god in an increasingly shitty world, and the ever-increasing hypocrisy of Christianity’s loudest fanboys, being near the top of the list – but this definitely is a valid point. Even back when I WANTED to attend church regularly, I was often working weekend side hustles, or recovering from working overtime, and just needed to fucking sleep sometimes. I needed an ACTUAL day of rest, not yet another day of getting up early and meeting obligations. So it wouldn’t be surprising if this has been a factor for a number of other people too.

Now, while I haven’t read the article beyond the bit before it hits a paywall, I got the impression that the author feels like poor Christianity has had its rightful place in civilization usurped by a secular culture that no longer makes time for the important stuff like meaning and community.

 

But, here’s the thing:

 

Liberals have been shouting for generations that everyone should be able to make a living with a single 40-hour job, and that the people wealthy enough to have employees should be compelled to pay their employees a living wage. We’ve been screaming about how bad it is, both for individuals and communities, when the average person has to work multiple jobs just to survive, and doesn’t have time or energy for things that create rest and meaning and community. And we’ve been trying to appeal to common sense, to decency, and even to all the things the Bible says about how a society should treat the poor, in order to fix that shit.

But conservative Christians called us lazy and entitled, and bitched about how any tax on people actually wealthy enough to afford it would be “punishing people for success” and “preventing the job creators from creating jobs”. Conservative Christians kept saying “those that don’t work, won’t eat”... as if most people who can’t afford food and rent aren’t already working every waking hour. Conservative Christians kept voting to shred the social safety net for the poor while funneling every penny of profit a business makes to its already rich owners and stockholders, at the expense of worker wages... and justified this with the laughably untrue claim that churches would do a better job than the government at taking care of people. Conservative Christians kept voting to take more and more power away from workers, and give more and more power to people who already have cartoon villain levels of power... and justified it by saying that their god was rewarding hard work with success and punishing laziness with poverty. Conservative Christians kept talking about how the Puritan work ethic made this country what it is, and were somehow convinced that was a GOOD thing.

 

In other words, a primary reason that people no longer have the time or energy for church is because the church – at least, the branch of it that has the most influence in America - INVENTED “workism”, and fought tooth and nail against anything that would stop it from becoming the American way of life. And they didn’t care how many people that would hurt. But NOW they care, because it’s hurting THEIR thing.

If only someone had warned them that they would eventually reap whatever they sowed...