Churches and Cooperatives (Part III): The American Church and Class Silence
John Aden
If churches hope to be actors in the work of economic justice, then they have a responsibility to develop an anticapitalist counter-theology, but to do so they must first disentangle from their own idolatrous faith in capitalism. What sort of faith allows Christians to bless the gods of capitalism while professing faith in the biblical God of justice? Unfortunately, rather than challenging the principalities and powers of the world, the church frequently mimics them. Several of capitalism’s key tenets and modes of organization have found their way into Christian theology and practice. For example, dominant notions of God’s power tend to stress God’s top-down control of the created order.
In economic terms, God looks much more like a CEO than a worker.1 Individualism and economic calculations find their way into soteriology: salvation is a one-time transaction between an individual and their personal savior. Salvation is frequently presented as a non-terrestrial phenomenon, something initiated or chosen here but properly executed in a future spiritual plane. But when Jesus says his kingdom is “not from this world” (John 18:36), this is not a rejection of the material world. The powers that be do not receive a pass. The reign of God is a way of life fundamentally at odds with Caesar’s top-down, oppressive empire, not merely in a spiritual afterlife but here and now: “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10).2 In our world today, the parallel to Caesar’s empire is the neoliberal economy and the nation-states that protect extractivist policies over human and ecological well-being. When the Church follows the lead of this empire, it reinforces the very powers it has been called to challenge.
Global missions and local charities are two of the Church’s most common modes of public economic engagement, yet these programs rarely challenge the capitalist hegemony because they do little to upend capitalism’s top-heavy concentration of power. Taking the dominant model of economics as a given, Christianity can become a tool to either segregate people from economic opportunity or assimilate them into the economic status quo. Missions have historically gone hand-in-hand with economic and cultural assimilation efforts, cloaked in notions of “development.”3 From early encounters with Indigenous people to overseas proselytization, Christian missions have often been “Americanizing” or “civilizing” projects, running parallel with the proliferation of capitalism and American military presence.
This perverse missiology serves the gods of capitalism in the name of the Christian God. Few Christians would intentionally frame missions in these terms today, yet many ongoing development efforts still serve to fold nearly all people into the big tent of global capitalism, as multinational corporations now “race to the bottom” to extract cheap labor from vulnerable workers across the globe. This exploitation, ironically, further allows the American Church to justify its missionary efforts. It seeks to save poor, oppressed souls without transforming the system that made them poor in the first place.
On the local level, churches in the United States run or partner with extensive networks of charities, and while many of the services offered by churches are vital in the short-run, they rarely address the root causes of economic injustice. Recognizing that charities merely address symptoms of deeper problems, many progressive faith communities have shifted towards advocacy models that highlight the need for systemic change. This is undoubtedly a step in the right direction, yet, as Joerg Rieger and Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger attest, these efforts are also limited when they overlook the connections between advocates and those for whom they advocate. “Too many advocates,” they claim, “assume that they are somehow above or unaffected by the problem, merely wanting to help others who are less fortunate.”4 This leads to a “one-sided solidarity” that presumes change comes about through the generosity of privileged middle-class individuals. Not only does this approach discount the agency of poor and marginalized people, it reinforces the hierarchy between the self-perceived middle class and the objects of their generosity.
To truly imagine and embody alternatives to capitalism founded in economic solidarity, churches must shine a light on the issue of class. Though seldom addressed head-on in ecclesial contexts (especially in predominantly white mainline and evangelical churches), class is nearly always operative whether we recognize it or not. Class sometimes operates beneath the surface because it is typically less visible than identity markers like race and gender. Mainline American churches are, in many ways, taking slow steps towards repenting for their histories of sexism, racism, queerphobia, and ecological devastation, yet capitalist hegemony, along with its models of charity and advocacy, is usually taken for granted. The lack of ecclesial class consciousness contributes to the endorsement of capitalist extraction within the Church and in American society at large.
Class is a reality that most of us feel at a deep level, and we frequently see its consequences or speak about it without using the language of class. Yet because class analysis has been otherwise cleansed from the American psyche, economic problems are frequently misdiagnosed. Neoliberal capitalism atomizes individual economic actors: each person is wholly responsible for their own destiny. Economic failures and the suffering they produce are privatized and internalized,5leaving the broader economic system unchecked. Class analysis, on the other hand, highlights the relations of power that shape our lives. While there are many competing definitions of class, I will follow Michael Zweig’s conception of class in terms of the power and control people have over their work.6 This notion of class, while limited and far from exclusive, is a helpful heuristic for analyzing relations of power among workers and capitalists because it accounts for the fundamental tension of capitalist organization: the competing interests and power disparities between workers and owners.
The working class is the largest and most diverse class in America, but what they all have in common is that they work for someone else: “They produce the wealth of nations, but receive from that wealth only what they can buy with the wages their employers pay them.”7 This group consists of the vast majority of the American labor force, 63 percent by Zweig’s count.8 Though popular representations of the working class tend to focus on white, male manual laborers, the working class is actually disproportionately Black, Hispanic, and female. Therefore, class analysis is integrally tied to the work of gender and racial justice. At the opposite end of the class hierarchy is the capitalist class, that is, strictly speaking, anyone who owns a business. Small business owners, however, have very little economic and political power compared to corporate executives, so Zweig distinguishes the peak of the capitalist class as the “ruling class,” the proverbial one percent of the one percent. This group includes the interlocking collective of financial and political elites who, though far from monolithic or all-powerful, have the greatest concentration of economic and political power.9
Between the working and capitalist classes lies the middle class, a precarious and ill-defined middle ground where many working-class people see themselves situated, if only in aspirations. The middle class includes small business owners, middle managers, and professionals (e.g., accountants, professors) across all industries, and they share traits with each of the classes around them.10 They tend to have a fair amount of control over their work, yet they have less control than the capitalist class and still bear a great deal of economic risk and instability. Their work, while somewhat highly valued in the job market, is subject to cost-cutting efforts, causing the middle class to slowly “sink into the proletariat.”11 Thus, their interests more closely align with the working class than with the capitalist class, cementing the proverbial “99 percent” as a very real, albeit diverse, group whose economic potential is being squeezed by capitalist elites. Yet, as Kwok Pui-lan and Joerg Rieger suggest, the “forced unification” of production relations opens the door for solidarity among diversity.12 Unfortunately, however, due to our collective silence on class, a mass movement of working-class solidarity—let alone cross-class or cross-racial solidarity—has yet to coalesce in opposition to capitalist extraction.
If it is to offer holistic care and service, the Church must recognize that a majority of its community, inside and outside of the Church, shares a relative sense of economic disempowerment. Even those in a more stable financial situation, if they are to truly be part of the “body of Christ,” can see that when “one member suffers, all suffer together with it” (1 Cor. 12:26).13 Class analysis helps build this awareness so steps towards solidarity may be taken. Discussing class and other economic issues will help churches to “read” the world and respond effectively in their own context. Movements for genuine economic transformation will undoubtedly go beyond the walls of the Church, but churches must play a role. In the face of neoliberal capitalist idolatry, the Church is responsible for articulating a counter-theology that emerges from the experiences of poor and working-class people. Thankfully, there is no need to build from scratch. The Church can look to a long theological tradition of economic justice that points to a God in solidarity with the poor and marginalized, offering toeholds for the development of a new economy that works for all people, not just the few.
1 Joerg Rieger and Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger, Unified We Are a Force: How Faith and Labor Can Overcome America’s Inequalities (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2016), 13.
2 See Joerg Rieger, “The Materialism of Religion: On Religion and Things That Matter,” in Jesus vs. Caesar: For People Tired of Serving the Wrong God (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2018), 53-72.
3 While assimilationist efforts like missions are more common today, segregationist attitudes have also been influential in Christianity’s history in the United States, most notably among defenders of slavery who cited the Bible to defend “natural” racial and economic hierarchies.
4 Rieger and Henkel-Rieger, 59.
5 Rogers-Vaughn, 100.
6 Some definitions of class use education, income, or a vague sense of social status as the dividing lines between classes. Each of these factors are deeply related to class (either as products or intersections of class), but none of them account for the tensions between workers and owners. For example, dividing classes into income brackets alone masks the power relations between classes that reproduce income inequality in the first place. While income does have a determinative effect on our economic (and political and social) power, it is ultimately a secondary product of economic relations that begin in the workplace (i.e., control of profit-distribution mechanisms, the means of production, etc.).
7 Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret, Second Edition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 3.
8 Zweig, 31.
9 Zweig, 17.
10 Zweig, 18-29.
11 Marx and Engels, 131.
12 Joerg Rieger and Kwok Pui-lan, Occupy Religion: Theology of the Multitude (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), 62.
13 One should be careful, however, not to confuse solidarity with sameness. White supremacy, for example, is detrimental to all of our relations, yet white Christians should not presume to share the same pain that their Black neighbors feel when they experience police brutality or other racist attacks. Likewise, middle-class people must learn to stand in solidarity with the working class without decentering the struggles of the working poor.