Labor Day Reflections

According to the US Department of Labor, Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers.

It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country. The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on September 5, 1882, in New York City, in accordance with the plans of the Central Labor Union. 

As we celebrate Labor Day 2014, it might be a good opportunity to re-examine the history of labor and capitalism, as they relate to the church. Historian Michael Novak makes the point that the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was the main locus for the first flowerings of capitalism. Max Weber located the origin of capitalism in modern Protestant cities, but today’s historians find capitalism much earlier.

“It was the church more than any other agency,” writes historian Randall Collins, “that put in place what Weber called the preconditions of capitalism.”

The church owned nearly a third of all the land of Europe. In order to administer those vast holdings, it established a continent-wide system of canon law that tied together multiple jurisdictions of empire, nation, barony, bishopric, religious order, chartered city, guild, confraternity, merchants, entrepreneurs, and traders. The church also provided local and regional administrative bureaucracies of arbitrators, jurists, negotiators, and judges, along with an international language, “Canon Law Latin.”

The Cistercians (Catholic Religious Order), who eschewed the aristocratic and sedentary ways of the Benedictines (monastic order) and, consequently, broke farther away from feudalism, became famous as entrepreneurs. They mastered rational cost accounting, plowed all profits back into new ventures, and moved capital around from one venue to another, cutting losses where necessary, and pursuing new opportunities when feasible.

The role of the Catholic Church helped jump-start a millennium of impressive economic progress. In about 1000 CE, there were barely two hundred million people in the world, most of whom were living in desperate poverty, under various tyrannies, and subject to the unchecked ravages of disease and much civic disorder. Economic development has made possible the sustenance now of more than six billion people–at a vastly higher level than one thousand years ago, and with an average lifespan almost three times as long.

No other part of the world outside Europe (and its overseas offspring) has achieved so powerful and so sustained an economic performance, raised up so many of the poor into the middle class, inspired so many inventions, discoveries, and improvements for the easing of daily life, and brought so great a diminution of age-old plagues, diseases, and ailments.

Economic historian David Landes, who describes himself as an unbeliever, points out that the main factors in this great economic achievement of Western civilization are mainly religious:

• the joy in discovery that arises from each individual being an imago Dei called to be a creator; 
• the religious value attached to hard and good manual work; 
• the theological separation of the Creator from the creature, such that nature is subordinated to man, not surrounded with taboos; 
• the Jewish and Christian sense of linear, not cyclical, time and, therefore, of progress; and 
• respect for the market.

In addition to the contribution of the Catholic Church, we cannot ignore the role of the Puritans. They spoke of two callings – a general calling and a particular calling. The general calling is the same for everyone and consists of a call to conversion and godliness.

A particular calling consists of the specific tasks and occupations that God places before a person in the course of daily living. It focuses on, but is not limited to, the work that a person does for a livelihood.

According to Wheaton Professor Leland Ryken, “Since God is the one who calls people to their work, the worker becomes a steward who serves God.” In essence, we serve God through or by means of the work we do. As a result, all legitimate forms of work is dignified, because of God’s involvement.

Christianity has and continues to bring dignity to legitimate work. In his second letter to the Thessalonians, the apostle Paul cautions believers to avoid idleness and dissociate from anyone “who will not work” (3:6-15). Such persons undermine and degrade the Christian work ethic.