What about the working poor? Asked my wife. #dmingml

In my last blog (Part 1) where I reviewed Max Weber’s book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, I briefly looked at how capitalism emerged and how within the Protestant expression of faith, it came to be closely linked to calling. Weber describes how during this period the notion of ‘work’ transitioned from being merely assigned to the physical or secular world to having a stronger spiritual significance. People began to see work as a calling, and therefore, their commitment to it as having spiritual ramifications for themselves, although not so much for others yet.

  As with all blogs, in order to make them interesting and more likely to be read, you can’t help but leave some things out. In this case, I had indicated that in the West, we had moved beyond those days where people worked in atrocious conditions for merely a pittance. By saying this, I was not saying that capitalism had changed its stripes and become everybody’s economic saviour, merely that we had perhaps become more civilised in the way employers treated their employees. Of course, we can’t make blanket statements like this and know it to be true everywhere. This is what my wife was getting at. She thought my comment was too narrow and ignored an obvious downside to capitalism that we saw overtly during our last 7 years living in the U.S.

  Even in today’s developed world, there are people living in poverty and for various reasons (aptly defined by Bryant Myers in his book, Walking With the Poor) kept in poverty and prevented from climbing out of it. Cultural or not, there were times when we expressed alarm to our American friends that people could work long hours and be paid very little for that, or that some could not afford appropriate healthcare, or food, or education. In response to our concerns, we were often told that’s how the system worked and that it was an employers right to make money. Somehow, there was a disconnect between the right of employers and shareholders to make a profit and the responsibility to adequately honour the efforts of the workers.  One only has to scrap the surface of the health debate in the U.S to understand how the spirit of capitalism has destroyed the hopes and dreams of millions of families with children living without adequate healthcare cover. While we hate to admit it, essentially the premise for many of our arguments (and therefore our policies) are shaped around stereotypes that have emerged from our limited personal experiences and what we define as the ‘haves’, the ‘elite’ the ‘non-poor’ and the ‘have nots’ or the ‘poor.’

  Having reached this point, I have only a brief space to account for Part 2 in Weber’s book, where he highlights the emergence of asceticism and the theological contributions of Calvinism, Pietism, Methodism, the Quakers, and various sects growing out of the Baptist movement. Wealth resulting from capitalism was seen as a blessing and a curse. It was a natural consequence of people working with the belief that their work was now spiritual and their fruitfulness was proof of God’s blessing (“proving one’s faith in worldly activity”). Their works and worldly activity would not bring about an individual’s salvation, but certainly it would act as proof of their salvation. Unfortunately, this led many into the trappings of material accumulation and justifying it regardless of the cost it took to acquire it (usually at the expense of the labourers and the community).

  It was in this context that asceticism developed and changed. Over time it moved from an asceticism that led to the gain of personal wealth and individual freedom, to wanting to be free from how capitalism and material wealth led to sin and a departure from the Christian life. Ultimately, it became an attempt to crawl back from the edges of unrestrained capitalism and accumulation of wealth that led to spiritual complacency, to a healthier view of how the spiritual and physical realms of life should be balanced. Sadly, this created a different set of problems where deeply religious people separated themselves from the world to the degree that they lost the ability to engage the world and all of its issues. They lost sight of where God truly desired for them to be, and that was to know the Light and to be light to those spiritually lost, providing hope and healing to a broken world.

It’s strange, that this battle is still being fought today. Capitalism and consumerism arguably present one of the biggest challenges to the Church in the West in living out the intent of the gospels.