To Work Is to Pray: Faith and Working-Class Resilience

Something unique happened whenever César Chávez of the United Farm Workers entered a room: you felt a presence, an aura. You could feel how Chávez's Catholicism influenced his worldview. He sought an integration of his faith and his everyday work life. Many contemporary labor leaders, members of the working-class rank-and-file, and white-collar employees still exude their faith both on their "day of rest" and in their jobs.

Lately, faith and workers often seem divided. Some scholars maintain that faith no longer matters in working-class life, while on the other side, organized religion's adherents tend to be more socially conservative and less inclined to work for justice. Some argue that faith has become too focused on the personal level, forging a chasm between one's religious life and the everyday world of work. Interestingly, during the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the Catholic Church declared that one of the most serious errors of the modern era is the false dichotomy between one's faith and the world in which one lives. Faith should form a person's understanding about the cosmic questions of life and death, but also about the grungy details of daily toil.

Robert Anthony Bruno and Pope Benedict XVI share a common hope: to show how faith does and should impact one's perspective and praxis. They call for a stronger sense of and commitment to justice in workplaces and in the general economy. Bruno's goal in Justified by Work: Identity and the Meaning of Faith in Chicago's Working-Class Churches is to demonstrate "how a small number of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim working-class believers used their faith to inform their lives" (p. 9). He investigates, through hundreds of interviews with working-class individuals in Chicago, how people view their work as having inherent religious meaning. Bruno is concerned that many secular and religious leaders do not recognize the religious value of everyday work and few want to talk about the relationship between faith and labor. His true fear is that the only group interested in religion and work consists of corporate executives and evangelical leaders who want to insert religion into the workplace in order to justify and pacify workers to the capitalist system.

Pope Benedict XVI is no less concerned. Drawing on the Christian Gospels with over two thousand years of social thought, the pontiff builds upon the Catholic Social Tradition in his third encyclical, Charity in Truth (Caritas in Veritate). He raises profound criticisms of the logics of the market and the State. Benedict, like his predecessors, rejects a total reliance on capitalism and statism as a mechanism for social justice and a moral economy. He is convinced that both of these polar extremes of economic thought create their own internal logic that either neglects the common good or denies respect for human dignity. These logics neither humanize nor advance the world's condition. Millions still live in absolute poverty awaiting their turn for "development." Social structures based on these models have failed. The pontiff calls for a new logic of solidarity and gratuitousness (or generosity). All peoples, especially those who witness to the Christian faith—workers, employers, government and civic leaders—must rethink the purpose of the economy. For Pope Benedict, the key is to develop people, families, communities, and the global society through structures of justice based on a worldview of abundance and gift. We are all one human family called to share with each other in a network of charity and solidarity. A moral economy requires that we change the very way we think and act from an over-reliance on markets or the state to a perspective of seeing each person endowed with dignity, working with others to build the common good of each neighborhood, nation, and world.

These two authors...