During our children’s early years, my wife stayed at home with them, caring for them, nursing them, raising them, and homeschooling them for a year. Our children benefited immensely even though these were also years of sacrifice, loneliness, and stress. I will be forever grateful for her act of love to our family.
Brittany is deeply interesting: She cares about art, ideas, and people. Yet when we went out socially, most people failed to see her as particularly interesting. Once she left the workforce, in group settings, people tended to ignore her to talk to me about my work and interests. I (apparently!) was the interesting and insightful one; she was just the housewife. Sadly, this pattern extended to church. If people asked her questions, they were about our children. Her value and interest to other people was defined by her labor, even within the church. And because her labor produced no immediate capital, people didn’t know how to talk to her.
In James 2, Jesus’ brother sternly warns against showing partiality to wealthy Christians—“pay[ing] attention” to those wearing fine clothes and making “distinctions among yourselves” (vv. 3–4, ESV throughout). Christians are still captive to the sin of partiality. Those of us who are white-collar workers (and it’s to this segment that I’m writing), “pay attention” to those who work in socially prestigious careers, typically those who earn the most money, and overlook those whose labor we deem insignificant, thus making distinctions.
Paradoxically, the church today praises the role of stay-at-home mothers but treats them as less worthy of attention. This puts women in an impossible bind: If they work outside the home, they go against a subculture’s social norms, but if they follow the norms and stay home, they are treated as insignificant. Yet, partiality is not just an issue with stay-at-home mothers. Many men who work in blue-collar jobs are often treated as less significant and interesting than those with professional careers, like business owners, doctors, lawyers, politicians, and college professors. The call of the church is to give loving attention to all its members without partiality.
When we determine our attention based on a person’s economic output, we alienate large segments of the population. Popular outlets have picked up on the self-conscious shame of “only” caretaking. In an experiment of sorts, I spoke with several stay-at-home mothers. Anxious about these sorts of questions, they felt an unacknowledged judgment: All you are is your labor, and your labor is just your children and household.
The mothers with whom I spoke wanted to express more about themselves: their interests, passions, and histories. But the labor-focused question “What do you do?” narrowed their options about what they could share. They love being mothers but also want deeper conversations than those narrowly defined by work or role.
Over time—whatever one’s profession and role in society—being overlooked by fellow believers can breed loneliness, alienation, and bitterness. Today, with modern city planning, loneliness is already increasing: Researchers found “crowded living conditions appear to lead to social withdrawal.” Suburban developments, too, often mean more time in the car and less time in local activities.
Adding to these modern realities, online trends like #tradwife content glamorize housewives. Tradwives are that subset of influencer whom Kelsey Kramer McGinnis defines as “mak[ing] faithfulness to some aspect of ‘traditional’ womanhood a central tenet of their online brand and identity.” I worry that if this movement does not come with a renewed understanding that women’s gifts, talents, interests, and roles vary from person to person, then many stay-at-home mothers are likely to burn out. They might feel isolated, lonely, and unable to match an aesthetic ideal.
In addition to stay-at-home mothers, many men suffer from the sin of partiality. Might I present a thought experiment? For those of us who have a college degree, work white-collar jobs, or are in a higher tax bracket, when church members greet one another—either during the service or afterward—whom do you greet first? We often gravitate toward the wealthy, those who work more socially respectable jobs, and those who are more esteemed by the world. It’s easier to ask them questions about their labor. We may even secretly hope that part of their influence will benefit us.
Often the sin of partiality overtakes those of us who are white-collar workers because we prefer ease. If we who are white-collar workers greet those who work as plumbers or repair cars (as my father and grandfather did), what will we say? What will we ask them about? We must put in effort to get to know themand their situations. (My assumption is that this is also the case among blue-collar workers; it’s easier to stay in homogenous groups.) As James says, we make distinctions among ourselves. For those who are different from us socioeconomically we only seem able to offer common pleasantries.
We have accepted the world’s categories of worth and value: a combination of wealth generation and social capital. Humans have a tendency toward what is called “prestige bias.” We “pay attention to whomever everyone else is paying attention to” and try to copy them. And we practice this in church, in direct opposition to James’s command.
So how do we repent of this sin? How do we practice showing love rather than partiality to our brothers and sisters in Christ?
James offers a response: “If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ you are doing well” (2:8). Everyone desires to be attended to, to be greeted, known, welcomed, and loved. Every Christian should want their worthto be in Christ, not labor. We address partiality by asking, How can we fairly treat everyone in the church, not just the people we find interesting? Of what does value consist—personal labor or Christ’s work on our behalf?
Practically, I think this comes down to James 2:3, where the writer warns against those who “pay attention” to well-dressed Christians in church. Attentionis the problem. Every human wants to be attended to, because attention is a gift of time and an affirmation of our existence.
Andy Crouch writes in The Life We’re Looking For, “All our lives, what we really have been looking for is blessing. We once lay on a mother’s breast, looking for a face. We were not looking for magic because we did not need it. All we needed was a person.” We all crave and need that kind of attention (a point I elaborate on in my forthcoming book, To Live Well).
Ultimately, the most satisfying affirmation comes from God, but through his body here on earth, we encourage and see each other. The church’s encouragement was brought home to me once when someone took the time after a service to ask how I was really doing. I didn’t need to pour out my heart to him, but I did need someone to ask, to attend to me. And he did. This is the opposite of the sin of partiality: taking the time to be with someone, to ask meaningful questions, to count the person as valuable regardless of labor or wealth. In a word, loving the person.
What does our attention say about our priorities? One of my own friends says that in church greeting times, our friends can always wait. We instead should focus on those who seem lonely or ignored, including visitors, stay-at-home mothers, or blue-collar workers, so we do not show partiality. Everyone is propelled toward partiality. Propelled by the Spirit and emboldened by Jesus’s mission, the church should be different.
And when we greet someone in church, we should start not with the loaded question “What do you do?” but, as one stay-at-home mother suggested to me, “How long have you been attending here?” The former implies that vocation defines a person. The latter opens the conversation to a story about the congregant and his or her history.
Then, outside the church service, we must reframe how we think about the value of the work done by mothers, mechanics, high-school teachers, salesclerks, and others in less socially prestigious jobs. Insofar as they do these jobs to God’s glory and serve the common good, they are each valuable and honorable. There is dignity in laboring “heartily” unto the Lord (Col. 3:23) and for the good of a community, whether you are installing pipes or setting up laws.
Finally, to repent of the sin of partiality, we must resist the urge to set apart some occupations as elite or special: professional, white-collar, and business jobs. It is appropriate to acknowledge the hard work someone has put into a business or medical practice. But recognition crosses the line into making “distinctions among yourselves” when we see these careers as holding special honor in our churches. James is clear: We are equal before Christ.
Our hearts are easily molded by our cultural narratives. It is easy for us to see the value of mothers only in their children or to overlook the men who work jobs that seem menial or uninspiring. But we serve Christ, who was a builder yet spoke in the temple. And his mother “treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart” (Luke 2:19)—which means she as a mother had profound thoughts about the Son of God, whom she carried in her womb and raised as a child.
This Sunday, let us all show more attention to those who have been neglected, to those lacking wealth and social capital. For we are all poor, in need of rescue from God. He left the riches of heaven and became poor to give us himself. We are all equal at the foot of the cross.
Alan Noble is associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University. He is the author of several books, and his book To Live Well releases in April.
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