“There’s a big difference between middle class and striver class,” the conservative commentator Aaron Renn wrote last year.
“Middle class is about building a life,” he said, about “the material elements of the American Dream.” To be a striver, by contrast, is about “moving up in the world,” not so much financially—though that can be a component—but in terms of social recognition, especially among well-educated peers.
The ambition of the middle class is to have a nice house and take fun vacations, Renn said. The ambition of the striver looks like “wanting to become a tenured professor at a good university, or to own an apartment in a fashionable NYC neighborhood, or to get an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal.”
Oh, I thought when I read Renn’s post, that’s me. I’m a striver.
It wasn’t a shocking realization. I grew up the only child of a single mother, early aware of social strata and nowhere more aware of it than in church. By fourth grade, I worried that my clothes were not right—not ugly, unkempt, or ill-fitting, but somehow socially wrong. In sixth, I resented the PhD-holding pastor of our church, with his new home and vast lawn, for what I took to be his condescension toward my mother.
Striving is not passive work. By the end of middle school, newly aware of both the cost of college and the existence of the Western canon, I self-assigned the tasks of making perfect grades and reading every classic I could, stirred by visions of learned conversations in which I’d catch every sophisticated allusion more senior scholars made. I even tried to muddle through Chaucer in the original Middle English. My copy of The Canterbury Tales came, along with a tattered Wuthering Heights, from some light trespassing in an abandoned farmhouse.
At 13, I chose French class over Spanish because it seemed fancier. It was French, after all, that I saw quoted in my books, and I recall some vague notion about keeping secretary of state (conceived as a role in which one dresses like Katharine Hepburn and talks in a transatlantic accent in smoke-filled rooms) open as a viable career path. By late high school, I’d settled on investigative journalism instead. That interest, which I never ultimately pursued, was not solely about the recognition that would come with possible Pulitzers. But it wasn’t not for the possible Pulitzers.
Being a striver makes certain disappointments sting all the more. At 16, I knew with excruciating clarity how I’d whiffed it after making it to the interview stage in my application to Yale. And it lends itself to too much keeping of accounts. Today, 20 years after graduation, one of the most embarrassing and unattractive facts about me is that I could tell you precisely how my high school principal unfairly blocked me from the valedictorian spot—which went instead to his son.
Aaron Renn is a striver too, as he acknowledged this spring in a Substack post expanding on his taxonomy, and he explicitly disclaims any assumption that striving is bad. Though I would expect him to acknowledge that each way of life comes with characteristic pitfalls and temptations, Renn describes the middle class and striver class alike as “completely legitimate.”
As a striver, I want to agree. Tell me that I’m just fine. But Renn’s assertion of the moral neutrality of striving is far from universal in the Christian tradition. Theologians from Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica to Miroslav Volf in his newly released book The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse have argued that much of what we call striving or ambition is a sin.
So what of my striving? Is it harmless, or perhaps a neutral tool to be turned toward good or ill? A mere matter of taste and talent? Or is it, as Aquinas holds, an inordinate desire, a longing for honor for myself “without referring it to God” or “the profit of others”?
I read and wrestled with the Volf book with these questions in mind. It’s a short volume, and literary, engaging Søren Kierkegaard and John Milton’s Paradise Lost alongside the testimony of Scripture. Volf’s work turns on a distinction between striving for superiority and striving for excellence. His concern, he explains early on, is “striving to be better than someone else, not simply striving to be better.”
This is a more meaningful difference than it may initially seem. In a competitive culture that trains its members to think in lists and rankings, any improvement will tend to be relative improvement, and that relativity is about the position of other people. If I strive to be better, as a matter of course I will become better than others. If one team wins, the other loses. If I get the big envelope from Yale, someone else gets the devastation of the one-page rejection. There’s only so much honor to go around.
But striving for superiority, Volf contends, “is not inherently tied to improvement at all.” Though the two often coincide, “I can [also] become better than someone else by that person becoming worse or by obstructing the performance of my competitor. It is even possible for everyone to become worse and for me still to become better than everyone else.” As Milton’s Satan famously observes, “Here we may reign secure, and in my choice / To reign is worth ambition, though in hell; Better to reign in hell than serve in heav’n.”
This distinction opens a gap between striving for superiority and striving for excellence into which the Summa’s definition of sinful ambition neatly fits. The problem, argues Aquinas, is not striving per se but striving for honor for myself, an aim achieved at the expense of others and in disregard for God and neighbor.
The sin, if I dare to hone the Summa’s razor edge to cut afresh, is not all ambition in our mild, modern understanding of the word. It is not Volf’s striving to be better nor even the social and intellectual ambition Renn and I share in our work. (I too would love to get an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal. Editors, hit me up!) It’s the “selfish ambition” that James pairs with arrogance and envy (3:14–16, NRSVue throughout) and Paul contrasts with Christ (Phil. 2:3–5).
Perhaps the natural pivot here would be toward some contemplation of humility as a virtue opposed to ambition’s vice. This is Paul’s move in the Philippians passage. “Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit,” he writes, “but in humility regard others as better than yourselves” (v. 3).
Yet it is not only humility to which the apostle calls his readers. There is an encouragement to generosity here too—an insistence on acting for “the interests of others.”
“Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others,” Paul instructs (v. 4). Imitate Jesus, he counsels, “who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself,” suffered, died, and was raised and “exalted … even more highly” (vv. 6–11). On this passage, Volf says,
Instead of holding onto the privileges of being the highest, Christ descended to become a servant even of the most despised humans. Instead of taking honor from others and amassing it for himself, he sought to elevate all into the glory in which all goods and all honors are shared. This is the logic of the enhancement of power and life, but for all rather than for oneself; there is no comparative superiority here, only the generous dispersal of conditions for excellence.
The end of Christ’s striving was the utmost honor, yet it was honor gained while he rescued the world.
Something similar could be said of Paul, who seems to have been a natural striver himself. “I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors,” he recalled to the Galatians (1:14). “If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more,” he told the church in Philippi: “circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (3:4–6).
But after his conversion, Paul doggedly bent this tendency to the service of Christ (Col. 1:28–29) and his church (1 Cor. 12:31; Col. 2:1–2). All these gains he counted as loss for the sake of Jesus (Phil. 3:7–10), and while no one could deny the man’s continued ambition—have a look at his missionary maps—his was “ambition to proclaim the gospel” (Rom. 15:20), not ambition for himself.
Perhaps, then, I can let myself off the hook. I’m not so far along in imitating Paul, let alone Christ (1 Cor. 11:1), but I can say with a clear conscience that I’m not striving for superiority over others in my work. Writers experience the baseline competition for opportunities and jobs that’s found in any line of work. But in a deeper sense, the success of good writing, particularly good Christian writing, is not a zero-sum game. If another, more successful writer influences his readers toward faithfulness and virtue, this is to everyone’s good, mine included. And if I’m doing my work well, perhaps his readers will come my way (and vice versa). We can muster a virtuous cycle of formation and book sales alike.
That’s not to say there’s no more eagerness for recognition in my heart. By its nature, my work requires attention to succeed. I see my central project as persuasion, which is inherently social and relational—that is, I need readers. Without readers to persuade, whatever the quality of my writing, I haven’t done what I set out to do. I haven’t achieved excellence.
Still, that recognition is not in limited supply. I’m striving to be better among others, not better than others. It’s not that I never feel a twinge of jealousy over someone else’s bestseller or subscriber count, but most of the time I know that esteem rightly accorded to other writers is no loss to me. Again, in clear conscience, I’m glad to see other people’s good work get its due.
Even so, I realized I’d be wrong to let myself off the hook.
It hit me the other day, out on a training run for an upcoming half-marathon, considering what kind of pace I might manage at the race. I was thinking happily about my personal best time, achieved at a race back in 2016, and about how much more impressive it would be if I could post the same time nearly a decade and three kids later. Then I’d ranked in the top 10 percent of women in the race. Now, in an older age bracket and a larger race, could I land somewhere in the single digits? How superior could I be to my peers? How much faster, better trained, better dressed? Would they notice my nicest running clothes, the ones with the subtle, if-you-know-you-know logo of the expensive New England brand I’d finally decided I could afford? Would they admire my good taste? Would they admire me?
The training run went well, but this realization sucked. I’d been ready to absolve myself in print, to find my striving innocent. Volf’s book may be needful for you, reader, but not for me. I’ve got it handled, or handled well enough.
I don’t.
Volf opens The Cost of Ambition discussing striving in the context of sports, and in retrospect it’s revealing that I found this a bit silly. For most of us, sports are just games—contrivances in which competition is inherent but basically artificial. I will strive to outpace other runners in this race, but not because we’re fleeing some danger or making for some destination. It’s not like the legendary first marathon, a desperate sprint to Athens to announce a battle won. After exercise, running against one another is the point. Of course we strive! It’s innocuous.
And it can be, I think, if the striving is for excellence, if outdoing others is merely the natural consequence of a race well run. My striving, though, is not solely that. It’s not, in Volf’s words, an unalloyed striving “for genuine goods—for what these goods are in themselves and for their benefits to ourselves, others, and the world.” It is not measured only against the excellence of Christ.
I haven’t arrived at a lesson fully learned, a vice wholly overcome, a new habit of virtue to cheerfully report. I’ll have run that race by the time this essay publishes, and I doubt I’ll do it with zero thoughts, however fleeting, about my superiority to any runners I best. But perhaps I can also run in meditation on the realism and perseverance with which Paul, in Philippians 3:12–14, speaks of his reorientation from striving of the sinful kind:
Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal, but I press on to lay hold of that for which Christ has laid hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider that I have laid hold of it, but one thing I have laid hold of: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal, toward the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.
“Let those of us, then, who are mature think this way,” he adds in verse 15. Let me. I expect I’ll always be a striver, but I aspire to striving for what I need not confess.
Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today.
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