The Changing Character of Work

EDITORIAL

Labor Day has an interesting history. Some trace its beginnings to the socialist Robert Owen, who claimed May 1, 1833, as the day for the beginning of the millennium. But the first May day or labor day celebration occurred in Paris on May 1, 1889. Most of the countries that observe a labor day do so on May 1. In the Soviet Union it is an official holiday. Canada and the United States have fixed the first Monday in September as Labor Day, and in these countries it is a national holiday in which all classes, not simply workingmen, participate.

Labor Day marks the fact that in civilized countries much of the toil of earlier days has been taken off man’s hands. Children used to sweep chimneys and work in coal mines and mills. Now they have too much time on their hands. Immigrants who came to America thinking its streets were paved with gold found themselves working in sweat shops. Automatic machinery has now taken on much of the burden. The change must be considered in the light of the biblical work ethic.

Scripture tells us that God placed Adam in the Garden of Eden and commanded him “to till it and keep it.” The work was not onerous; tooth and claw were not against him. But with Adam’s fall everything changed. God cursed the ground and had it bring forth thorns and thistles; man was condemned to earn his living by the sweat of his brow. Later, when Moses laid down the ten commandments, six days out of seven were given to toilsome work; the seventh was a day of rest. Mankind tended to regard this as a satisfactory arrangement.

Now things are different. More people are demanding shorter work hours, and some are saying that no one should be required to do any work. Some people enjoy work, and many others do not; their attitude depends in part on what they do and whether they took their jobs out of necessity or as a career choice. As heavy toil gives way to technology, heavy leisure takes its place, and plenty of people arrive at the shop or office on Monday morning worn to a frazzle—they may get more rest on their jobs, intentionally or otherwise, than they do on their own time. For the first time we face the need to define work.

The United States has traditionally been thought to uphold the Puritan work ethic, which was based on the belief that men ought to be enterprising, painstaking, frugal, and industrious. Self-help and self-reliance were cardinal virtues. Diligence was urged in many popular proverbs: “An idle man is a burden to himself, to his family, and to the public”; “God gives all things to industry”; “industry and frugality make a poor man rich.” This attitude developed at a time when the American colonists were carving out homes in the wilderness and hard work was essential. And at least in New England, belief in the necessity and dignity of work was intrinsic to a Calvinistic theology that stressed vocation, calling, and stewardship. But in our day conditions have changed, and the popular proverbs of yesteryear have lost their hold.

Contrast eighteenth-century America with the world at large today. In the third world, with a population that doubles every thirty to thirty-five years, multiplied millions of people who want to work have no jobs. Modern medicine has extended the life span, and land has grown scarce. As a result poor nations are getting poorer. God said man would eat bread in the sweat of his face. But for many there is no work to be had, no unoccupied land to till, and no food to eat except that which comes from someone else’s sweat. And there seems to be little hope of any quick reversal for the have-not nations of the world.

Moreover, the technology that has freed men from labor and given them leisure time has bedeviled their children. On the farm the children could see the fruits of their parents’ labors and were themselves intimately involved in the production processes. But now in an urban technological culture most children do not see the fruit of their parents’ labor nor do they have a credible idea of the relation of the work ethic to the food they eat, the style of life they live, the religion they profess.

The Apostle Paul laid down the dictum that “if anyone will not work, let him not eat” (2 Thess. 3:10). How is this to be construed for landless people who can find no work? And what does it mean for those who work only three or four days a week to earn a living? It is apparent that we need an updated and better understanding of the biblical work ethic.

Whatever curse God placed on the earth in which thorns and thistles were to plague men, his purpose was not simply penal. He intended that the labor man would be called upon to perform for survival would be good for him in his lost estate. Therefore work is to be welcomed, not shunned, even though it is arduous. Many of us need to reshape our thinking so that we see work, not as a drag, which indeed it can be, but as a part of our inheritance, a needed discipline, a necessary accompaniment of our humanity. But conditions in modern life require much thought about questions of who should work and who cannot work and should be cared for by those who work.

In the case of people who are unable to work productively because of old age, illness, or disability, Christian concern and compassion require believers to work for the supply of their needs. It is to be supposed that first the children or parents have a responsibility to provide for them and beyond that the larger community. This does not deny the value of insurance plans, which are based on the principle that the majority of the participants will pay for the misfortunes of the minority.

The Apostle Paul’s injunction that those who will not work shall not eat should be a basic part of our thinking on this matter. Enforcement would of course not include the aged or the sick. But it would take in the able-bodied who refuse to work. Welfare provisions for the able-bodied unemployed should include work assignments to prevent their becoming freeloaders and to give them a chance to achieve a sense of personal worth.

The case of those who have earned enough to retire early or who need to labor only a few days a week to support themselves is different. A Christian work ethic should stress the desirability of non-gainful employment for those who have large blocks of time that they do not need to devote to earning a living. Surely Christian early retirees or those who are gainfully employed on a short-week basis should seek out forms of work that will benefit other people and keep themselves well occupied. Churches, hospitals, day-care centers, the Red Cross, and hundreds of other service organizations welcome this kind of help. This can have the subsidiary effect of reducing the (sometimes legitimate) complaint of those in lower income brackets who must work more intensely.

Christians, of all people, should seek work, not try to avoid it, and should regard it as an opportunity to serve God and to fulfill their stewardship responsibilities. Paul said, “Keep away from any brother who is living in idleness … Brethren, do not be weary in well doing” (2 Thess. 3:6, 13).

Noblesse Oblige

The most ancient law code known to historians, the Code of Hammurabi, king of Babylon (c. 1728–1686 B.C.), divided the population into three classes: “gentlemen,” “citizens,” and “slaves.” The gentlemen enjoyed special privileges, but they were also punished more severely for their offenses. The Bible gives us no warrant for accepting permanent, legally imposed class distinctions such as these, which are a familiar feature of so many human societies. But it does emphasize the increased accountability of those who enjoy privileges: our Lord himself observed, “Every one to whom much is given, of him will much be required” (Luke 12:48). From the context, we can see that he approves of this attitude.

As candidates vie for high office, they do so in the expectation of securing unusual privileges and powers. Yet hardly a month passes when we do not hear of a man or woman in a position of prominence who has assumed that high office gives immunity from responsibility and even from legal sanctions. And in some cases this assumption evidently holds up.

In a free society where people of varying ability and ambition compete, “gentlemen” are going to rise by securing, through science, business, or politics, unusual wealth and power. To prevent such rising would be to impose the tyranny of enforced mediocrity. But if we permit it, as we do—it is on the existence of “incentive” that much human effort is based—then we should not overlook this insight, anticipated in substance by wise men as far back as Hammurabi: “To whom much is given, of him will much be required.” And let our candidates for office make it clear, by words and by actions, that they intend to be exemplary in obeying laws as well as in writing them and enforcing them on others.

The New Totalitarians?

“The most important Manhattan Projects of the future,” writes Aldous Huxley in the introduction to Brave New World, “will be vast, government sponsored inquiries into what the politicians will call the ‘problem of happiness’—in other words, the problem of making people love their servitude.” In his recently published book The New Totalitarians (Stein and Day, $10), Roland Huntford, Scandinavian correspondent for the Observer (London), shows the frightening extent to which Huxley’s vision has become reality in modern Sweden.

Huntford writes in a calm, dispassionate, almost detached way. This makes the accumulation of facts he presents all the more devastating in its impact. He shows how the people of one major modern nation, supposedly well versed in both the Christian and the democratic traditions, have been trained by a combination of bribery and coercion to “love their servitude.”

The twentieth century has made us all too familiar with the totalitarianism that gains and keeps its power by the ruthless use of the army, the police, prison camps, and, more recently, “mental hospitals.” Social Democratic Sweden uses no terror, but a country can accomplish the same goals just as effectively by bureaucratic regulations.

Take freedom of worship, for example: “As a consequence of redevelopment in Stockholm, the only Catholic church was demolished.” When the congregation collected money to build a new church on another site, “at the last moment the Labor Market Directorate refused permission to start building, on the grounds of economic stringency.… A levy of 25 percent was imposed on all luxury construction, under which the proposed church was judged to fall.… In fact, at the time, all churches had been put on the list of inessential buildings whose construction was banned. ‘We are,’ to quote Mrs. Alva Myrdal, the ecclesiastical minister at the time, ‘dismantling the Church bit by bit. And where necessary we are using economic means to do so.’ ” When Huntford challenged an ordinary Swede, who saw nothing wrong in the matter, “So, in fact, you approve of closing down churches?,” he got the response, “Yes. But you must understand, it’s not religious persecution, which is what you’re getting at. It’s a matter of simple economics” (The New Totalitarians, pp. 176–178).

In the area of personal freedom for political activity, Professor Bror Rexed, head of the government Directorate of Social Affairs, comments with astonishing frankness: “Social welfare limits political action, because nobody will tolerate a threat to their benefits and the power of the Welfare State” (p. 191). In other words, once the people have come to be, in Rexed’s words, “clients of the State,” they will be afraid to challenge or criticize it for fear of losing the benefits they are led to believe it bestows on them (but for which Swedes paid, in 1968, 40.6 per cent of their GNP in taxes).

In the area of the arts, Huntford comments: “Artists owe most of their bread and butter, and most decorative art owes its existence, to the public authorities” (p. 309). The director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Erland Josephson, stated:

I am against the commercial theater, because it has to live by its profits. The theater must be non-profit-making. I want the commercial theater to close, and let the State take over. The whole thing’s academic anyway, because I think that you’ll find that all private theaters will disappear within ten years. Most of them are scheduled for demolition anyway, and so the whole question has been settled for us by the town planners [pp. 312, 313].

“The drama, says Josephson, must promote the intentions of the government” (p. 310). The prime minister, Olof Palme, himself says, “Marxism makes it possible to see art not only as a product of society, but also as a weapon in the class war, as an instrument for changing society.… So far will I go in confessing a Marxist attitude to life and art” (p. 307).

Huntford describes “progressive,” “democratic” Sweden, then, as a totalitarian state. It wears velvet gloves, to be sure, but it is just as totalitarian in theory, and ultimately in practice, as the Soviet Union.

As our national elections approach, Americans will be well advised to scrutinize the speeches and promises of the parties and candidates to see whether and to what extent they too are promising us new totalitarianism. It would be convenient if we could attach a party label to these tendencies, and say, “Here in America it is the——candidate who theatens us with such velvet-gloved tyranny.” Unfortunately, as Christian thinker Jacques Ellul observes in The Political Illusion, the almost universal development in our century, in every country and all major parties, is in the direction described by Huntford. So our task as Christian citizens is not merely to choose wisely among the candidates, but to challenge candidates and fellow-voters alike to recognize the implications of the course into which we are drifting and to seek an alternative more compatible with the dignity of men and women as responsible individuals called to be children of God.

‘Marjoe’ In The Shadowlands

As Marjoe Gortner, Pentecostal evangelist, stood before them under the banner “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever,” most people at that tent meeting believed what Marjoe preached. They assumed he believed it, too. But when they go to see the film Marjoe, a documentary of his last days milking the revival circuit (see News, page 40), they discover that Marjoe was a cheap fake.

Many film critics exultingly proclaim with New York magazine’s reviewer that Marjoe “gives us an insight into revivalists and evangelicalism that other films have aspired to but never quite achieved. It is ‘now’ and it is always, a perception of hunger and loneliness and of the surcease the opiate provides.” But true evangelical Christianity—as distinguished from the Marjoe imitation—is by no means an “opiate,” another high; it provides life full of harmony and beauty, abundant life. And not all evangelists are Marjoe Gortners. There is a “ring of truth” about committed ministers of the Gospel that the film’s phony evangelist never attains. Gortner’s statement on the “Today” program that “there is no difference between Billy Graham and myself, except for the class of people we preach to,” shows how little he knows of the real thing. Moreover, the counterfeit guarantees the existence of the real. Marjoe, rather than cheapening Christianity, merely cheapens its protagonist, who seems content to exist in night’s shadowlands rather than live in the sunlight of God’s day.

Frisbee Flexibility

A collection plate may have been the first Frisbee. The Official Frisbee Handbook by Goldy Norton, attempting a history of the popular flying discs, traces one (uncertified) theory back to a Yale undergraduate, Elihu Frisbee, who in 1827 rebelled against compulsory chapel and hurled the collection plate across the campus quad.

Try reversing the procedure by using Frisbees to lift an offering at your next church outing. They’d be easier to handle than hats.

Talking Back To The Tv

Television’s two harbingers of fall have arrived: professional football and breathless ballyhoo about the great new season acomin’ on NBC/CBS/ABC. Anyone who believes television commercials about detergents and deodorants does so at his own risk. Anyone who believes television commercials about television is mad. Most of us have been watching it long enough to know that what we can really look forward to is an unimaginative reworking of overworked formulas.

For variety, why not a fast-paced series based on the adventures of a missionary of an unnamed church who goes to an unnamed Middle East nation as an undercover agent for the CIA charged with keeping tabs on the sheikh’s connections with an unnamed Communist world power while avoiding the blandishments of the sheikh’s harem. Script-writers would have a wide open field for all those things Americans love to see on TV: suspense, violence, patriotism, sex, and even a little innocuous religion.

But perhaps that’s going too far. Not even innocuous religion is likely to be given a place in television drama. Real people generally believe something about God. Real people talk—even fight—about religion. But for TV people, religion hasn’t yet been invented.

We suggest that Christians counteract this by theologizing the programs they watch. Raise questions: Does this character believe in God? How can you tell? How would he express it if the writer allowed him to? What difference might it make if the good guy bent on revenge met Jesus and followed his teaching? Or what difference would it make if the bad guy was converted?

If you ask these questions aloud, your family may banish you to the nine-inch black-and-white set upstairs. If you don’t, you and they may be absorbing a set of values antithetical to your faith.

Let Your Yes Be Yes

Christians are supposed to accept certain moral and ethical standards for their personal conduct, and two of these are telling the truth and keeping commitments. We may marshal many rationalizations, and even some cogent reasons, to persuade ourselves that in certain situations we cannot tell the truth or fulfill an obligation. These include the doctrine of “mental reservation” espoused by certain Roman Catholic casuists and the very flexible interpretations of “situation ethics” put forward by Episcopalian Joseph Fletcher and others. All of us probably resort to some such devices at times, though perhaps with an uneasy conscience.

Yet over and over again incidents arise in which it becomes evident that no matter how awkward the truth may have seemed, it would have turned out to be a good deal less awkward than evasion. The Eagleton fiasco is a case in point. Suppose, when questioned by Senator McGovern’s staffers about skeletons in his closet, Senator Thomas F. Eagleton had told them of his hospital record. Perhaps he would have been selected anyway—McGovern said that he would have been—and there would have been no embarrassing exposure afterward. If instead he had been turned down, then he would have been just where he is now as regards his candidacy, and in much better shape as regards peace of mind.

When the news came out, McGovern could certainly have asked Eagleton to step down, for the very adequate reason that Eagleton had been less than candid with a man who was willing to stake on him his own and his nation’s hopes. But McGovern courageously—or quixotically—proclaimed his 1,000 per cent support for Eagleton. As the opposition to Eagleton began to mount, McGovern would probably have preferred to be like the man the psalmist describes, “that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not” (Ps. 15:4), but political prudence dictated that he withdraw this commitment. Many of his admirers, though convinced of the necessity of disavowing Eagleton, felt that it should have been done sooner and more straightforwardly.

Special Notice

There will be a three-week interval between this issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY and the next. Each summer we interrupt the regular two-week cycle to allow for staff vacations. The next issue will be dated September 15.

On the sidelines, trying desperately hard to be a star but sounding a good deal more like a hyena, was the sensation-hawking columnist Jack Anderson. Journalistic integrity, and an awareness of the tremendous injury false reporting can cause, should certainly have kept him from publicizing unsubstantiated reports about Eagleton’s alleged citations for drunken driving. When brought to the point where he had to admit he had done wrong, Anderson made an ambiguous statement that restored his own honor as little as it did Eagleton’s chances.

We hope the personal embarrassments of this incident will soon be forgotten as the candidates face the major issues of our day. But we must also hope that at least a few people have learned a lesson, and will more faithfully heed the Lord’s admonition, “Let your communication be Yea, yea; Nay, nay” (Matt. 5:37).

A Massacre Remembered

August twenty-four is the four-hundredth anniversary of the infamous massacre of French Protestants on the eve of the Feast of St. Bartholomew.

The occasion for the beginning of a program that lasted for nearly six weeks and ultimately led to the murder of thirty thousand or more Huguenots was the marriage of Henry of Navarre (later Henry IV), at that time a Huguenot leader, to Margaret of Valois. Catherine de Médicis, queen mother and the real power behind the throne, was extremely jealous of the influence on the young king Charles IX exerted by Gaspard de Coligny, the admiral of the French fleet and also a Protestant. She seized upon the occasion of his visit to Paris for the wedding to arrange with the powerful Guise family for his assassination. When the attempt aborted, she provoked a bloody attack on the many Huguenot leaders who were in the city for the wedding. The massacre quickly spread throughout the provinces, leaving a trail of blood across France.

This was but one event in the intermittent persecution of French Protestants for more than a century. The culmination came in the 1680s with the extreme measures of Louis XIV, who decreed the destruction of all Protestant churches, the removal of all children from Protestant parents to be raised as Catholics, and other torments. This final period of persecution led to the emigration of nearly half a million Huguenots from France—to the subsequent cultural, religious, and economic deprivation of France, but to the enrichment of the life of England, Germany, Holland, and the Americas.

The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day stands as a vivid reminder not only of the importance of the great doctrines of the Reformation, for which these French Christians were willing to die, but also of the supreme value of the political right of freedom of religious belief. This freedom, which has come to many (but not all) parts of our world only of late, and then at great cost, is extremely fragile and must be constantly guarded.

As a safeguard against smugness, non-Catholics need only recall that what happened on St. Bartholomew’s Day and during the subsequent weeks in 1572 has happened many times in the history of human relations. Pagans have persecuted Christians, and Christians pagans; Protestants have persecuted Roman Catholics, and both have joined forces against Anabaptists and Jews; professing Christians have killed Muslims in the name of the Lord, and Muslims have slaughtered Armenian Christians; and in modern times, atheists in Germany, Russia, and China have put to death literally millions of Jews, Christians, and other “undesirables.”

May each St. Bartholomew’s Day serve to remind all spiritual descendants of those brave French Protestants of their responsibility to stand side by side with other men of good will in the defending of the precious gift of religious freedom—even the freedom to be wrong!

A Mission Field At Your Doorstep?

The Christian and Missionary Alliance calls attention to an alarming decline in the number of candidates for foreign missionary service (The Alliance Witness, July 19, 1972). It seems that the mood of “neo-isolationism,” of preoccupation with domestic problems, that is evident on the political and economic scene in the United States is also beginning to be heavily felt in the religious sphere.

There may have been a tendency in the past for the evangelical church to “export” its concern for its neighbors: instead of taking thought for the unevangelized and distressed neighbor here at home, evangelicals preferred to give money and to send missionaries to the four corners of the earth. But the slogan, “There is a mission field at your doorstep,” like so many other ideas that are valuable for the correction of a problem, may be becoming a problem itself.

A variety of evangelical groups have devoted themselves with laudable zeal to remedying the fact that in our “Christian” America only a minority of people even know what the Gospel is, much less accept it. Key 73 is a result of this zeal. But such a concern, so evident among the Jesus people and in the charismatic movements, must not diminish our view of millions who have not even heard of Jesus Christ.

There may be some justification for the “neo-isolationist” trends in American politics—we will not go into that question—but there is no justification for any kind of spiritual neo-isolationism if it means we lose our willingness to obey the Lord’s Great Commission, “Make disciples of all nations.”

Pass It On

Nothing is free in this world—not even salvation. Everything has its price. Salvation, free to those who accept it, is still the world’s costliest gift. God gave up his Son to death so that we could freely receive what we could neither merit or earn.

Having received this free salvation, we ought to pass it on. It gives us everything and costs us nothing; the least we can do is share it. Moreover, it is one of the few gifts that can be kept when it is given away.

In the Christian churches today there are multiplied numbers of enthusiastic young people and older people who have experienced salvation in Jesus Christ and are passing it on; and there are large numbers of churchgoers who never share the Good News with anyone. For many in the latter group, the Gospel and thus the mission of the Church have become a socio-political, humanistic matter. Witness, for example, the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism of the World Council of Churches, which meets in Bangkok at year’s end. The theme is “Salvation Today.” But preparatory materials thus far have said little about personal regeneration as understood historically. Unless some significant change takes place between now and then, it is highly unlikely that by the end of the meeting the delegates will have anything to pass on to anybody.

At the risk of being called simplistic and reactionary, out of tune with the times, we recommend to all churches and to every individual Christian the sage statement that came out of the meetings of the International Missionary Council at Tambaram, Madras, India in 1938:

The unfinished evangelistic task of the Church is determined by the commission committed by our Lord to His disciples to preach the Gospel to every creature. By evangelism, therefore, we understand that the Church Universal, in all its branches and through the service of all its members, must so present Christ Jesus to the world in the power of the Holy Spirit that men shall come to put their trust in God through Him, accept Him as their Savior, and serve Him as their Lord in the fellowship of His Church.

To those who have never embraced the Gospel we say: Receive it. To those who have it we say: Pass it on.

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