A Christmas column for labor

 Christmas is deep in the heart of the season of Advent (from the Latin adventus, meaning “arrival”).

It can be an adventure, too (as in the Latin adventurus, or something “about to happen”).

But some people may already think “what IS happening with Christianity?” Often it seems as if the Right wing has hijacked Christianity, transforming it into an almost unrecognizable corruption of White Nationalism that’s as divisive as jobs where union-busters try to pit workers against each other.

During autoworkers’ Big 3 strike, UAW President Sean Fain told workers how he was influenced by his faith, quoting the part of Matthew where Jesus says even if faith is the size of a tiny mustard seed, it can move mountains: “Nothing will be impossible for you.”

Fain said that autoworker solidarity would work: “an act of faith in each other.”

Fain’s words and workers’ win “not only reinvigorated an emboldened labor movement in the U.S.,” wrote John Blake of CNN, “it also marked the revival of another movement in America: the Social Gospel.”

Christianity’s Social Gospel was embraced by many churches in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, says Heath Carter, author of “Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago.”

Carter, a professor of American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary, said, “For countless workers throughout American history, traditional faith and labor militancy have gone hand in hand. From the labor movement’s earliest days, workers insisted that they organized because the Bible told them so.”

Social Gospel’s adherents advocated for the 8-hour work day, and opposed child labor and business monopolies.

An early union, the Knights of Labor, was established in 1869 by Quaker mechanic Uriah Stephens and invigorated a decade later by Catholic machinist Terrence Powderly. Made up of bricklayers and boilermakers, blacksmiths and carpet weavers, it was technically a “secret society” since workers gathered privately to avoid retaliation by bosses, so the Vatican initially frowned on the group. But then Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore intervened to get Rome to see the Knights differently. By the mid-1880s, the Knights numbered about 700,000 members and led a nationwide strike against the Union Pacific Railroad, and in 1891 Pope Leo XIII wrote “Rerum Novarum,” a papal letter about the rights and duties of capital and labor that expressed support for the Social Gospel in general and labor in particular.

Church solidarity with working people has developed beyond “Rerum Novarum,” and progressive Pope Francis praising labor. Moderate Pope John Paul II in 1981 wrote, “Workers not only want fair pay, they also want to share in the responsibility and creativity of the very work process. They want to feel that they are working for themselves — an awareness that is smothered in a bureaucratic system where they only feel themselves to be ‘cogs’ in a huge machine moved from above.”

And conservative Pope Benedict XVI in 2008 wrote that unions are more important today because of globalization.”

Throughout the 20^th century, there were many “labor priests” who advocated for workers, and in 2018, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops filed a legal brief supporting the right to unionize in AFSCME’s fight in the “Janus” Supreme Court case that nevertheless weakened unions by making it easier for people covered by collective bargaining agreements to enjoy their benefits without paying dues to support negotiating and enforcing contracts.

Decades ago, Christian leaders comfortably allied themselves with labor, drawing on scripture. The New Testament says, “Those who become rich by abusing their workers have sinned against God” (James 5:1-6) and “Rich people are to be generous and ready to share” (II Timothy 6:18-19). And the Old Testament added, “Do not exploit your neighbor … Do not keep the wages of the worker” (Leviticus 19:13), and Isaiah (58:3-7) said, “To observe religious practice but oppress your workers is false worship.”

Today, attendance at most faiths’ worship services has declined, according to Gallup, as has membership in unions. But like labor in recent years, engagement with socially conscious religions could experience a resurgence. Many factors contributed to a loss of involvement in organized religion and organized labor, like everyday people losing hope and having little knowledge of history.

“Most Catholics no longer know the Church has teaching about labor and work,” says former letter carrier and rubber worker Clayton Synai, director of the Catholic Labor Network.

In 1996, the late John Sweeney, then AFL-CIO president, said, “It's time unions and the Church stopped trying to go it alone. Unions need aggressive participation by the Church in our organizing campaigns. In most cases, we're up against employers who are willing to break the law by firing, harassing and intimidating workers and the only way we can back them off is with the help of the Church. Likewise, we need the public support of the Church in bargaining situations where employers have forced us out on strike and then permanently replaced the workers.”

Public support for unions has grown, according to Gallup, which pegs it as 67%, the highest level since 1965, and though unions are still recovering from decades of “permanent replacements,” bargaining givebacks, and employers who break labor law with impunity, almost 300,000 new workers organized last year. So maybe there’s momentum for an ongoing turnaround.

It’s only right, according to some Christians.

“Capitalism thrives on selfish impulses that Christian teaching condemns,” writes author Gary Dorrien, who teaches religion at Columbia University. And today, the Social Gospel is increasingly affecting politics; it has nothing to do with racism or nationalism, involving not only Fain but U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, author and scholar Cornel West, the Rev. William Barber II, and others.

“No one should have been surprised to read about Fain's faith,” said National Catholic Reporter columnist Michael Sean Winter. “As the labor movement finds new strength and support in American society, the leaders of the Catholic Church, clerical and lay, would do well to stand arm-in-arm with organized labor. Fighting together for a more just society is our heritage and our hope.

“When workers in the very religious 19^th century looked for metaphors and ideas about the solidarity they know they would need to succeed in organizing themselves into unions, it was only natural that they turned to the same verses and ideas that shaped the Social Gospel and Catholic social teaching back then and formed Shawn Fain and millions of religious progressives today,” he continued. “There is no group in American society with whom it is easier to share a conversation about Catholic social teaching than the leaders of the American labor movement. It is my experience that the concepts drawn from papal teaching are always received on the first bounce among labor folk. They get it. They live.”

Merry Christmas.