Many conservative Christians today regard the dogma of free markets as untouchable and are either indifferent or hostile to workers’ rights and working class interests. But for Cardinal Manning, theological orthodoxy went hand-in-hand with a commitment to social justice – a combination of views that must be recovered today, argues Sohrab Ahmari.
What happened to the Christian tradition of supporting workers’ rights?
“Behold, the wages of the labourers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out” (James 5:4). This verse serves as the epigraph to my most recent book, Tyranny, Inc., which documents the ways in which an asset-rich few lord it over the asset-less many, and explains why we need a renewal of the New Deal order that defined much of the American economic landscape in the middle twentieth century to overcome this state of affairs.
Given my reputation as a “public Catholic” of a theologically conservative bent, the book has caused not a little confusion on both ends of the political spectrum. In the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg has described me as “the right-winger calling for social democracy.” Meanwhile, one of my many critics on the Reaganite right has labeled me a “pro-life New Dealer.”
This crossing of ideological wires raises a vexing set of questions: Why is it that these days, it’s considered unusual, even exotic, for small-o orthodox Christians to champion labour unions, social democracy, and the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Does traditional religion deserve its reputation as the upholder of existing material hierarchies, however unjust they may be? Why has that reputation come to attach itself to traditional religious communities? And how can we – I address myself to those who share my orthodoxy – shake off that reputation, as indeed we must?
Behold, the wages you withheld cry out. It’s one of the most crystal-clear verses, among numerous others of the kind, both in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, that address the problem of just and unjust wages. Or to put it more sharply: verses that condemn unjust wages. The Catechism of the Catholic Church cites that verse from James, as well as Leviticus and Deuteronomy, in identifying unjust wages as one of the sins that cry out to heaven for divine vengeance. Yet today, the conservative corners of the Catholic Church in America are decidedly silent when it comes to widespread job and health precarity, systematically low wages, eye-watering inequality, the hollowing out of the real economy by Wall Street, and the destruction of the shared prosperity achieved by working people in the previous century. That is, when self-proclaimed “traditionalists” don’t go out of their way to justify, in the name of orthodoxy, some of the worst abuses associated with today’s model of neoliberal capitalism.
It wasn’t always thus. In August 1889, dockworkers in London’s East End mounted one of the longest and most consequential strikes in British labour history. The East London docks processed much of the trade that had catapulted Britain to global supremacy in the nineteenth century, generating the wealth that made possible the Victorian opulence satirized in the novels of Thackeray and Trollope, and whose aging relics to this day attract tourists. But for the workers who sought employment there, the docks were a site of hyperexploitation. I say “sought” because in addition to the permanent employees, some ten thousand itinerant workers, known as “casuals,” would show up each day desperate for work and wages. But only about a third would be hired on any given day, and of these, few could obtain a full day’s work and wages. This vast army of excess labour depressed wages for all dockworkers and made organizing them a steeply uphill battle…
To continue reading, click here
The rest of this 5,000 word essay can be found at Plough Quarterly.
T4CG has permission to share the opening paragraphs while the article is new. However, we will be able to publish the whole article in a few weeks’ time.
Sohrab Ahmari is a founder and editor of Compact magazine, a contributing editor of The American Conservative, and a visiting fellow of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University. His books include From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith (Ignatius, 2019) and The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos (Convergent/Random House, 2021). His latest book is Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty–and What to Do About It (Penguin Random House).
This article was featured in T4CG’s Michaelmas 2024 Newsletter. Subscribe to the T4CG newsletter here