The future of religion may depend on whether it manages to develop an edge or whether it continues to accommodate to the status quo. Today this edge shapes up perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the relation of religion and labour. After a seminar on religion and labour with the state- wide Texas AFL-CIO, a young organiser asked whether I was suggesting that labour should begin to lobby religion, just like it was lobbying politics. A better way to phrase this concern might be to talk about organising religion: people of faith—many of which are working people—can pull together and organise so that religion can reclaim its edge and recover some of its most powerful traditions. How else are we going to prevent the dominant powers from continuing to shape religion in their image?
Labour Radicalised by Religion Just as labour can help us rediscover and reclaim the edge of religion, religion can help us rediscover and reclaim the edge of labour. This is not merely a matter of revitalising labour unions, just like merely revitalising existing religious communities would be missing the point. What would it take to reclaim the significance, the energy, and the power of labour? How would this be linked to reclaiming the significance, the energy, and the power of religion? None of this can happen when religion is treated like a cheap date for labour organising. Religion needs to be more than a place where labour organisers can recruit and mobilise warm bodies or “rent a collar,” as the saying goes. To begin with, religious traditions can provide important resources that help clarify the importance of labour and class at a time when these topics have become taboo. Next, religions can help generate a kind of critical thinking by asking questions about what really matters in life. In these ways, religions can help question the dominant powers of the age and identify alternative powers. Production—still the basis for the accumulation of profit in the capitalist economy—may serve as an example for what is at stake. When viewed from the perspective of labour and religion, the perspective of production changes: Productive labour matters not just in terms of profit but in terms of the actual contributions that working people make to the community, shaping history from the bottom up. This perspective is supported by religious traditions that remind us that God stands with working people in the exodus from Egypt and, in Christianity, becomes human as a member of the working class. Dr Joerg Rieger is Distinguished Professor of Theology at Vanderbilt University and holds the Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair in Wesleyan Studies. He is Founding Director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice. He is also Affiliated Faculty of Turner Family Centre for Social Ventures, Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University. He is author and editor of 24 books and more than 170 academic articles.
24 INSiGHT OCTOBER 2021
