Maintenons La Flamme

Wrapped around the Haus des Lehrers ( House of the Teachers) is a mosaic mural titled Unser Leben ( Our Life), depicting various occupations of ordinary people in East Berlin, Germany.

A recent study by the Brookings Institution provides another framework for the future of religion:

The religious right spoke to the country’s worries about social change. The religious progressive movement speaks to the coun try’s desire for economic change. In the late 20th century, ‘family values’ were invoked in opposition to what many saw (and feared) as a cultural revolution. In the early twenty-first century, family stability is most threatened by an economic revolution that has created a growing gap between the economy’s productivity gains and the wage growth of most American workers.11

What might be the prospects of the other framework of religion de scribed in this passage? What if the Brookings Institution is right and the concerns of economic justice prove to be the fertile ground of this era?12

As people are concerned about increasing inequalities and injustices, particularly in the world of work and labour where it affects them the most (and race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality are part of this), they are also paying attention to how these things play out in the churches. People judge their religious communities in terms of economic justice as well: forty-five percent of those who had been raised Evangelical, forty- three percent of those raised Catholic, and thirty-one percent of those raised in a mainline Protestant denomination said the focus on “money and power” was an important reason they no longer associated with a church.13

In other words, even though religion in the United States has gained prestige by accommodating to the interests of the ruling class, it has also lost a great deal. More and more people seem to be getting tired of religion playing the wingman of the status quo. And, what is perhaps most surprising, those getting tired of dominant religion might be the ones who actually care more about religion than those who continue to go through the motions without asking questions. If religion keeps losing those who care and retains those who don’t, it does not have much of a future.

When religion gets involved in the tensions of real life and engages with labour and class, things change. Far from being just one more outlet for socially engaged people of religion, engaging in the struggles of labour and class can help reclaim the heart of various religions. If images of the divine set the stage in these struggles, as many of religious traditions insist, religious people will only find God if they look for God in these struggles rather than in the vestiges of dominant religion.14

While the future of religion will depend on how it deals with the struggles of life, religion in the past has also been decided along these lines. How has religion been able to maintain an edge amidst innumerable temptations to assimilate to the status quo? It seems that joining people and the divine in the grassroots struggles has kept alternative forms of religion alive. Alternative religion has been deeply shaped, for instance, through the efforts of a St. Francis who sought to reconnect the dominant church with the poor of the Middle Ages, through taking a stand with the peasants of early modernity that shaped Protestant reformers like Thomas Müntzer, and through the experiences of the African slaves in the United States, shaping both alternative Christianity and alternative Islam.15 These movements have been so powerful that some of their tradi tions are still used in worship today, from Francis’ prayer to the spirituals and the gospel hymns.

The close relationship between labour and religion is not a new idea but goes back to the origins of the Abrahamic religions. Slightly over a century ago, even mainline churches in the United States had the good sense to support the concerns of working people in the fights against child labour, for the eight-hour workday and the weekend, for the respect of women at work, and for collective bargaining.16 Today, the official documents of many mainline denominations still support collective bargaining, but only a small percentage of members are even aware of this. What might religion have learned in these efforts to support labour? Did the God worshipped by these religions look different than the God of capitalism, whose main goal is the maximisation of profit?

11 Davis et al., Faith in Equality, 49. 12 Davis et al., Faith in Equality, 50. 13 Davis et al., Faith in Equality, 26. 14 This insight was powerfully expressed by a German theologian who fought the false religion of German fascism, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. See the monumental biography by Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. 15 See Raboteau, Slave Religion. Recall that the Nation of Islam was founded in the 1930s, still under the impression of the ongoing struggles of African Americans. 16 See Fones-Wolf, Trade Union Gospel.