A review of Saving the Protestant Ethic, a new book by Andrew Lynn.
A review of Saving the Protestant Ethic, a new book by Andrew Lynn
Saving the Protestant Ethic: Creative Class Evangelicalism and the Crisis of Work, by Andrew Lynn (Oxford, 360 pages, $35)
T he Evangelical “faith and work” movement is a topic of significant importance to me. For over two decades I have earnestly studied the subject of what our earthly vocations mean to God and where our own careers fit into His Kingdom. I have a book on this very subject coming out in February, Full Time: Work and the Meaning of Life (Post Hill Press). There I make the case for a far more existential understanding of work in the life of a Christian and for a total understanding of God’s Kingdom. The book is critical of many Evangelical approaches to faith and work, particularly those that seek to ground the value of work in its mere instrumentation — that is, its use as an instrument to accomplish ends peripherally to its inherent function. Essentially, I argue that work is what God made us for, and that the church’s equipping of saints in this subject has been wholly inadequate for generations. This is timely in our current age, when isolation and alienation run deep. A robust theology of vocation properly wedded to purpose would give the church a witness and a voice in a time when one is sorely needed.
Given my passion for this topic and the timeliness of my own book release, I read with great interest Andrew Lynn’s new work, Saving the Protestant Ethic: Creative Class Evangelicalism and the Crisis of Work. The book was clearly well researched and aspired to answer some of the key questions that are at the heart of the faith-and-work movement. Lynn seeks to digest and summarize a vast amount of literature that has come out on this subject and to compartmentalize much of evangelicalism’s treatment of work into distinguishable silos. In so doing, he provides a history of the faith-and-work movement that is quite useful, and also a diagnosis of the movement that I believe to be somewhat misguided. Most importantly, though, he identifies issues within the current movement that warrant further resolution and conviction. These issues are the focus of my review.
The positives in Lynn’s book are important and impressive. He does thorough work documenting the history of Protestantism’s relationship to work and demonstrates the rich legacy from which 21st-century efforts heavily borrow. While Max Weber’s famous treatise is firmly in Lynn’s mind as a reference for Protestant understanding of work, he competently grasps the early Reformers’ paradigm-shifting understanding of vocational calling in the Kingdom of God. He provides helpful frameworks for understanding the leading schools of thought in the faith-and-work world, and is fair and charitable in expounding upon the criteria that define and drive each framework. Unlike many scholars who have addressed the history of faith and work, Lynn understands that various cultural, eschatological, and sociological commitments from adherents of different schools of thought were not merely tangential.
His categorization of the modern faith-and-work movement into the re-commissioning camp, the re-sacralizing camp, the re-integrating camp, and the re-embedding camp is as functionally useful as any other compartmentalization effort I have encountered. The history he provides of each camp is well documented and gives readers a good understanding of the pieces on the board when thinking about the faith-and-work movement in 2023. His overview of various theological schools of thought relevant to this study was fair and useful, even where minor room for nitpicking presented itself. Serious students of the faith-and-work movement and even actors in it will learn from this book, and I commend it for that reason, despite the criticism I now offer.
A significant accusation in Lynn’s book is that the modern faith-and-work movement has little to say to minorities, to women, or to blue-collar workers. He spends a lot more time making these accusations and insinuations than he does substantiating them, though, so I am left without a lot of actual arguments to contend with. In providing anecdotal experiences about audience breakdown at various conferences he attended, he does not offer statistical analysis of where the faith-and-work movement’s outreach may relate to the demographics of the population at large. In other words, to assert that Evangelical faith-and-work outreach shows a bias toward white males, it would have been useful to see those numbers up against population-wide data in given professions, geographies, etc. The idea that the faith-and-work movement lacks a message for the marginalized of society is a heavy accusation, though not an unfamiliar one in the modern context.
An eye-opening revelation of Lynn’s limited vision for the cultivating and creating many of us are calling for was found when he accused Andy Crouch of a bait-and-switch tactic in making the case for the nobility of work in lower-paying or less socially recognized vocations. He argues that Crouch’s appeal to the relational benefits of fast-food work proves that Christian responsibility for excellent work is really upheld for “creative class capitalists” and not lower-tier work in the lower socioeconomic strata. He accuses the “re-integrationist” camp of alternating between a focus on the work and a focus on other tangential benefits deriving from the work. For Lynn, Crouch is not trying to help the re-integrationists improve their own argument but is rather asserting that the faith-and-work movement has no answer for the futility of much work in “contemporary capitalism . . . supervised by faceless algorithms.” Ironically, the very camp that Lynn most targets in this book is one that repeatedly answers this call head-on.
Lynn appears to argue against his own accusations on multiple occasions, and in one significant case inadvertently walks into the fundamental tension of his own critique. He describes attending a large conference in Michigan co-sponsored by the Kern Foundation, the Acton Institute, and the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics. He expresses surprise that the vast preponderance of the crowd was non-white. He concedes that the speakers included black and white thought leaders leading with a message of economic opportunity, capital investment, and the juxtaposition of markets and morality. Nevertheless, Lynn has a hard time understanding why a message of economic empowerment rooted in the principles of a free society and limited government intervention — versus, as he suggests, a discussion about “historically marginalized communities and historical injustices” — would be relevant to a non-white audience. He refers to the agenda of the conference as “Hayekian libertarianism.” He acknowledges that the conference addressed “issues of inequality” and “under-resourced urban neighborhoods” but questions whether the “valorization of entrepreneurialism” and advocacy for “creation of new businesses rather than structural changes” are the appropriate message for this audience. It is here that Lynn appears incapable of separating his own political and economic biases at the very moment that he accuses groups such as Acton and Kern of politicizing and “sacralizing” their economic agenda. One would think that Lynn could disagree with a market-oriented prescription for the topics at hand while still acknowledging the legitimacy of the prescription in the context of faith-and-work integration.
The word Lynn uses repeatedly to describe the imposition of free-enterprise ideology on the faith-and-work movement is “sacralization.” The not-so-subtle accusation is that the faith-and-work movement has merely “baptized” a faith in “impersonal markets, material needs, and an amoral pursuit of self-interest.” He writes with the same market skepticism that has become common among center-left commentators today, and an increasing number in the so-called New Right. References to “impersonal algorithms” that “control and terminate workers” are common, even if not totally coherent, and Lynn’s own distrust of market forces to meet the needs of workers, vendors, and other stakeholders is hardly disguised. What Lynn has inadvertently done is make the case many of us have been making for years — that a defense of a free and commercial society must be inextricably connected to a morally enlightened sentiment. This is hardly new news to the very people Lynn is criticizing (who have spent decades aggressively making that very case that an atomistic understanding of markets fails in its duty to meet the conditions for human flourishing).
An economic worldview rooted in biblical anthropology is not amoral, it is not neutral on matters of incentive and knowledge, and it is not committed to impersonal or atomistic forces. While many of the conclusions reached by market-economy advocates may be compatible with Hayekian thought, the premises behind Christian efforts to extract beliefs and commitments in matters of social cooperation and a commercial society are entirely different from the secular humanism underlying much of contemporary capitalism. Lynn seems more critical of the fact that vigorous defenders of biblical anthropology in economics (Acton, Kern, IFWE) draw some of the same conclusions as Austrian economists than he is aware of the different commitments, premises, and presuppositions that get us there.
The suggestion that tying one’s faith and work commitments to “economic structures” is “political” is rank projection. Having capably and fairly defined the Kuyperian foundation for work as rooted to the cultural mandate of Genesis and a distinct Christological theology of Lordship, Lynn fails to connect the dots that would lead to recognition that the same is true of commitment to “economic structures.” The particularity of the economic worldview in question — a production-focused system that is rooted to the dignity of mankind as made imago dei — is heavily overlapped with the very faith-and-work discussion that is the subject of Lynn’s book.
Rather than “sacralizing” an economic system, the group(s) that seem the heaviest target of Lynn’s critique are harmonizing a necessary web of ethical, vocational, cultural, and anthropological concerns fully consistent with the aim of the Kuyperian camp of which he writes. There is ample room to charitably disagree with any conclusions drawn, of course, but Lynn’s critique is not of any conclusions per se as much as it is of the very attempt to juxtapose faith and work with economic commitments.
My suggestion is that this endeavor is long overdue, and that a robust theology of faith and work cannot exist without a coherent biblical anthropology (which is to say, economics). It is the feature, not bug, of 21st-century Kuyperian faith-and-work efforts, and it has its work cut out for it. It would seem perfectly consistent to argue that the social aims Lynn desires to see (nonexploitative worker conditions, high systems of ethics, opportunity for the marginalized, etc.) are enhanced by greater participation of the faithful in the marketplace, no?
The irony in reading Lynn’s book is that much of what he bemoans about the impact of the faith-and-work world in the past generation is vastly overstated. I wish he were correct that the “re-integrators” (Kuyperians) had been as successful as he claims in advancing the cause of Christ’s Lordship in vocational endeavors. He seems to not appreciate the massive gulf that exists between what he observed at a handful of high-profile extra-ecclesial conferences and the standard Sunday message that continues to issue from pulpits. Some of us wish that the influence Lynn describes of the integrationists were as widespread as he suggests, and that the legacy of the pietists had waned as much as he describes. A fundamental separatism remains the primary view of work in 21st-century Evangelicalism, unfortunately.
While there is much to benefit from in Lynn’s work and research, the fatal flaw of the book is his inability to fully grasp the comprehensiveness of the re-integrationist worldview that he capably describes. Whether the desired label is “Kuyperian” or “neo-Calvinist” or (my preference) “creational,” the need of the hour is a fully embedded world-and-life view of Christianity that sees an ontological purpose that transcends race, class, and gender lines. It is the critical-theory commitments of the author that fail to deliver a potent work message to all walks of life, not the Kingdom theology of a fully Kuyperian vocational worldview. None of this is to say that our work is complete.
Offsetting nearly a century of cultural dualism is not going to happen in one generation. Lynn’s admirable desire for a work message that reaches women, minorities, and lower-paying occupations is embedded in the holistic Protestant message of work. His concern that “the faith and work movement’s primary orientation of venerating the inherent goodness of work undertaken within a capitalist system leaves little room for values that might run against that system” begs the question. Our aim must be to define the values that create the conditions for human flourishing and pursue them in all matters of Christian life.