By Chris Armstrong, reprinted from Humanism as a Way of Life. Part two of a series.
Most seriously, many of us may be tempted to some idols or cults present in our workplaces and industries. For example, there are the cults of material gain, of accruing power and competitive advantage at any cost – cults that seem to demand cutting the legs out from the other guy, doing shady back-room deals, hoarding resources, mastering the white lie and the cover-up, stepping on others as you climb the ladder. . . . Many of us work alongside at least some people who are given over to these cults. And we may find ourselves daily tempted to join them – for after all, that’s how the game is played, right?
Again, CS Lewis brings us clarity on just how extraordinary our struggle at work is. He describes it like this:
A man starts a new job with a sense of vocation and, perhaps, for the first week still keeps the discharge of the vocation as his end, taking the pleasures and pains from God’s hand, as they come. . . . But in the second week he is beginning to ‘know the ropes’: by the third, he has quarried out of the total job his own plan for himself within that job, and when he can pursue this he feels that he is getting no more than his rights, and, when he cannot, that he is being interfered with.
When we work, we are thrust unavoidably into the arena of our own selfishness and sinfulness.
I think it’s fair to say that our best weapons in that struggle, in that arena, will be something quite ordinary – though at the same time rare – that is, the ordinary virtues of the Christian life. These virtues are not sexy, they’re not flashy, and they’re not popular. They won’t help you build up your image on social media. But they are what Christ’s twofold law of love demands, for they protect and nourish both love of God and love of neighbor.
You can think of what these virtues are, but a good start is Paul’s list of the Fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. For at stake here is not just our own personal discipleship. The kinds of people we become at work has tremendous importance for the organizations we work with and the people we serve!
Our Institutional Context, and the Damage We Can Do through Babel-Like Self-Aggrandizement
A couple of words are worth saying here: first, about the institutional context of our work, and second, about a syndrome that is degrading the ability of these institutions from truly serving the common good.
Our work context – it’s not good folks!
First the context of our work: The Gallup organization, in their Survey of the American Workplace, discovered that 70% of Americans are disengaged at work. And 30% are so actively disgruntled that they are working against their organizations. How many of us are in that 70% at least, or maybe on some days getting close to being in that 30%?
But frankly, things don’t seem much better for those Christians who do engage their work, and who thus succeed and rise up the ranks.
Amy Sherman, in her book Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good, relates what former Gordon College president Michael Lindsey found as he interviewed Christians who had reached the top of their fields – in business, academics, entertainment, and so forth, for his book Faith in the Halls of Power. Lindsey found that most of the Christian marketplace leaders he interviewed were infected with the same obsessive ladder-climbing, conspicuous consumption, insensitivity to justice issues, and what he identified as work-life balance problems as their secular counterparts.
In Sherman’s words, “the vast majority of [Christians] perched atop their career ladders in various social sectors displayed a profoundly anemic vision for what they could accomplish for the kingdom of God.”
Syndrome vs. serving the common good
So second, we’re seeing here a hint of a syndrome that is hindering workers today from truly serving the common good. Gallup concluded that often the primary problem people experience at work is bad bosses. And if you’ve experienced one of these, or are experiencing one of them now, you may be saying a silent “amen.” But Lindsey’s evidence suggests another problem: some of the attitudes toward that work that we, the workers, bring into it with us.
Recently the Israeli-American academic and journalist Yuval Levin wrote the important book A Time to Build, whose rather long and involved subtitle was “From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream.” In it, Levin joins other commentators on American culture in observing that the past fifty years have seen a rapid decline in the public’s trust of institutions—that is, the major sectors in which most of us work. Some of the discouraging statistics include the following:
Over the past half-century, America has seen a 45% drop in public confidence in Congress. A 42% decline of trust in the news media. A 40% erosion in public trust in medical professionals. A 29% drop in trust in public schools. A 20% decline of trust in business – which now is in the sub-basement, almost as bad as our confidence in congress!
And particularly disturbing to me as a sometime professor and the son of a professor, in just the single decade leading up to 2024, trust in the university as an institution has declined by a full 20%—across all major demographic and political groups. And over that same decade even the military, which has long been held in high regard by Americans, has seen public trust erode significantly.
Why is this so? Levin identifies a culprit that is relevant to our topic today. He argues that self-platforming—that is, workers’ concerted and inward-turned focus on building their personal reputations and careers—is ravaging organizations, institutions, and professions from law to medicine to education and the church. In this age of widespread obsession over our social-media profiles, many careerist American workers are placing undue attention on “building our brands.” For some of us, at least, in the absence of other meaning in our work, we turn to motives of self-aggrandizement—akin to those that animated the builders of Babel’s tower.
We are not, in other words, satisfied with the ordinary service of ordinary work. We want to build something better for ourselves, using work as a means to selfish ends.
And although many of us may protest that we, at least, are not blatantly self-platforming in the ways Levin identifies, I’d suggest that even with the best of intentions, at some times and in some ways almost all of us end up leaning, just by virtue of being fallen human beings, toward various kinds of idolatry in our work—if not full-blown “Babel-ism,” then at least “Babel lite.”
The Green Room 