HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE CHURCH DISCIPLINE: THE CHURCH AND THE LABOR UNION
Coalition of Good Shepherd ministers who helped poultry workers unionize at the Country Pride plant in Hurlock, Maryland. December 21, 1985. Photograph from the AFL-CIO subject files, courtesy of University of Maryland libraries. Public domain.
I like to say that it’s my time in left politics that led me to reembrace orthodox Christianity. It’s a fun line to drop on contrarian grounds. After all, Christian left political activism is often associated with a vague, antidogmatic theological liberalism, and an emphasis on theological orthodoxy with political quietism or even reactionary conservatism. But this is more than just an amusing provocation for late night conversations in the seminary common room; it also happens to be true. It was precisely my experiences in the trenches as a student radical, left political operative, and union organizer which led me to a realization that the old teachings of the church about God, Jesus, and salvation were not optional parts of the Christian message, and that the church has not only the right but indeed the responsibility to expect and, yes, require Christian belief and action from its members.
Now, part of this had to do with the way realities of life in working-class America shattered the sunny theological anthropology of mainline liberalism. It just did not seem plausible that the Kingdom of Heaven was right around the corner or that even graced human action could right all wrongs and wipe the tears from every eye. I simply could not believe that merely-human effort, no matter how gargantuan, could extricate even a single person from the way that our very selfhood was shaped by the disciplining powers of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. I needed grace, salvation from outside myself, the promise of a Second Coming not dependent on human effort or activities, an apocalypse much wilder than the Kingdom-as-social-democracy.
But of course, a concern for Christian orthodoxy is more than just private belief in the traditional dogmas of the Christian church. Even in my own flirtations with mainline liberalism, I never really rejected traditional views about the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, the resurrection, and so on; I just didn’t think it was particularly important or necessary that my fellow Christians held them. Yet my time on the left taught me about the possibility and desirability of a form of social organization thicker than that of any church body that I had been in, where shared ideological commitment was expected, mutual accountability practiced unceasingly, and convincing others of our message was a matter of urgency. In short, it was the organizing world which taught me what the church is supposed to look like – ironically, bringing me back to a quite traditional picture of the Christian church exhorting its members to grow in holiness, unapologetically holding the faith, and taking seriously the call to bring the whole world into the body of Christ. It was the labor union which taught me to stop worrying and love church discipline.
As I’ve written elsewhere, the heart of a labor union is not in legal recognition or a contract or a grievance policy, but in a community which forms its members morally and politically to prioritize having each other’s backs over acquisitive individualism. This was something that I was taught quite explicitly by my own organizers. No matter the setting and the group of people I was working with – sitting with undergrads in neo-Gothic dining halls, going door-to-door in innumerable decaying post-industrial neighborhoods, meeting with hotel workers for drinks after work – we were about forming a different kind of community, inaugurating a way of relating to each other foreign to the moral formation of neoliberal capitalism. This wasn’t always easy to do and, just like church discipline or evangelism or enforcing orthodox belief, was certainly capable of being abused by unscrupulous or sincerely overzealous actors, but it did give me a taste of what I now believe Christian community ought to look like.
As organizers, we spent a great deal of time and energy spreading our good news. We would strategize at length about how to share it most effectively, figuring out what exactly it would take to move a specific person from doubt or disagreement to enthusiastic acceptance. Consider, for example, election canvassing: when we were sent out in pairs to knock doors for candidates (the very action, of course, resonant with old-school door-to-door evangelism), it wasn’t just a matter of securing a vote for our candidates and moving on. We were carefully trained to engage the people we were talking to in real conversations about their values, building relationships and transforming how our interlocutors imagined themselves as political actors. In short, we used elections as an opportunity to do some basic community organizing and invite our neighbors into a different sort of political imagination. When it came to figuring out how to get a worker in a hotel to sign on for the union, especially a worker who other workers respected and would follow, we could have given Gregory the Great a run for his money when it came to thinking through the precise way to persuade. What would move them? What were the particular things that they were concerned about, or hoped for? What sort of affect or emotional intensity did we need to bring to the conversation? And let’s be clear: these conversations were not from a place of real or imagined neutrality! We were not simply there to lay out the facts about a given candidate, or a university investment policy, or unionizing a workplace. We were there to convince, and over time learned to be very unembarrassed about the fact that we were asking people to do something – because it was what was needed to bring new life into their lives and communities. It was, in short, evangelism. I distinctly remember walking in the rain around sunset from one house to another ringing doorbells one night and being struck by this fact. I was left wondering why I was so willing to deal with rain and slammed doors and sneaking into apartment buildings to spread the good news of the union but was made uncomfortable by the thought of doing so explicitly for Christ. I have come to believe that, whether or not precisely the same methods ought to be used, I ought to – and want to – have the same intensity in sharing the capital-G Gospel.
We also were convinced that what people believed really and truly mattered; ideological commitments were more than purely a question of private concern. On one hand, we were consistently trying to bring in as many people as possible to the organization (be it an undergrad organizing group, a community organization, or a labor union), refusing to write people off and struggling mightily to reach the resistant. But on the other hand, it wasn’t enough, particularly for our leaders, to simply be ‘in community’ without sharing the beliefs and values that animated us. The invitation was open to all, but it was an invitation into a very particular project, and to be transformed in a very particular way. You couldn’t be a union leader who was iffy on the question of unionization; a community organizer who believed that the big employers and developers in our struggling city had the best interests of its overwhelmingly working-class, black and brown population at heart; or a student radical who thought that students didn’t deserve a more substantive voice in university governance. Even when it came to the nitty-gritty of campaign strategy, it wasn’t an option for us to agree to disagree and each do whatever we believed made the most sense. We had to come to a consensus, and had to be willing to act according to what that consensus was. If one found oneself consistently unable to do so, that might be a sign that continued participation in the organization – and certainly in a leadership capacity – wasn’t tenable. To say “well, this is just my opinion, and you have yours” simply wasn’t an option for way we wanted to be in the world or the work we wanted to do. Orthodoxy mattered.
I also learned how to build relationships of both vulnerability and accountability from my time on the left. We in the mainline church tend to focus a lot on the first of these, on creating spaces where individuals can unburden themselves of the heavy things they are carrying to pastoral caregivers who nonjudgmentally accompany them. And vulnerability is a good and holy thing. But somewhat uniquely, the left taught me how to have relationships that matched that sort of self-disclosure and loving care for the other with a firm commitment to hold people accountable to being the sort of people they say they want to be and doing the sort of things they say they will do. In the part of the organizing world I spent time in, there was a keen awareness that doing the things we were asking people to do (talking to their neighbors about coming together to fight for justice, talking to co-workers about forming a union, and so on) was, well, hard. It went against the grain of how we are socialized, and left to our own devices most of us would find excuses to avoid doing this work. And so we spent a lot of time discussing the “push”: how to have honest conversations with people about why a particular task scared them, how to support them in doing it anyway, and how to follow through – gently but persistently – to ensure that commitments were actually met. Sometimes these conversations were conflictual, but they were always intended to be about the growth of the relationship and the growth of the person being held accountable. As a conflict-averse white Midwesterner, this wasn’t a way that I was used to relating to people at first. But rather to my surprise, I found being in relationships like these, where we were honest with each other about the hard things in our lives and pushed each other to work through them, incredibly transformative. And they felt so different, so much more real, than relationships I’d had within churches where no one really asked anything more of me than showing up on most Sundays.
All these practices have analogues in the life of the Christian church: evangelism, establishing and enforcing doctrinal orthodoxy, and practicing accountability (through means which include church discipline in extreme cases but also the more everyday work of Spirit-driven growth in holiness carried out with a confessor or spiritual director or small group). But in truth, I don’t know if I’ve ever been in a church – certainly not a mainline one – that has sought to be this sort of community. Some of the reticence is for good reason, of course; these sorts of communities have the potential to go awry in damaging ways. During my undergrad years, for example, we would-be radical firebrands adopted a policy wherein disagreement with the party line could only be expressed within the group, and all members were expected to enthusiastically endorse it in all its particulars to those outside. As you might expect, the results were ultimately stultifying and demoralizing; censoriousness and thought-policing produced dishonest, damaged relationships. But I can attest also to the incredible power of effective practices of accountability, and I miss them deeply now that I have left full-time work in the organizing world to attend seminary. They seem to me to be so central to the vision of the church set forth in the New Testament and found in the tradition: the church as a community which evangelizes, which preserves the teaching handed down from the apostles, which invites, exhorts, and admonishes its members into (imperfect, but real) newness of life here and how. Yet it was not the contemporary church, but the labor movement, where I found all these things!
The point is not, of course, that the church is (or ought to be) just another ‘thick community’, albeit one oriented towards the end of life with Christ rather than organizing labor unions. Ecclesiology must start from above, from the church’s divine constitution and use (thanks to Christ) of particular means of grace, rather than from an analysis of human sociality as such. But if the church is divine, so too is it human, participating (albeit in a particularly graced way) in modes of human relation broadly shared outside its boundaries. And I thank God that my time in left organizing taught me the value of a set of social practices hard to find in many corners of my own Episcopal Church. I pray for the wisdom and strength to help build Christian communities which, precisely because they imitate or draw upon in some ways my time on the left, will better be the Church for a needy world.
