A few years ago before my mother passed away at age 79, we were talking about life on the family dairy farm when my brothers and I were kids. For those that don’t know, a dairy farm is a seven-day-a-week job with long hours, and as kids we thought everyone worked like that. Teasingly, I told my mother that if I knew then what I know now, I would have reported her and my father for child abuse! We both had a good laugh. While my brothers and I may not have appreciated it when we were children and teenagers, the instilled work ethic molded us, shaped our characters, and made possible the joys and blessings of life.
However, as our nation staggers toward the looming welfare state, work has become just another profane four-letter word. The denigration of work has been around for thousands of years and flourished in the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome in which physical work was considered demeaning to all except slaves and the lower classes. In ancient Athens, one-third of freemen sat daily discussing the affairs of state in the court of Comitia as slaves, who outnumbered citizens five-to-one, performed all manual labor. In the “bread and circuses” pleasure-seeking Roman culture, it was again slaves who did all of the manual labor. [Schmidt, pp. 194-195.]
But during the first century, at the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, a child was born that would give voice to God’s view of the dignity of labor. His name was Jesus, the promised Messiah. His early disciples were mostly callus-handed fishermen, tradesmen, and even a local IRS agent. And the arch-persecutor-turned-apostle of this tiny Christian sect was a brilliant theologian and evangelist but also a tent-maker by trade. And the Apostle Paul admonished the Thessalonian Christians that, “If any one will not work, let him not eat.” [2 Thessalonians 3:10. RSV] It was in the first century that Christians were driven from their homeland and made their first appearances in the Greco-Roman world. Because Christians believed in the dignity and honor of work, they were held with contempt by their Roman masters. Persecution arose, in part, because those strange Christian beliefs about work conflicted with the Romans’ view of the world and also because of suspicions and jealousies of the Christians’ prosperity due to their strong work ethic. [Schmidt, pp. 195-196.]
But the first century Christian view of work was not a new philosophy but a reflection of the image of the Creator stamped on man, the pinnacle of His creation. Biblical instruction and admonitions regarding work are abundant. The first chapter of Genesis records God’s labors in creating the universe. Not only does God work, He charged man with responsibilities and duties of being fruitful, replenishing and subduing the earth, and having dominion over all living creatures. When Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden of Eden because of their sin, God told Adam that “…cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life…In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground…” [Genesis 3: 17, 19. RSV] Notice that God did not impose work as a punishment for their sin. Rather, the curse was on the ground upon which they would toil. In other words, the curse was upon the conditions under which the work would be performed, not on work itself. But God loved man and would make possible a way for man to re-enter right relationship with Him by sending His Son Jesus in human form as a babe. Perhaps this gives us another insight into God’s view of work in that the earthly father of God’s Son was a carpenter.
With the decline and fall of the western half of the Roman Empire by the end of the fifth century, a remnant of the Christian heritage of the western portion of the Roman Empire was pushed northward into the sparse and hostile forests of France and western Germany. The inhabitants were Gauls whom the Romans had conquered and brought civilization at the beginning of the Christian era. To this group was added a smaller number of Teutonic invaders that had come from the East and hindered for a time the building of an organized social life and assimilation of the Mediterranean culture. Life was harsh in the pioneer wilds of northern Europe at the beginning of the Middle Ages around A.D. 500. However, out of this difficult and meager existence was built a cohesive and somewhat refined civilization, and the broad and general characteristics of their medieval society remained for centuries. Those characteristics and viewpoint, worldview if you will, became the ideas and ideals of Christendom which were the foundations of the American experience from the earliest colonial days to the middle of the twentieth century. [Johnson, p. 88.]
Christendom’s creedal reverence for work and the practical necessity of work amidst primitive conditions in the forests and clearings of early Europe produced the phenomenon of the middle class, unknown before the advent of Christianity and now present in all of Western civilization. With the birth of the middle class came the reduction of poverty and its attendant disease. And from the middle class arose political and economic freedom of a magnitude unknown in the history of the world to that time. [Schmidt, pp. 198-199.]
In the very earliest years of Europeans on the American continent, socialistic answers were sought to replace the Christian work ethic as the North Star for organizing society. Because of their isolation from the civilized world, Jamestown and the Plymouth Colony stand as great laboratory experiments regarding questions as to the validity and worthiness of socialistic principles. Communism of an almost pure variety, in the isolated and controlled environment of the New World, failed miserably in its initial years as laziness and inefficiency trumped thrift and industry. As the colonists abandoned their experiment in socialism, the colonies flourished. [Johnson, p. 247.] Karl Marx’s ideas regarding socialism presented in The Communist Manifesto became the twentieth century’s grand socialist experiment which led to the enslavement of a third of humanity behind the iron and bamboo curtains. For three quarters of a century, the consequences of these socialistic systems were death and misery unparalleled in the history of mankind.
But our collective memory is short and socialism’s propaganda machine is strong. As a result Christianity and its values are being rapidly abandoned in Western societies in favor of a humanistic worldview requiring socialistic solutions to society’s problems. As a result, socialism is destroying the middle class and its indispensable Christian work ethic, and America is becoming a bread and circuses culture.
The displacement of the work ethic by the actions of the American government’s social engineers since the 1960s has had a multitude of far-reaching consequences. Just one example is the humanistic welfare solutions that have fractured the concept of family by substituting governmental assistance to unwed pregnant teenage girls. Fathers are not required to work and provide for the mother and child for whom they are responsible. This welfare system perpetuates itself through ensuing generations that repeat the cycle. The direct consequences of institutionalization of illegitimacy in American life are a rise in the illegitimacy rate (6% in 1963 to 41% in 2014) and consequent increases in drug use rate, dropout rate, crime rate, and incarceration rate. [Buchanan, p. A-14.
In the mid-1990s Congressional welfare reforms required those seeking welfare to work. However, this requirement was removed by an executive order by President Obama in 2012. Additionally, governmental subsidies provided by the Affordable Care Act have now been determined to be a disincentive to work by those receiving subsidies with a consequent loss of 2.5 million jobs over the next three years according to a Congressional Budget Office report. [Carruthers]
The operation of man’s fallen human nature exposes the soft and rotten underbelly of the tenets of the socialism and humanistic faith in mankind and their commitment to the principle of the greatest-happiness-for-the-greatest-number which humanists consider to be the highest moral obligation for humanity as a whole. [Johnson, p. 247.] The operation of human nature conflicts with man-made socialistic solutions to the problems of life, and the end result is failure. People fail, families fail, and cultures ultimately fail. The socialists’ false view of man’s nature leads to poverty, starvation, and loss of freedom. The antidote is a rejection of socialism and a return to the Christian work ethic.
Larry G. Johnson
Sources:
Alvin J. Schmidt, How Christianity Changed the World,” (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2004), pp. 194-196, 198-199.
Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods – Humanism and Christianity – The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2011), pp. 88, 247.
Patrick Buchanan, “Is this end of the line for the welfare state?” Tulsa World, February 12, 2014, A-14.
Wanda Carruthers, “Joe Scarborough: CBO Report Shows Obamacare ‘Still Red Hot Mess’,” Newsmax.com, February 6, 2014. http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/cbo-work-obamacare-disincentive/2014/02/06/id/551246#ixzz2tEpiNt4b (accessed February 13, 2014).
