{"id":3370,"date":"2017-05-04T09:50:19","date_gmt":"2017-05-04T13:50:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/practicalmattersjournal.ecdsdev.org\/?p=3370"},"modified":"2017-05-23T07:46:07","modified_gmt":"2017-05-23T11:46:07","slug":"evangelical-faith-at-work-resistance-as-obedience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/2017\/05\/04\/evangelical-faith-at-work-resistance-as-obedience\/","title":{"rendered":"Evangelical Faith at Work: Resistance as Obedience"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/strong>Download PDF: Estey, Evangelical Faith At Work<\/a><\/h5>\n
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Abstract<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Protestant Christian evangelical practice and theology provides resources for resistance to labor exploitation. Black evangelical union members in Moncure, North Carolina demonstrate through a nine month strike against their plywood plant how resistance to unfair labor practices are also expressions of evangelical adherence to the authority of the Bible and faithful commitment to the church. Their labor ethic includes union membership and church membership to challenge overwork and attacks on labor unions.[1]<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Introduction<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Higher health care costs, longer work days, weekend work, fewer holidays, weakened seniority protections, a doubling of mandatory overtime from ten to twenty hours. Such was the last and best offer for contract renewal from the Atlas Holdings negotiating team to Woodworkers Local Lodge 369 of Moncure Plywood in the spring of 2008. Atlas Holdings LLC, a firm from Greenwich, Connecticut, purchased Moncure Plywood from the Weyerhaeuser Company in 2004 and they were determined to secure a handsome return on investment by saving money on labor and production in this latest contract round. Despite the uncertainty of going on strike, the union members knew one thing for sure based on these contract demands: this private equity holding company intended to eliminate union representation.<\/p>\n

Months before the economies of the United States and Europe nearly toppled headlong into a depression rivaling the one in the 1930s, Local 369 of Moncure Plywood took a dive into the unknown on July 19, 2008. For the first time in the forty year history of the local, they voted to go on strike. An angry hive of workers flew out of the plant and lit on a thin stretch of gravel between Corinth Road and the railroad tracks in front of the factory. Set between trains and trucks, the workers began a three shift, seven day picket pacing back and forth, holding firm through the seasons until April of 2009. Out of approximately sixty work stoppages in the prior quarter century in North Carolina, this was the fifth longest.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

This small woodworkers local attracted national attention, emerging from anonymity inside a gigantic machinist and aerospace union. The odds were long in this right-to-work state that also featured the nation’s lowest union membership rate, then a daunting 3.5%.[3]<\/a> Before the strike, 160 or around 80% of its two hundred workers belonged to the union. For North Carolina as a whole in 2008, the unionization rate within workplaces that include a union was approximately 70%. Thus, Moncure Plywood was slightly ahead of the state average. hen the picket line formed, the union dropped to 120 members as forty workers elected to cross the picket line and thus leave the union. A knowledgeable workforce remained behind to train the flood of replacement workers pining for work. In unreciprocated solidarity, Local 369 went on strike for everyone, including almost half the workforce that continued work inside the plant.<\/p>\n

As a former evangelical, this strike intrigued me. My father worked in a factory and when he became born-again, he would go to his truck at lunchtime to read the Bible and pray. For him, work was a result of Adam’s sin in the Garden of Eden. Problems in the workplace had their source in individual sinfulness. The plant in which he toiled did not have a union. When work became difficult because of management or even his co-workers, he turned inward to ponder issues arising there. For two summers between college years, I joined my father to labor at the same factory. Those experiences prompted my interest in the relationship between faith and work. Thus, when I heard about a strike that involved a woodworkers local with an evangelical leadership and evangelical rank and file membership, I was eager to investigate this conflict. They handled their workplace problems in a different way because they had a union and chose to use its protections. Now, as a faculty member at Brooklyn College, I teach in a political science department though my degree is in theology. My professional responsibilities include teaching across two disciplines \u2013 politics and religion. I also belong to the Professional Staff Congress (AFT Local 2334) at the City University of New York. While my doctoral studies focused on the relationship of theological ethics and labor history, interviewing these workers in North Carolina was a new experience. Their strike and the financial crises that they faced were very tangible and pressing. The strike fund provided only $150 per week for each worker along with assistance, on occasion, to meet other kinds of financial exigencies. As a result of talking to the workers, I discovered how evangelical theology and commitment to Biblical teaching supported their labor activism in ways that I had not imagined possible as a young person in a white, working class setting in rural New Hampshire. The question that has emerged for me in this labor story has been this: Can one be an evangelical but also be committed to a reciprocating nexus of practice and belief that supports laboring people? The theology of many of the union members that I interviewed at Moncure Plywood is classically evangelical. But the expression of their theological commitments in the context of this collective struggle over their livelihoods is especially creative and invigorating. They did not merely apply their theology to the crisis at hand. Their dedication to their respective churches, not to mention the years-often decades-spent in various phases of plywood manufacturing, set the context for creative Biblical and theological responses that crystallized on the factory floor and on the picket line from the summer of 2008 to the spring of 2009 and afterwards. Their theology would be recognizable to an evangelical anywhere in the abstract. But their framework for discussing the Bible, their beliefs, and their faith practices were distinctive. It was infused with the experience of producing plywood with friends, family members and fellow church members. This was a tight knit group of workers who, on the basis of multiple accounts, actually enjoyed coming to work because of the camaraderie experienced there. Most of the workers at Moncure Plywood, at that time, were African American. Their theology was also shaped by the experience of working in a white-owned plant as well as being managed by a newly hired white management team brought in from Texas sometime in 2007 or 2008.<\/p>\n

Methodological Questions about Evangelical Definition and Identity<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Evangelicalism has been notoriously difficult to define \u2013 even among evangelicals! The association of evangelicalism with the Republican Party and, generally, national polling that separates white evangelicals from everyone else exacerbates confusion about definition and categorization. One Gallup report noted that “[T]here is no universally agreed-upon definition of exactly who is and who is not an \u2018evangelical,’ but the label typically refers to individuals who are highly religious and identify with a non-Catholic Christian (Protestant) faith.”[4]<\/a> Elsewhere in Gallup, a section on religion features a question with this built-in definition: “Would you describe yourself as a \u2018born-again’ or evangelical Christian?”[5]<\/a> This definition leans toward a religious experience rather than a set of beliefs or doctrines. In 2016, this poll showed that 41% of adults responded as born-again or evangelical Christian.<\/p>\n

The Pew Research Center for Religion & Public Life conducted their second U.S. Religious Landscape survey in 2014. In a report based on the survey entitled “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” they also align “born-again” with evangelical. In an appendix on the classification of Protestant denominations, the report divides Protestantism into three major traditions \u2013 evangelical, mainline and historically black Protestantism.[6]<\/a> Survey respondents were categorized according to the “specific denomination with which they identify.” For instance, all members of the Southern Baptist Convention are deemed to be evangelical, all American Baptist USA members are classified as mainline Protestant, and all those who belong to the National Baptist Convention are placed in the historically black Protestant tradition. If respondents were unclear about their precise denominational affiliation, then they “were placed into one of the three Protestant traditions based on their race and\/or their response to a question that asked if they would describe themselves as a \u2018born-again or evangelical Christian.'”[7]<\/a> According to this method, the report places 25.4% of U.S. adults within evangelical denominations. Evangelical denominations, according to the report, share religious beliefs such as the importance of personally accepting Jesus Christ as the only way to be saved. They also emphasize the practice of bringing other people to the faith. Another aspect of an evangelical denomination has to do with “origins” which, according to the report, includes “separatist movements against established religious institutions.”[8]<\/a> The matter of origins is very important because the struggles between the so-called “fundamentalists” and “modernists” in the early part of the twentieth century did lead to enduring denominational fissures. It also led to questioning among some fundamentalists themselves of whether a middle ground might exist between the warring factions in Protestantism, fighting as they did over questions about the significance of the scientific method and questions about the faith in light of Biblical criticism and evolution. The founding of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in 1942 provided an institutional home for believers, denominations, and organizations who did not wish to completely withdraw from other believers or from the world at large as many other fundamentalists still wished to do. The label “evangelical” found an organizational home, so to speak, in the NAE and it has functioned ever since to situate the presence of evangelicals in American life. Still, the emergence of evangelicalism (organized as a national body) occurred as a result of highly publicized theological battles conducted in large part by white theologians and pastors.<\/p>\n

Earlier in November 2015, drawing upon this history of debate around defining evangelicalism, the NAE and LifeWay Research concluded in a joint study that evangelicals are to be defined by what they believe. As Leith Anderson, the NAE president, noted in a press release accompanying the release of the report: “Evangelicals are people of faith and should be defined by their beliefs, not by their politics or race.”[9]<\/a> The joint study lists four statements with which people must strongly agree in order to be categorized as evangelical.<\/p>\n