Michael Farris Doesn’t Read the Bible (Apparently)

Three months ago, Dan Price, C.E.O. of Gravity Payments, a credit card processing company in Seattle, announced that he would no longer pay an employee less than $70,000 a year. Price hoped to ensure that all of his employees would have a minimum standard of living, and figured the publicity wouldn’t hurt along the way. Yesterday the New York Times published a piece on Price’s struggles since making that fateful decision, as two of his best employees quit, upset that newer and less qualified employees were earning nearly as much as they were, and as the company lost customers who saw him as an ideologue or feared the business’s demise.

As chatter about the story spread to other news outlets, HSLDA and Christian Right leader Michael Farris posted this status update:

As a young woman with a good Christian upbringing rich in Bible reading and memorization, Farris’s comment leaves me confused. More than that, it leaves me wondering if Farris reads the Bible he claims to adhere to so closely. Surely I am not the only product of a devout evangelical upbringing to note the close resemblance between Price’s situation and a certain parable told by Jesus in the Bible.

Matthew 20:1-16 (NIV)

The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard

20 “For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. 2 He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard.

3 “About nine in the morning he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. 4 He told them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ 5 So they went.

“He went out again about noon and about three in the afternoon and did the same thing.6 About five in the afternoon he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, ‘Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?’

7 “‘Because no one has hired us,’ they answered.

“He said to them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard.’

8 “When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.’

9 “The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius. 10 So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. 11 When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. 12 ‘These who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’

13 “But he answered one of them, ‘I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? 14 Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. 15 Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’

16 “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

In sum, a landowner hired people to work in his vineyard, and at the end of the day paid each worker a denarius whether they’d worked since dawn or only arrived in the afternoon. When some of the workers who had been there since dawn complained, the landowner reminded them that they’d been promised a denarius from the beginning. “Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money?” He asked. “Or are you envious because I am generous?” It is the landowner who is presented positively, and the grumbling workers who are presenting negatively.

You want to know what’s going on here? Farris and others like him claim that their beliefs are based in the Bible, their economic positions flow not from the Bible but rather from conservative politics. After all, it is conservative politics, and not the Bible, that derides Price’s decision as socialism. When they side with conservative business interests, they forget that at his core, Jesus was subversive against the reigning order. Can you see Jesus defending the level of social inequality in our capitalist society?

But you want to know the best part of it? Dan Price is a homeschool alumni raised in a large conservative Christian family. Farris may not have realized it when posting his status update, but he was deriding a product of his own movement. Somehow I don’t think we’ll see Price on Farris’s next list of successful homeschool alumni, his CEO status be damned.