Mark Hemingway excoriates the left’s denigration of work and says that the lack of respect for the working class is what drives Donald Trump’s popularity. And then he offers his proposal for making America great again: Recover Luther’s doctrine of vocation!
Read what he says after the jump. This will kick off a special series of posts on vocation this week (while I’m away in Denmark). As someone* wrote me recently, “vocation has messed with me for the past several years.” Let it mess with you this week!
From Mark Hemingway, Bernie’s Hatred Of Work Is Why Trumpites Are So Mad, in the Federalist:
My rather immodest proposal for making America great again: We need a sea change in our attitudes toward work.That this needs to be said is damning indictment of how debased American culture has become. (Mike Rowe is just about the lone significant cultural voice in America screaming into the void about the value of work.) Not that long ago, we were celebrated for our “Protestant work ethic,” although, as with a lot of theological concepts, most Americans no longer have any frame of reference for what that means.
Although often associated with Calvinism, it is was first rooted in Martin Luther’s doctrine of vocation, which posits that we serve God by accepting our callings and employing our God-given abilities to do the work that needs to be done. Not because we get to do what we love, but because we do what needs to be done out of love for others.
One does not need to even believe in God to see that an economic order that arises from a culture where naked self-interest is tempered by expressions of respect and gratitude for those who willingly accept responsibility to take care of others is preferable to every man for himself. It’s also vastly better than the other extreme of socialism, where the fruits of our individual labor are disproportionately seized and redistributed without regard to our families and the community members we care about most and are best positioned to take care of.
For the first step towards that end, America needs to go here.
*That would be R. J. Grunewald, who applied vocation to Christian t-shirts in a piece I’ll be linking to this week.
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