Interrogating the Faith & Work Movement

Christianity has come to Silicon Valley, according to The New York Times (February 11, 2025) and this publication (Summer 2025), thanks in part to local churches teaching how a high-tech profession is a vocation from God. The last two decades have seen a surge of books, conferences, institutes, parachurch ministries, and Bible studies on the connections between Christianity and the workplace. The so-called Faith and Work Movement has become a major strain in contemporary evangelicalism.

Saving the Protestant Ethic: Creative Class Evangelicalism and the Crisis of Work by sociologist Andrew Lynn is an illuminating study of this movement. But it is also a critique of same that gets tangled up in the obligatory left-wing economics of his profession.

As Lynn shows, from its very beginning Protestantism promoted a positive relationship between faith and work. Luther’s doctrine of vocation taught that God calls all Christians, not just members of religious orders, to productive labor and relationships through which God works to sustain His creation and in which Christians can live out their faith in love and service to their neighbors. Whereas Luther stressed the multiple vocations that Christians have, not just in the workplace but also in the family, the society, and the church, Calvin focused on economic callings. Calvin’s emphasis on the character-forming disciplines of hard work, thrift, and pursuit of the common good inspired generations of industrious, energetic Puritans whose “Protestant work ethic” would turn former peasants into prosperous members of the middle class and contribute to the rise of capitalism.

But what happened to the Reformation doctrine of vocation and the Protestant work ethic? In the late 19th and most of the 20th century, those topics largely disappeared from the sermons and writings of conservative American Protestants.

Here Lynn makes an important contribution by identifying what he calls the “Fundamentalist Work Ethic.” With the Second Great Awakening came Methodist perfectionism, the “deeper Christian life” of the U.K.’s Keswick theology, the dispensationalism of the Scofield Bible, and the premillennial conviction that Christ’s second coming is imminent. All these emphasized the inner spiritual life and explicitly played down the significance of our physical existence in “the world”—which would soon pass away. Lynn marshals evidence from the religious writings of the time that warn against the spiritual dangers of money-making, materialism, and “worldly” ambition.

This “new clericalism,” as Lynn calls it, influenced the way laypeople saw their work. In their ordinary jobs on the farm, the factory, and the office, laypeople could earn money by which they could support mission work, whether by their local congregations, individual missionaries, or large-scale mission organizations. In that way, ordinary work could help spread the gospel.

Then laypeople realized that their own workplaces were also mission fields! Secular employment was seen as a way to reach people who might never visit a church. Sharing the gospel on the job became paramount. In fact, the first half of the 20th century saw a number of businessmen’s organizations crop up—such as the Gideons and the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship—with the purpose of evangelizing in the business world. A number of books by successful Christian businessmen made the case that God’s work could be carried out in the business world.

According to Lynn, much of 20th-century evangelicalism—including the “neo-evangelicalism” of Billy Graham and the parachurch ministries he inspired—approached work in terms of some version of the Fundamentalist Work Ethic, either saying little about it or valuing it for instrumental purposes, such as evangelism or carrying out other functions of the church.

Today’s Faith and Work Movement, however, emerged out of fresh Christian attempts to engage with culture, associated with American evangelicals’ discovery of the neo-Calvinism of Abraham Kuyper as popularized by Francis Schaeffer. This approach values work in itself as a participation in God’s creation. Lynn describes an “explosion” of books on this topic over the last two decades, averaging 185 every year since 2000. (Full disclosure: I have written three of them, on Luther’s doctrine of vocation and its applications. I honestly did not realize I was part of a movement.)

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