Job-Shaming vs. Vocation

Last updated on: September 9, 2018 at 6:49 pm By Gene Veith

Geoffrey Owens is a Shakespearean actor, but he is best known for his role on The Cosby Show back in the 1980s, playing the boyfriend of one of the Huxtable daughters and later her husband. But lately he has been working as a cashier at a Trader Joe’s grocery store in New Jersey.

Someone took pictures of him at his cash register, and the London tabloid The Daily Mail ran with it. The writer of the article thought it was hilarious that this former star had fallen so far as to work in a grocery store, his name, once up in lights, now on a company name tag. Then Fox News piled on with a story of its own.

For once, social media erupted in a positive way. This man is doing honest work. He has taken on a job to support himself and his family. How dare you mock him. He deserves praise and respect. These journalists were doing nothing but “job-shaming,” putting someone down because of the work he is doing. But no one should be made to feel ashamed for taking on jobs that need doing, however “low status” they seem in the eyes of privileged snobs like the journalists. (You get the idea: See Mike Rowe on Dirty Jobs.)

The journalists added ignorance to their snobbery. Yes, big movie stars make lots of money, but there aren’t many of those. Most working actors don’t make all that much anyway. But even when they get parts, acting is a “gig” profession. You get paid when you get a job in a play, TV show, or movie. But after that job is over, you get nothing. No regular paycheck, no health insurance, no benefits. So between acting gigs, most rank and file actors have “day jobs.” And since you might get a part at any time, you can’t really take a long-term position with ongoing responsibilities. So lots of actors work jobs they can leave easily, working retail, in restaurants, or in blue collar jobs. (Read these reactions to the job-shaming of Mr. Owens from other actors.)

But job-shaming is especially despicable in light of the Christian doctrine of vocation. Our work is part of our calling from God–along with our families, our church life, and our citizenship–where He places us to love and serve our neighbors, as He works through us in our everyday lives. As such, all vocations are equally valuable in the eyes of God.

In the eyes of the world, though, all vocations are not equal. Professional athletes and, yes, big movie stars get paid enormous amounts. Those are legitimate vocations, serving their neighbors by entertaining them and bringing a little pleasure to our humdrum lives. But the more lowly and low-paid jobs often involve higher and more important levels of service to the neighbor.

The people who clean up after us, build our roads and houses, manufacture the products we depend on, and bring us the food we eat (from farm workers to the cashiers at the grocery stores), are doing more important work for those of us who benefit from it than high status athletes, movie stars, and many other high status positions.

And the fact that many of those necessary jobs are hard, dirty, tedious, and unpleasant give us even more reason to honor them. Those who do them are sacrificing themselves for us.

If you have a job that is satisfying, fulfilling, and enjoyable, praise God for giving you that calling. But realize that other people don’t have jobs like that. But theirs is no less a vocation than yours.

Vocation teaches us not to look down on anyone for the work they do.

See the reaction of Geoffrey Owens to the whole affair. It is quite refreshing. He says that Trader Joe’s is a good place to work. He says that at first he was embarrassed by the job-shaming, but was heartened by all of the support he received.

Photo Credit: U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Delano Scott/Released. Public domain.

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A Labor Day Meditation on Good Works, Vocation, & Our Neighbors

Last updated on: September 2, 2018 at 3:31 pm By Gene Veith

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Happy Labor Day, a secular holiday which we here at the Cranach Institute are trying to co-opt as a Christian holiday to celebrate the doctrine of Vocation! (Did any of you hear that connection made at church yesterday?)

And what better way to celebrate this holiday than to hear from Martin Luther, the great theologian of Vocation. Here he underscores how we are not saved by our works and yet how good works are part of the Christian life after all.

He then expounds the purpose of all of our vocations (whether in the workplace, our families, our congregations, and our country): to love and serve not ourselves but our neighbors (our customers, our spouse and children, our fellow-Christians, our fellow-citizens).

From Martin Luther, Sermon for Pentecost Monday, John 3:16-21–Christ, Our Mediator:

18. . . .No person who professes to be a Christian dare undertake to do any work, imagining thereby to be saved; he is not saved except through Christ alone, whom it cost his all. We must come to salvation through him and his work, with nothing else added to it. If we build upon human works, we are reckoning directly against God’s grace.

19. On the other hand, we must not abandon works, saying as do the impudent: Aye, then I will do good works no longer in order to be saved. True, you dare do nothing with the intent of its being meritorious for salvation, for the forgiveness of sin and for the pacifying of the conscience; you have sufficient for these in your faith. But your neighbour has not sufficient; you must extend a helping hand to him. That you may perform such service, God permits you to live; if not so, your execution would soon be called for. You live for the purpose of serving by your life, not yourself, but your neighbour.

20. Christ the Lord had also sufficient; what the world had was his. He might have passed us by, but it is not the nature of true life to do so. Nay, cursed be that life into perdition that lives for self; for to so live is heathenish and not Christian. Then those who have at present their sufficiency from Christ, must follow the example of Christ and with utter sincerity do good to their neighbours, as Christ did to us; freely, without the least thought of obtaining anything thereby, only with the desire that it be pleasing to God.

[This is from a translation of Luther’s Church Postil, a collection of 117 sermons that were sent throughout the Reformation churches for pastors to preach and model their teaching after. Much of Luther’s teachings about vocation are to be found in the Postil, which means that those teachings were widely circulated throughout the Lutheran churches. This is from the translation by John Nickolas Lencker (1905), which is posted on an excellent website on Luther originating in the Netherlands.]

For more on Luther’s doctrine of vocation, see the Swedish theologian Gustaf Wingren’s Luther on Vocation. For how all of this applies to everyday life, see my book God at Work.

Illustration via Pixabay, CC0, Creative Commons

HT: Jackie

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Does Vocation Allow a Spy to Employ Sex as an Espionage Tactic?

Last updated on: May 18, 2018 at 2:58 am By Gene Veith

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In our recent post, The Vocation of a Spy, we discussed whether espionage is a legitimate vocation from God, and, if it is, does the vocation authorize the morally problematic activities that a spy must engage in–deception, lying, tempting others to betray their country, etc.

Sometimes, in recent history, this would include the “enhanced interrogation” of suspects, such as the waterboarding overseen by CIA director nominee Gina Haspel (just confirmed, by the way). Or assassinations, as practiced by Mossad, the Russians, and possibly, at least at one time, the CIA. But what about the classic espionage tactic of using sex and seduction, either to blackmail, reward, or otherwise induce a target to turn over secret information?

My former colleague, Jock Bennie, himself an intelligence professional and a professor of Strategic Intelligence at Patrick Henry College, e-mailed me a nice response to that post and put me onto the work of Darrell Cole, a Drew University ethicist, a Christian, who specializes in just war theory, particularly as it applies to espionage. He wrote an article that draws on Luther entitled “Whether Spies Too Can Be Saved” in The Journal of Religious Ethics in 2008. And he is the author of Just War and the Ethics of Espionage.

I was most struck by his article Sex, Lies, and Spies, in which he discusses whether a spy who is a Christian could ever be justified in employing the spycraft of sex. He frames the issue this way:

Recall that we’ve already agreed one can be both a good soldier and a good Christian. To put it bluntly, this means that stabbing, shooting, and bombing other human beings are conformable to being good Christians. So, too, deceiving and lying are probably conformable to being a good Christian. But is having sex in the line of duty likewise conformable? If we can kill our enemies for the common good, can we not have sex with them?

His answer is an emphatic NO!

You should read his whole essay, published in Providence: A Journal of Christianity & American Foreign Policy, which is a fascinating discussion of Christian ethics, informed by vocation while upholding the concept of moral absolutes and Biblical authority.

Here is a sample from Darrell Cole, Sex, Lies, and Spies:

When we look at the Christian tradition on sex, we find widespread agreement that the primary purpose of sex is to consummate a covenant of marriage and, only within this covenant relationship, to procreate and to experience the pleasure of sexual intercourse. . . .

Unfortunately, like all genuine human goods given to us by God in creation, sex too suffers from the Fall. We are now tempted to use sex for selfish and manipulative reasons. We can use sex to control and harm others. When spies have sex in the line of duty, they are clearly not expressing agapeic love for their partners. Even if in love with their targets, they cannot give themselves entirely to the other for they are hiding their motives for having sex. . . .The sex such people have is always manipulative.

However, we could say that spies. . . have the motive of love of country—love of neighbors, just as the just soldiers who kill and the just spies who deceive. The problem for such an argument is it assumes that non-spousal sex is not an inherently evil act. . . . Unlike soldiering and lying, there are no Biblical sources from which to build a case for just non-spousal or manipulative sex. . . .

Scripture gives us norms of human behavior that admit no exceptions. There is, for example, never a time when murder is the right thing to do. We may argue over what counts as murder, but the principle holds firm in all places, in all times, and for all peoples. Scripture gives us plenty of moral room for a just use of force, which is why the Christian tradition has largely agreed on the possibility of a just war. Scripture does not give us so ready a space for lying, which is why there is a larger division in the tradition on lying than on the possibility of a just use of force. Nevertheless, Scripture does offer some material to build upon a permissive tradition that would support the kinds of deceit used by spies. Scripture gives us no room at all for merely manipulative sex.

[Keep reading. . .]

Notice that “murder” is always wrong. It’s just that some cases of homicide do not constitute murder. Some actions may be authorized by a person’s vocation that would be unlawful if they are done without a vocation. And there may be disagreements about what is ethical and what is not. But the Commandments always apply in vocation.

HT: Jock Bennie

Photo: Mata Hari (German spy, World War I), by Unknown – http://delirium.lejournal.free.fr/Mata_Hari2.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3232049

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The Vocation of a Spy

Last updated on: May 14, 2018 at 10:55 am By Gene Veith

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Normally, the leadership of important government agencies like the CIA goes to politicians, campaign allies, or career bureaucrats. This spoils system approach is not always bad, resulting in some effective leadership as well as some that is less effective. This time, though, the president has nominated to head the nation’s spy agency an actual spy.

Gina Haspel was not only a long-time CIA employee. She was a clandestine field officer, working undercover in the most dangerous places in the world, having fought in the Cold War against Communism and in the War on Terrorism, rising through the ranks to gain experience at every level of intelligence-gathering and analysis.

The CIA rank-and-file is overjoyed at the prospect of one of their own running the agency. Morale has been low, due to the decades-long politicization of the agency, with its pressure to tell government officials what they want to hear. A Gina Haspel administration could get the agency back on track with the professionalism that used to be its hallmark. She would be only the second operations agent to be promoted to the top spot, and she is being called the most qualified person ever to be nominated for CIA director.

The problem is. . . well, she is a spy. And as such she has had to carry out some unsavory missions. Specifically, she oversaw the interrogation of terrorists in secret locations using water-boarding, later classified as a means of torture.

So a number of senators are opposing her nomination, including not only Democrats but some Republicans such as John McCain and Rand Paul.

So how do we consider this?

First, Marc Thiessen tells of one of her exploits, with others still being classified:

It was one of the Clinton administration’s biggest counterterrorism successes. Just weeks after al-Qaeda terrorists trained by Iran blew up U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, Gina Haspel’s phone rang in the middle of the night. She was in her final weeks as station chief in what the CIA describes as an “exotic and tumultuous capital” in central Eurasia, and intelligence had just emerged that two senior al-Qaeda associates linked to the embassy bombings were on their way to the country where she was stationed.

Haspel swung into action, devising an operation to capture the terrorists. She worked around the clock, sleeping on the floor of her office, as agents tracked the terrorists to a local hotel, where the men were apprehended after a firefight. According to the CIA, “The successful operation not only led to the terrorists’ arrest and subsequent imprisonment, but to the seizure of computers that contained details of a terrorist plot.” For her efforts during the operation, which ultimately disrupted a terrorist cell, Haspel in 1999 received the George H.W. Bush Award for Excellence in Counterterrorism . . . .

We should be thrilled that the woman behind this major counterterrorism success has been nominated to become the first female director of the CIA — and only the second person ever to rise to the agency’s top post after spending her entire career in clandestine operations. But instead of being grateful that a seasoned, experienced intelligence operative has been chosen, Senate Democrats are threatening to kill her nomination.

This is insane. Gina Haspel is quite possibly the most qualified person ever nominated to lead the CIA. She has experience in virtually every agency discipline, from counterterrorism to counterintelligence and offensive intelligence operations — including personally recruiting spies and directing covert operations.

[Keep reading. . . ]

Now in those days soon after the 9/11 attacks when the CIA was waterboarding captured terrorists in an effort to identify their comrades and to thwart other plots, water-boarding was not classified as torture and was accepted as a legitimate interrogation technique. Later, authorities determined that it was, in fact, torture and that it may no longer be used.

Lots of CIA, military intelligence, and law enforcement operatives engaged in waterboarding when it was permitted. Should they all be disqualified from promotion or even holding their current positions? Normally, a person isn’t punished for doing something before it was made illegal. So is it fair to punish Agent Haspel now?

Thiessen in the column quoted above points out that John Brennan, who served as CIA director under President Obama, also was involved with these interrogation centers, but Democrats supported him. Why not Haspel? (Brennan had also worked for the CIA and was a presidential Counter Terrorism advisor.)

But let’s look at this controversy from the angle of vocation.

One implication of Luther’s doctrine of vocation is that some actions that are, in general, unlawful, may be lawful when they are authorized by one’s vocation. To take some everyday examples, sex within the vocation of marriage is a good work, though it is sinful outside of that vocation. Punishing someone else’s child is not your job, but if you have the office of a parent, it is.

We are not to kill. Rather, we should love our enemies. In his treatise Whether Soldiers, Too, Can Be Saved, Luther argues that being a soldier is a legitimate calling from God and a means of loving and serving one’s neighbor. He makes the case that a soldier under a Romans 13 chain of command may, “does not bear the sword in vain” (Romans 13:4). That is, the soldier, by virtue of his vocation, may kill his enemy.

This does not exempt the soldier from the moral law binding on all people. As a Christian, he is still enjoined to love his enemies, even though he may have to take their lives in battle, and there are other limits to his conduct and to that of the higher authorities to whom he is subject.

A spy too would seem to be among those who legitimately “bear the sword” under Romans 13.

Espionage involves not only overt actions such as waterboarding, but, even more commonly and essential to the task, deception, lying, pretending to be someone you are not, persuading others to commit acts of betrayal, and other morally-questionable actions.

Can such problematic actions be done under lawful authority and in love and service to one’s neighbor? Put another way, can a Christian be a spy? Must we consider “Whether Spies, Too, Can Be Saved”?

Then again, the only way anyone can be saved is by the forgiveness of sins. In this fallen world, we cannot escape our participation in the network of sin, and we all bear our responsibility for our evil actions. And even when we are forgiven through faith in Christ, He sends us back into the sinful world to love and serve our neighbors, in our vocations. And here we still must struggle, as the conflict between sin and grace continues in both the world we are trying to serve and also within ourselves.

Where should we come down on all of this?

How does this relate to the principle of the Nuremberg Trials that “just following orders” is no defense in the case of heinous crimes ordered by one’s superior? What would be the limits on what a spy–or soldier–should carry out?

If being a spy is intrinsically immoral, should we just not have a Central Intelligence Agency at all? If we do need such a thing, who could work in it without participating in its questionable activities?

Would you vote to confirm Gina Haspel?

Photo, Gina Haspel, by Central Intelligence Agency [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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The Vocation of a Christian Police Officer

Last updated on: April 3, 2018 at 4:02 am By Gene Veith

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As controversies roil over police shootings, such as that of Stephon Clark in Sacramento (reportedly shot 8 times in the back), we should remember to honor the vast majority of officers who love and serve their neighbors by putting their lives on the line to protect us. A good example of a Christian police officer carrying out his dangerous vocation is Arnaud Beltrame.

On March 23, a terrorist loyal to ISIS attacked a supermarket in southern France, killing two and wounding many others. He took hostages.

Beltrame, a devoutly Christian gendarme, offered to exchange places with one of the hostages, a woman. The terrorist agreed. After a few hours, the terrorist shot Beltrame in the neck. Other officers then killed the terrorist, but Beltrame died the next day.

You can read all about it in this account by Archbishop Charles Chaput, A Lesson for Holy Week From the Witness of Arnaud Beltrame. Here is how the story concludes:

Arnaud Beltrame was a thoroughly human being like the rest of us. He had, by some accounts, dabbled in freemasonry before his religious conversion. He was imperfect and not a martyr, at least not in any way we usually mean the word. He was an ordinary civil servant doing his everyday job on a day that turned out to be anything but ordinary. He didn’t need to offer himself as a hostage. He could have done otherwise. He didn’t need to do anything risky; he was a man in love getting ready for a wedding, and there were other police officers on the scene.

But if “martyr” means witness (and it does), he certainly did offer an example — a witness — of a life lived for others. He was a man who deliberately shaped and disciplined his own life until it became a habit, a reflex, to place the well-being of others before his own. He was also a man with the common sense and substance of soul to ask what his life meant, to listen for an answer, and to find that meaning in his Catholic faith.

This week is Holy Week, and the original Hebrew meaning of that word “holy” is other than. God’s ways are not human ways. They are other than ours; higher and better, more powerful, moving and redemptive than our own.

It isn’t logical, it isn’t “normal,” for anyone to place his or her life in harm’s way for a friend, much less for a complete stranger, as Arnaud Beltrame did. Only a special kind of love can make a person do something so unreasonably beautiful. This why John 15:13 says that no greater love exists than laying down one’s life for the sake of another. It’s a love so great that on a Friday 2,000 years ago, it turned the world on its head and — with divine irony — defeated death through an instrument of torture called the cross.

No greater love exists than the love God bears for each of us. That’s the meaning of these holy days. So may God give all of us the blessing of a Holy Thursday, a profoundly Good Friday, and the joy of new life in the Resurrection this Easter.

As the word of God reminds us: Love is as strong as — no; even stronger than — death.

Holy Communion and Vocation

Last updated on: March 28, 2018 at 11:14 pm By Gene Veith

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Today, on Maundy Thursday, we commemorate Christ’s gift of Holy Communion, in which He gives in an ongoing way His body and blood for us in bread and wine. Peter Leithart at Christianity Today connects the Lord’s Supper to vocation, though he doesn’t use that term:

Keeping our eyes fixed on the surface helps us see how the Supper contributes to a Christian understanding of culture. Bread and wine are, after all, cultural products. The Old Testament sacrificial system testifies to the link between cult and culture. Ancient Israelites never sacrificed raw materials. They brought roasted grain, flour, or bread, not raw grain; they didn’t offer newborn lambs or goats, but animals nurtured for at least a year. They didn’t pick up the materials for sacrifice from the neighborhood grocer. A shepherd brought a goat he had midwifed, fed, protected, led. A farmer planted and harvested grain and turned it into flour or bread suitable for the Lord’s table. God didn’t ask for his talent back; he wanted Israel to multiply talents. Israel’s tokens of liturgical exchange represented their labor. So do ours.

Given their liturgical preeminence in the church, bread and wine are representative cultural products that exemplify the telos of our labor. Work always transforms raw nature. Some transformations improve; some degrade. Bread is an elevation and glorification of grain. We remake the earth when we plow, cut grain from the stalk, pound grain into flour, knead dough, and fire up the oven to bake a loaf. To turn earth and seed into bread, we need to become like cherubim who wield sword and fire. Wine is a glorification of grapes, requiring analogous skills.

Fruits of earth and work of human hands, Eucharistic bread and wine are destined for shared festivity. Personal profit is good, but we don’t thrive if we eat and drink alone. Everything we make is a loaf, formed to be broken, distributed, shared. We work to meet practical needs but not only that. We build for beauty, cook for taste, shape stone, and smear paint to give visual pleasure. The Eucharist reminds us that we transform creation in order to make a delightful world more delightful.

Of course, this delight has a transcendent dimension. We eat and drink the products of our labor in the presence of God. The Father accepts us and our works in Christ, and the works of our hands, used in accord with God’s Word, become, by the Spirit, means of communion with Jesus. We discover that our works are ultimately his gifts to us, for which we offer thanks. As Schmemann emphasized, the Eucharist isn’t a strange exception to the normal pattern of work and culture. It unveils the deep truth of culture, that everything is a gift from our Father’s hand, a token of his love by which we enjoy continuous communion.

To bring vocation explicitly into it, the bread of Communion is more of the “daily bread” that God provides to us through the vocations of farmers, bakers, shopkeepers, etc., etc.*

In the Communion wafer, someone grew the wheat that someone ground into flour that someone baked into bread, with everyone in the division of labor and chain of production a “mask of God” who works through them to create this wafer. With daily bread, God feeds us physically. And with this particular daily bread, God feeds us spiritually, as Christ’s body is joined to this vocationally-produced object. This happens by Christ working through the vocation of the pastor, who consecrates the bread by the power of God’s Word.

So the human and the divine come together in the Sacrament in multiple ways. Here God gives us our bread, which He does every day, but in this sacred meal He also gives us His Son, the Bread of Life. He gives both by working through human beings, from the farmer to the pastor.

Leithart is emphasizing our work, which we offer to God. This is part of vocation, though strictly speaking we obey God by offering our work to our neighbors. But God is active even in our “secular” labors. He is present in the Sacrament but He is also present, though in a different way, in our secular callings.

How does wine fit into this?

*Keep in mind too, in the words of the Catechism, that “Daily bread includes everything that has to do with the support and needs of the body, such as food, drink, clothing, shoes, house, home, land, animals, money, goods, a devout husband or wife, devout children, devout workers, devout and faithful rulers, good government, good weather, peace, health, self-control, good reputation, good friends, faithful neighbors, and the like” (Lord’s Prayer, 4th Article).

Photo by John Snyder – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30706095

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