The first Monday in September is Labor Day in the United States and Canada, commemorating the contributions of organized labor to improved working conditions. The common story of Labor Day is typically secular: To fight for higher wages, safer workplaces, and shorter workweeks, workers formed unions to bargain collectively or, if necessary, to strike. There’s nothing inaccurate about that, but the history of organized labor, both domestically and abroad, includes the history of Christian labor organizations and Christian support for organized labor, offering a more nuanced picture of labor unions and cooperatives than the usual, often adversarial, and Marxist story.
The first Christian socialist, F.D. Maurice, supported entrepreneurial worker cooperatives but opposed revolution and class warfare. At a time when, in Paris in 1848, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon proclaimed, “Property is theft!” and revolutionaries burned the throne of Louis-Philippe, Maurice insisted to his hearers in London that “property is holy.” It is holy because “beneath all distinctions of property and of rank lie the obligations of a common Creation, Redemption, Humanity.” There could not be a sharper contrast to Karl Marx’s historical dialectic of class conflict.
The Christian worker cooperatives struggled and ultimately failed to make a profit, owing to a mixture of mismanagement and legal obstacles that prevented them from obtaining limited liability status. But Maurice’s Christian socialism had as its goal awakening the consciences of clergy, aristocrats, and employers while evangelizing and educating workers. He continued that work as the first president of the Working Men’s College (the WM College today), founded in 1854 as the first institution of liberal higher education for working-class people in Europe.
When the Industrial Revolution and harsh factory working conditions spread to central Europe, Christians there also uniquely supported organized labor. In Denmark, Hans Lassen Martensen spoke out for organized labor. Martensen was Lutheran bishop of Zealand and one of the most renowned Christian ethicists of the 19th century, but today he is most famous (if known at all) for being the teacher and polemical target of philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. He also considered himself a socialist of sorts, but like Maurice he rejected as “Utopian chimeras” radical socialist views that would upend the social order.
Unlike Maurice, however, Martensen did advocate for political action, claiming that “we do not regard as Utopian the demand that legislation should afford protection to artisans, and to workmen in general.” But even in this political advocacy, he argued that it should come from the bottom up through free association: “By this we do not mean that the State must draw up certain rules and regulations for them, but, on the contrary, that the workmen should be fully at liberty to devise such regulations among themselves, and that the State should afterwards sanction them.”
In the Netherlands, Abraham Kuyper would build on both Maurice and Martensen in his advocacy for the disenfranchised “little folk” whose traditional Calvinism had so inspired his own spiritual awakening. He fought to expand the right to vote to heads of working class households, and he worked closely—though sometimes uneasily—with Patrimonium, the Dutch Protestant workers association, which he contrasted to secular socialist groups. In “The Social Question and the Christian Religion,” for example, a speech given in 1891, Kuyper argued that “the lower rural classes, even though their condition is often more wretched than that of the lower urban classes, actually live happier lives and complain far less than their counterparts in the city. One can also discern this in Patrimonium. … How vastly different its tone from that heard in socialistic groups!” Patrimonium included religious education and even welcomed employers to join and contribute to workers’ mutual support. It cosponsored the First Christian Social Congress in the Netherlands, at which Kuyper gave the above-quoted speech. In his politics, Kuyper also advocated for establishing a “chamber of labor” to complement chambers of commerce, where workers could advocate for their interests and draw up their own “labor code.”
Also in 1891, Pope Leo XIII inaugurated the modern papal social encyclical tradition with Rerum Novarum, subtitled “On Capital and Labor.” Like Maurice, the pope strongly affirmed the importance of private property, rejecting radical schemes of redistribution. He did, however, end his letter with a nod to Catholic labor: “At the time being, the condition of the working classes is the pressing question of the hour, and nothing can be of higher interest to all classes of the State than that it should be rightly and reasonably settled. But it will be easy for Christian working men to solve it aright if they will form associations, choose wise guides, and follow on the path which with so much advantage to themselves and the common weal was trodden by their fathers before them.”
Like Kuyper and Martensen, Leo believed that social harmony was possible through free and virtuous association: “If the sense of what is just and rightful be not deliberately stifled, their fellow citizens are sure to be won over to a kindly feeling towards men whom they see to be in earnest as regards their work and who prefer so unmistakably right dealing to mere lucre, and the sacredness of duty to every other consideration.”
In the United States at this time, many of the “Social Gospel” movement also supported organized labor. Once again, Christians advocated for free labor associations that would work for social harmony rather than social conflict. One Congregationalist pastor, Washington Gladden, even provocatively asked, “Is It Peace or War?” in an 1886 speech advocating for improved class relations. He noted that some professions, such as clergy, doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants, and artists, had genuinely benefited from industrial capitalism but that others lagged behind and labored under harsh conditions for low pay. Wary of revolutionary panaceas, Gladden warned, “Surely the world is not enriched by warfare; it is impoverished.” Later, he reflected, “I knew these employers, many of them, to be men of humane and generous purposes; I knew many of the workingmen, and was in entire sympathy with their condition; and I witnessed with sorrow and alarm the widening of the breach between these classes.”
For offering such a balanced perspective, Christian advocates for organized labor were often maligned by secular socialists as covert supporters of the status quo, and sometimes they still are today, such as in the case of the Christian Labor Association of Canada. Yet no fair reading of their works could yield that conclusion. They rejected class warfare, affirmed private property, and tended to have more positive views of the market economy. But given the genuinely harsh working conditions of the time, one will not find any of them cheering for free markets, and sometimes they could be economically confused. Nevertheless, the solutions they proposed show another side to the story of organized labor, a freer and more virtuous side, and certainly a significant one, given how many workers were also faithful Christians in the 19th century.
So this Labor Day, we should remember the role of organized labor in advocating for improved working conditions. So, too, we should also remember the variety of organized labor, a variety largely lost with the rise of large and powerful labor associations that advocated for more state privilege and exclusion in the 20th century, leading to the breakdown of union membership and support by the 21st. Among that variety were Christian supporters of organized labor, who no doubt would have welcomed Labor Day as an expansion of the Sabbath principle and recommended that, in addition to cookouts and yard games, we all might benefit from making this holiday a “holy day,” thanking God for the spiritual rest he gives in Christ to all those “who labor and are heavy laden” (Matt. 11:28).
