IF JESUS HAD been in Bessemer, Ala., he would have stood with the workers who tried and failed to organize the Amazon distribution center there.
That was the firm conviction of Joshua Brewer, a lead organizer for the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU). “It’s everything we’re told to do—to look out for our brothers and sisters in need, that a [person] should be paid for an honest day’s work an honest day’s wage, that we need to look out for the immigrant, that we need to look out for the widows and the children and the orphans, and we need to look out for each other,” Brewer told the Alabama Political Reporter in the heat of the campaign.
Brewer was hardly alone in his belief that the Bible offered clear sanction for RWDSU’s fight. On-the-ground reporting underscored that organizing meetings began with prayer, and that an instinctively pro-labor faith steeled many of those who participated in the campaign. In longer historical perspective, none of this is surprising. From the beginning, many workers who powered the labor movement did so with the confidence that Jesus, a lowly carpenter, had their backs.
Christian institutions have not been so sure. The churches were unrelentingly hostile to unions until, in the early 20th century, working-class believers broke through in a tenacious, decades-long fight to change the clergy’s mind. Thanks to their efforts many major denominations have pro-labor statements. But social teachings do little good if they just accumulate dust on shelves at denominational headquarters. From time to time, churches need to be held accountable to the truths they have already professed.
If what happened at Bessemer is any indication, the time for such accountability is now. What was missing in all the media coverage of the unionization drive were the names of local clergy and churches standing in solidarity. Several nationally recognized experts on labor organizing cited the absence of overt support from churches in Bessemer as a key factor in the campaign’s failure.
Absence of overt church support is not unique to Bessemer. When was the last time your pastor or priest preached about the importance of unions or, better yet, in a throwback to an older tradition, turned the pulpit over for a day to a unionized worker? How many churches in your community are routinely active in labor struggles? Unions have long dealt with stiff headwinds in the legal and policy realms. Anemic support from local churches is yet another major drag on the movement’s momentum.
But there are reasons to wonder if congregations’ reluctance to join the fight hurts them too—and not just in a moral sense. We live during a time of historic drops in rates of church membership and religious affiliation. The declines are most pronounced among millennials and Generation Z. These are the very same people who are more likely to be skeptical of free markets and even capitalism itself.
Church leaders who look anxiously toward the future might consider deepening their institutional commitment to the contemporary fight for living wages and just working conditions. It would be a stirring witness. But it might also get the attention of many who have not darkened a church door in recent years.
What happened in Bessemer is not the end of the story. There is still power in a union—power for church and labor alike.
Heath W. Carter, author of Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago, is an associate professor of American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary.
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