New Light Through Old Windows:

The Labor Church Yesterday and Today

reprinted from RELIGIOUS SOCIALISM • FALL 2003 p. 11-13

by JESSE LEAMON

An ancient motto of the Benedictine order states, Orare est labore, laborare est orare (To work is to pray, to pray is to work) . The first paid employment I put my hand to was bussing tables at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant. Somewhere between the castaway string potatoes, fried clams, and coleslaw I found God. If you don’t think a person can find God in food then think for a moment about any potluck you ever attended — the food, the labor and the Lord were a triumvirate. When the church gathers for a meal, the feasting is the fulfillment, but it is labor that made the meal. Someone planted the food, tended the food, inspected the food, picked the food, hauled the food, purchased the food, prepared the food, and cleaned away the remains when the meal was finished. In one church meal we have the AFL-CIO joined with the Spirit, the Ag-industry, the farm laborers, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the longshoremen, the longshorewomen, the Teamsters, the sanitation workers. 

The Indianapolis Labor Church (ILC) literally grew from anti-Second Iraq War protests in Indianapolis. We have close ties with the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center and worship at the local AFSCME building, and our members include members of Veterans for Peace, Jobs with Justice, and various left political groups. ILC works from the ethic "an injury to one is an injury to all" and finds inspiration in the history of socialism, including the great socialist thinker Jesus of Nazareth. 

We worship in a pastoral, not silent, Quaker tradition. The Midwestern Wesleyan Quaker services include two hymns, a three-point sermon, a period of "open worship" where anyone can speak, and a poem at the end.  

For music we have to rely on a boom box and hymnals donated by another congregation. Hymns are traditional Christian with occasional Billy Bragg and Anne Feeney interludes.  My daughter’s oboe sheet-music stand was recently replaced by a home-made wooden pulpit. My wife is doing the children’s story and we ’re passing a can for an offering plate, or better yet, maybe we’ll start using a Kucinich 2004 baseball cap for subtle candidate endorsement that flies under the Federal 501(c) (3) tax-exempt radar!

We are trying to keep it simple. I don ’t want to scare off the people who are strongly resistant (and in many cases rightly so)  to Christianity. That is the hardest part of our beginning, because for some people the Labor Church is too religious and for others it isn’t religious enough. We ’re very much on the cusp between the sacred and the secular. 

One key difference between the ILC and other "faith/labor coalitions" is that we ’re trying to actually have a "labor church" instead of a "labor and church coalition." The "labor and church coalitions" do good work, , but too often the commitment begins and ends with a Labor Day sermon on "Jesus the Carpenter." We need that, , but we can’t build up the house of labor by preaching a Jesus-the-Carpenter sermon once a Labor Day. 

A great benefit of faith/labor coalitions is bringing in churches for leverage to assist a union drive. Workers at Brylane (the New York based catalog firm) won a union drive with this tactic in Indianapolis. They just skipped the election and went straight for community pressure and card check. They got the recognition. How can you have a "fair election" for a union after the company has terrorized the voters? Can you get a free and fair election after a dictator has terrorized the public? After Florida, there shouldn’t be any illusions about the use of intimidation at the ballot box. The right wing does it every day of the year in union drives. Why not national campaigns? 

ILC hopes to minister to union families 365 days a year and to develop pro-labor congregations from the roots up, so people can grow up with moral principles that are pro-solidarity. A "campaign" is a poor way to discover organized labor. What does the campaign say to someone who has no background in labor? It conveys the message that "Unions are hostile, and ask you to put your family income on the line for what?" People need to discover the left in a softer environment, and in an environment where they can hear a message of progress continuously. 

Our mission is to create a culture of solidarity. The problem with labor is not that it doesn’t run good campaigns. The problem with labor is that campaigns are not enough. We have to conquer the culture. It ’s a culture war, and if the left loses the churches, the schools, the institutions, then it has lost.  Period. 

We have to find ways to institutionalize our gains. We protested the war a lot in Indianapolis, but what happens when the protest is over? We vented our spleens, blew off a lot of hot air, and have the used picket signs to show for it. Protests aren’t institutions. Protests aren’t cultures. 

Somewhere in my theological studies I read that Jesus died to "take away the curse." I wondered, ,"If Jesus died to abolish the curse, why is the curse so much with us?" Didn’t Jesus venerate the lilies of the field that do not toil? Then I read about John Trevor and the nineteenth-century British Labor Churches. 

Labor Church Movement

The labor church movement grew out of the social chaos of the European Industrial revolution, springing from the same soil that gave rise to the Salvation Army. John Trevor, a former Unitarian minister, founded the Labor Church with the first service in Manchester in October 1891. A movement began to grow as labor churches were established in many industrial cities including Leeds, London, and Birmingham. 

Inspired by Christian socialism, Trevor and his followers believed that the labor movement was instrumental in achieving God’s Kingdom on earth. Many British religious leaders advocated socialism in the cause of labor (Editor ’s note:  See chapter eight of John Cort’s Christian Socialism for an expanded discussion of Christian socialism in England) . When the Independent Labor Party was formed in Bradford, Trevor organized a church service for the event. It was estimated that more than 5, 000 people attended the service. Trevor began publishing a monthly magazine, The Labor Prophet , in January 1892. It was replaced by the quarterly Labor Church Record . The motto "God is our King" later changed to "Let labor be the basis of civil society." After Trevor fell ill, , the Labor Church union dissolved, some became "socialist churches," some died, , and still others were reorganized. 

As I learned about the Labor Church movement, it occurred to me that Trevor’s notion of the "Kingdom of God" was much broader than contemporary Christianity’s in either its Protestant or Catholic variants. A thorough examination of Trevor’s Labor Church theology has never been written, but we might call it "Edenic Restoration Theology." Unlike Protestants who believed in returning to the Early Church as a model of restoration, or the Catholic Counter-Reformers who believed in purifying but preserving the existing order, Trevor believed that a return to Christ was an experiential state in which the wall between the sacred and the secular became translucent. The Kingdom of God for Trevor was a spiritual state in which divinity is seen in the fields and the work of the shepherds, where God is experienced in the material world and the material world experienced in God, where eternity and the temporal grain of time are one. 

But "experiential religion" in the Labor Church sense is closer to the Quaker or Unitarian than the Pentecostal or Charismatic understanding because Trevor saw the Kingdom of God in social terms, not individualistic ones. He was part of the "socialist Sunday school" movement, and the idea of lopping off the "socio-political" from Christian concern and endeavor would have been to him entirely preposterous. If Christ had no politics, then he was no prophet, because the prophets of the Hebrew scriptures were very critical about the social issues of their day, including condemning the ruling classes who defended the existing social order of economic exploitation and oppression. 

When Christ said ,"Come unto me you who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest, for my burden is light" he was speaking as one un-cursed, as one who had found God in and through the practical economic and political struggles of daily life. The struggle for Christian socialism is the struggle to abolish the curse not just "legally and figuratively" but "literally and actually." It is the struggle to re-create that Edenic quality in everyday life where working in the garden was the joy of living not the misery of existence. It is the struggle to abolish the curse not just for me and mine, but for you and yours. 

In the Garden

As part of my spiritual journey I have become a gardener. I recently planted 60 boxwoods in my back yard in the form of an angel (really more of a butterfly) . I call my garden "Three Angels Garden" after my three children and the verse from the Book of Revelation that speaks of the three angels’ message announcing the day of God ’s judgment. God ’s judgment falls upon the race because of its economic and social injustice, but is redeemed when our hands and hearts become the channels of divine benevolence. I sit often in the morning drinking my coffee and watching the cardinals, goldfinches and humming birds (squirrels, cardinals, wrens, and woodpeckers in winter)  outside my window in their search for food, their only time clock the limitations of finitude that come with the rising and falling of the day. All the work that I put into creating my garden I can now enjoy as the just and right fruit of my labor. 

The window through which I watch the birds outside is an old one, but the light that shines through the window in the morning is new.  How very much like my old window are the social institutions within which we move and have our daily being.  They grow old and stained by the historical and dated choices and decisions of humanity, so much that the Light of God shines but dimly. Call it reformation, call it restoration, call it revolution, but sometimes in the course of events we must wipe away the grime if we are to see the new light through the old window. This is a generational choice that none can avoid;  it is part of the dialectic of existence, which is part and parcel of all faith, whether sacred or secular. 

What Trevor accomplished in the Labor Church was the merger of the scientific and utopian strands of socialism into something catalytic. He wiped away the grime of time and let some new light through the communitarian portal. Wherever socialism has advanced it has done so with just this combination of planning and passion, form and vibrancy, light and substance. 

We can no more divorce the utopian from the scientific than we can divorce the left brain from the right, the female from the male. All gardens involve the aesthetic of planning and passion, of science and utopia, of flower and iron. 

Fertile Ground in Indiana

Indiana is an ideal place to renew the Labor Church experiment because it has a long history of "utopian religion," from Robert Owen’s Harmonist experiment in New Harmony to the Mennonite communities in New Berne. As the inspiring statesman Victor Gollancz declared, "There is really only one method of re-educating people, namely the example that one lives oneself." We can preach socialism but how much better to live it, as those early Hoosiers tried so to do. 

The Polish Marxist Leszek Kolakowski said that both the priest and the jester are needed by balanced kings, just as every castle is surrounded by a wild field. If we are ever to survive as a species we need to imbibe the lessons of both the priest and the jester, the castle and the field. Authentic humanism depends on our ability to do just this. We are a long way from the Garden of Eden, from St. Benedict’s wish that our labor be a prayer instead of a curse. But there is nothing in the nature of things that prevents our work being a blessing except the inauthentic, exploitative, and suicidal lifestyle that we create for ourselves. A better world is possible. This is the birthing and beckoning light of God ’s Spirit shining through the darkening pane of our common and all too violent life together.