These are the worst of times for organized labor, which during the post-World War II decades – the heyday of middle class expansion – represented more than a third of all private sector workers. Today, that number is less than 7%. This precipitous decline has, not coincidentally, been accompanied by a historic surge in economic inequality, which has some leading economists calling ours a new Gilded Age; and the disparities between the richest and the rest continue to become only more and more staggering with each passing year. In 2014, Wall Street bonuses amounted to more than double the combined total income of all American minimum wage earners.
Despite such jaw-dropping figures, you’ll be hard-pressed to find prominent evangelicals who are fighting to make inequality an election-year issue, let alone willing to join beleaguered union organizers in the trenches. There are any number of historical explanations for this, none of which are necessarily connected to the gospel. In fact, in the late nineteenth century, ordinary believers helped to launch the trade union movement precisely because the Bible told them so – a reading, notably, that was no more popular among the church leaders of their day than it is among our own.
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