The Industrial Revolution changed Europe. Most importantly, it changed how we saw ourselves. Between the Middle Ages and the twentieth century, most Western Christians moved from viewing private property as a qualified necessity to a good in itself – a right to be protected by law and doctrine, even in the face of the dire poverty of others. In the present day, Christians seem on the whole to have signed an implicit social contract in which individual freedom reigns supreme. Your job is to pursue your own self-interest vigorously: you’re not expected to prioritize the well-being of others. Across all other divides, we share an impoverished vision of freedom as freedom from the needs of others.
And this carries a heavy cost. We see our lives as separate from, even opposed to, others, and so we struggle to live in community. We calculate how to spend our time, money, and energy according to what serves our interests: we live with blinders on. Without those blinders, we might see that, as Stanley Hauerwas and other thinkers have argued, the way we live runs contrary to following Christ. The politics of Jesus calls us to reject violence, wealth, and power and to seek community and serve each other, especially the poor. One movement responding to the gospel in this way is the Catholic Worker. As someone involved with the Catholic Worker, I’ve seen the fruits of this kind of discipleship. But my involvement has also brought me face-to-face with the limits of what we can achieve in the current social order.
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