It's the Economy, Stupid.

What makes Millennial Christians take up the fight for social justice?

My generation’s concern about social justice is so novel and surprising to many that it has drawn criticism from both conservative evangelicals and concerned atheists alike. Those are two groups you don’t expect to find on the same side of a social issue. So it was remarkable to me when a Southern Baptist culture critic who wrote a lot about the dangers of the New Atheists a decade ago invited an avowed atheist onto his podcast to discuss the dangers of the growing army of social justice warriors. 

Ain’t that something? 

Who objects to this interest in social justice, though, is not nearly so interesting to me as attempts to explain why. As far as I can tell, critics both Christian and otherwise tend to explain the triumph of “wokism” primarily in doctrinal or ideological terms. It is the result of rejecting Christian orthodoxy or classical liberalism in favor of expressive individualism or cultural Marxism or the like. Somehow an entire generation was brainwashed into ideological compromise through public education, social media, whatever is the contemporary equivalent of MTV. 

Appeals to ideological shift as the primary cause are unconvincing to me. They also frequently devolve into endless cycles of accusation and deflection: “I’m not compromised—you’re compromised!” So I’m open to (and eager for) alternative explanations. Here’s one I’m test-driving at the moment: What if Millennials’ embrace of social justice was facilitated by a previous, more fundamental shift? What if the fundamental issue, to quote James Carville, is “the economy, stupid!” 

Social Sources of Religious Conviction

I’ve been slowly working my way through Richard Niebuhr’s 1929 book The Social Sources of Denominationalism, a fascinating work of sociology. Niebuhr’s goal is to demonstrate how social forces—race, class, economics, nationality, geography—influence how people sort into one Christian tradition or another. In Niebuhr’s view, our social situation shapes our faith and practice. “Religious energies are dammed up,” he writes, “confined to narrow channels, split into parallel streams, by the non-religious distinctions and classifications of Christians” (27). An individual’s Christian faith may be completely authentic and sincere. But there’s no escaping the fact that Christians, like all people, are divided by class, race, geography, and nationality and that these divisions influence (determine?) the nature of their religious belief and behavior. We are discipled, Neibuhr argues, in churches that reinforce the values of our social situation. 

For the purposes of this conversation, we’ll focus on two groups: the middle class and the “disinherited.”

The way Niebuhr describes the middle class and its social concerns strikes me as surprisingly current. According to Niebuhr, “The individuals of no other group … are so highly self-conscious” as the middle class (81). This self-consciousness and the “resultant love of personal liberties,” are the result of higher-than-average levels of education, financial security and physical comfort. Unlike lower-class workers whose jobs consist largely of taking orders, middle-class employment “places responsibility for success or failure almost entirely upon their shoulders.” That means the middle-class employee is largely the master of his own fate. That’s a lot of pressure. 

Pressure at work adds to pressure at home. Niebuhr notes that “a very high regard attaches to the ethics of family life” among middle-class people, as well. The family is the main outlet for a successful man’s social life. His kids have to be prepared for the challenges of the workforce. As a result, middle-class people face enormous pressure to succeed at work and, at home, expend a lot of energy raising their children to be successful citizens. 

Neibuhr believes these social and economic pressures result in a middle-class Christian faith that prioritizes psychological relief and the promise of eternal rest. People who largely control their own destinies adopt a faith that “is likely to be rather intensely personal in character” and in which the “problem of personal salvation is far more urgent ... than is the problem of social redemption” (82). 

And this brings us back to our thesis. When it comes to social justice, Niebuhr claims, middle-class Christians are “capable of producing a real heroism of self-discipline” but “incapable of developing a hopeful passion for social justice” (87). The reason is simple: they are prone to believe, based on their own experience, “that prosperity is the reward of virtue and poverty the affliction of sin” (96). I mastered my fate. You master yours. 

Middle-class sensibilities and religion contrast with those of the working-class. Working-class people are shaped by social forces, too, only different ones. They have less agency to change their own fate—they work for the middle-class!—so they are prone to attribute their professional failures or social struggles to forces outside of their control—on the management, on the government, on “the system.” They imbibe “the attitude of resignation” with their mother’s milk, Niebuhr claims, because they recognize from an early age that their opportunities are limited by the class above them.

Because daily life is difficult and options are limited, the working class embodies “more than elsewhere, appreciation of the religious worth of solidarity and equality, of sympathy and mutual aid, of rigorous honesty in matters of debt” (31). Likewise the salvation sought by “the churches of the disinherited” is not simply individual, future-oriented salvation (i.e., going to heaven when I die) but liberation from oppressive forces in the present. Heaven is great, but we’re hungry now. 

Look again at the working-class characteristics Niebuhr points out: solidarity, equality, sympathy, mutual aid. Those are words you might hear from so-called social justice warriors today. We might add others: advocacy, allyship, and equity. A good many Christian millennials would insist that those characteristics are in fact gospel imperatives. They are what you should be and embody if you are faithfully following Jesus.

For the sake of conversation, let’s say Niebuhr is right and our social circumstances shape our religious convictions. What changes in social circumstances might make a generation of otherwise conservative and middle-class Christian young people suddenly concerned about social justice?

A Liminal Generation

On the one hand, Millennials meet many of the social criteria of the middle class. We have higher rates of college education than previous generations. Younger Millennials are social media natives, which surely contributes to greater self-consciousness and more deliberate identity formation. 

On the other hand, many Millennials never managed to experience the middle class in the economic sense. Many of us have never reached the middle-class milestones our parents had reached by the time they were our age now.

When it comes to work, for example, Millennials are the largest generation in the US workforce, trying, like generations before them, to author our own destiny. Unfortunately “today’s real average wage...has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago.” In the same span of time, housing prices have soared. In Phoenix, where I live now, home prices rose more than 20% in the last year, making home ownership less likely for more people. 

Surely it’s no wonder, then, slightly more than half of adults ages 18-34 live with their parents (the youngest of those are not Millennials).  A majority of Millennials are unmarried and the ones who are married tied the knot later in life than previous generations. Millennials more likely to have student debt. By all measurable standards, Millennials are worse off than our parents economically.

In terms of education, technology use, and general self-consciousness, then, Millennials are solidly middle class. In economic terms a significant portion of Millennials have struggled for their whole adulthood to claw their way into the middle class. That may make us a “liminal generation” not quite middle class, certainly not disinherited. But disillusioned that our investment in the market didn’t yield the same benefits that it has for previous generations.  

Remember, the question we’re aiming to answer is, What could make middle-class Christian young people start thinking and talking like the working-class poor?

Robert Bellah, the sociologist who coined the term “expressive individualism,” warned in the late 1990s of another, potentially more dangerous, form of individualism. “Economic individualism” is promoted by “the market,” in which “the only standard is money, and the only thing more sacred than money is more money.” In full bloom economic individualism destroys “solidarity, a sense of being members of the same body.” Bellah foresaw a day in which “Under the ideological facade of individual freedom, the reality will be, is already becoming, a society in which wealth, ever more concentrated in a small minority, is the only access to real freedom. ‘The market’ will determine the lives of everyone else. 

I wonder if my generation’s stunted, interrupted entry into the middle class inclines us to see the world the way Bellah envisioned it—a world in which even those of us with good jobs and growing families feel limited in our opportunities, controlled in some sense my a market stacked against us. Are circumstances like a difficult job market, an out-of-control housing market (popped in one decade and over-inflated in the next), and the job disruption of a global pandemic, enough to give middle-class adjacent Millennials some working-class sensibilities?

New Questions & New Answers

At the very least, I suspect these circumstances have prompted a generation to ask questions we hadn’t asked before. And I suspect our experiences have made us open to answers we wouldn’t have considered plausible before. 

This is not to say, of course, that economics are the only factor. I suspect (though I can’t prove it) that my generation’s increased sensitivity about racial matters also has something to do with the higher visibility of inter-racial adoption among younger evangelicals. Growing up around out-and-proud LGBTQ+ friends is certainly a factor, too. Those relationships are important social sources, too. 

In any case, I rarely hear evangelicals talking about economics as a driving force for belief. We are quick to see financial interest as a motivation for behavior. We talk a lot about “personal finance.” But we are slow to admit the possibility that changing economics can alter our perceptions of reality and a changed perception of reality can modulate our faith. 

This essay may not have convinced you. That’s fine. I’m not entirely convinced myself. But here’s the question I’m asking: what if Niebuhr is right? It might help to explain why so many are disaffected with the faith of their youth. Maybe that faith was tuned to resonate with middle class values and our failure to successfully enter the middle class has us looking for a song in a different key. And if that’s true, continual harping about ideological compromise is not likely to bring us back. For my money, then, it’s worth asking what social conditions “dam up” our religious sensibilities to run in a certain direction—and to ask, furthermore, if that’s a direction we really want to go.