The Christian advertiser and laborer

There are so many other fields that could be treated. What is a Christian mathematician? Not one who is "moral" or who uses problems like, "How many nuns would there be if each...", but one who knows what mathematics is, what it is doing, and who helps it be that way. What is a Christian accountant? Not one who doesn't use bookkeeping to cheat (not that the Christian would do this), but one who sees what the numbers are doing and helps the books be what they are, and the firm to do what it does with their help. What this would be in practice, I leave to others. Neither the Christian mathematician nor the Christian accountant would do anything very different from his non-Christian counterpart; but his different attitude toward what he is doing would make his own life more enjoyable and make the work itself glow with hope and love, somehow.

But let me close this list of jobs by saying something about Christian advertising, and Christian labor, because I think they are both misunderstood. Advertising, first of all, because it seems exactly the opposite of what Christianity as a kind of morality is supposed to be all about: it seems to be pandering to greed and selfishness, using falsehoods and downright lies to persuade those who are not greedy to become as greedy as possible. It is capitalism at its worst.

But what does advertising do, really? It tells people about what they can be like if they have the product or service that the advertiser is attempting to sell. Is it a lie to say that if you own a Mazda RX-7 sports car, you can zip around the country in comfort and with panache? Because you can. It is not simply movement from place to place, any more than a suit is just something to cover your body. It makes an esthetic statement about you and your mobility; and esthetically it says something about your taste in movement.

This is the truth, not a falsehood. The value of the car is what it can enable the person who has it to do that he otherwise couldn't do; its value is something beyond the metal and the machinery. There is nothing wrong with pointing this out to people who would be interested in buying a car: pointing out to them that when you buy a car, you are not simply concerned with what it can do, but what you can do with it, and so what you can be with it.

Granted, much of advertising is simple silliness, and much of it is pretty sordid: the pornography of acquisitiveness. But this is not to say that it has to be this way. Advertising does perform a legitimate function: it lets people know that goals they never thought of are open to them, and shows them how to get there. Is there any reason why this attitude could not pervade advertising, and we have to be bombarded with stupidities?

Once again, the Christian would be moral. I would find it difficult for myself as a Christian to advertise the how much better Kool cigarettes are than other brands, if smoking them is an invitation to lung cancer; there are certain accounts, I would suspect, that a Christian would not take on. And there are certain things that a Christian would not do: mislead people into thinking that things are not what they are, and so on.

But this is not to say that things are always what they seem. Not too many are aware of the spiritual value of the material; and the Christian layman, who has some expertise in this area, can show this value to the public in a way that the non-Christian cannot; and the Christian would not be plagued by the vague uneasiness of the non-Christian who does the same thing, because the non-Christian thinks that there's something underhanded in what he's doing (portraying Pepsi as roistering innocent enjoyment, like splashing in a pool or surfing), while the Christian realizes that the metaphor is valid. Exaggerations are not lies; even Jesus used exaggerations, and wild ones ("If your eye is an obstacle to you, pluck it out and throw it away!"); and no one takes the exaggerations of advertising literally.

So yes, there is such a thing as Christian advertising; and like everything else Christian, it involves mainly shifting your focus on what you are doing, and the result is a redemption and transformation of what is fallen.

As to labor, so much has been said about the "dignity of labor" that something needs to be said to point out that labor's dignity has been emphasized precisely because in itself it is not dignified--and who knows this better than the laborer? The "dignity" of collecting garbage is such that if we could figure out a way for machines to do the whole job, we would be criminal to subject human beings to such a rotten task a minute longer than we had to. The "dignity" of wielding a jackhammer or lugging a hod of cement up a ramp is a farce. There is nothing human about such a task, in itself: nothing that speaks of the embodied spirit.

No, the "dignity of labor" is not in the labor, but in the laborer, who is willing to degrade himself to the level of a packhorse because the job has to be done and in the state of society we are in, some human being has to do it. In this way, a subhuman task becomes an act of charity, and the person who freely undertakes it (when he could be doing something more fulfilling) is performing a noble sacrifice indeed. He has the dignity of the housewife, who gives up her fulfillment for the sake of the comfort and freedom of her husband and her children. In this sense, the feminists are right; a woman who is forced into this menial position is a slave. But a woman who does it because it must somehow be done and why should she not be the one is a heroine.

What the Christian attitude should let us do is to cut through pious platitudes and see things as they are. There is nothing bad about spending your life digging in the dirt, or changing diaper pails; but neither of these tasks are uplifting in themselves, but only in their effect on others. In an age of self-fulfillment, it is not surprising that nurses are in short supply. Who could pay anyone enough to make that kind of task fulfilling? In these cases, the "dignity" is not in what is done, but in the fact that there are people willing to submit to it, because someone has to do it.

And as technology advances, let us hope that it advances into these areas where human beings are acting like machines or worse and takes over the sub-human chores and leaves humans to do human things. Granted, there are some human beings who are not capable of doing any but mechanical tasks; but machinery can help them--and surely there is now such a vast number who "cannot" because they have been stifled by having to do nothing but this sort of thing.

I think that Karl Marx had in the back of his mind when he referred to the "classless society" a world in which machinery would be so advanced that only a few people had to tend it, and it would produce such an abundance of everything that no one would need to buy and sell and scrimp and scrape for the means of a bare existence. It is not inconceivable that machinery and automation could lead, if not to that happy condition where you could walk into the factory and just take your red Mazda RX-7 and drive it off, still somewhat in that direction. The fact that Marx equated this with a classless society and his attempt to put it into practice has resulted in the unprecedented horrors of the Communist police-state should not blind the Christian to the fact that (a) much human labor now is degrading and exploitative, but (b) machinery can be used to make it less so, not more so. Communism is not the answer; and I am thoroughly convinced that that parody of Christianity called "Liberation Theology" is as far from the answer as you can get. A Christianity of acceptance of the world as it is and recognition of its potential, coupled with a willingness to help it take its hesitating steps toward what could be, and which does not push it as it toddles forward, is what will redeem our working lives. When you "right the wrongs" you sweep the room clear of the devils and leave it bare--and then in come, as Jesus said, seven devils worse than the original ones.