It's in the Code ep 186: “Blue Collar or Bust”

Dan Miller: Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus. My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. Pleased to be with you as always, and as always, want to say thank you for listening. For those of you who take the time and join us in all the different places where we show up, we really appreciate it. Can't do it without you. And just want to say that and remind you that this series, more than anything else we do, is coming from you. And I am preparing a new series on questions I was not allowed to ask in church, or questions I wasn't supposed to ask in church, soliciting responses from you, getting some great comments and ideas from different people about the kinds of questions that got them in trouble in church, the kinds of questions that maybe made church people uncomfortable, or whatever it is. If you would like to share those with me, I'd love to hear them. danielmillerswaj@gmail.com — send them my way. If you put in the header "questions I wasn't supposed to ask" or "wasn't allowed to ask," that'll help me to spot those. But that's coming up as we kind of begin coming to the end of Josh Hawley's book, and I'm looking forward to doing that, looking forward to your insights.

Diving into today — as I just said, we are in Josh Hawley's book, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri. I didn't really like Josh Hawley before. The more I read his book, man, yeah, I really don't like him. Anyway. That's beside the point. Reading his book, looking at his book — his book on manhood, his book that tells us what it is that men are supposed to be like, and how we can cultivate masculine virtues that will save America. Pretty sure I'm not the man he has in mind, but you know, maybe I'll read the book and be converted. It's unlikely. We are in the fourth of the roles that he says men are called to play — it's a bunch of roles that men are called to play, to exercise their masculine virtues and to save America. And the fourth of those roles is that of builder. It's the title of his chapter. We started looking at it last week, and the first thing to note is he says builder, but he doesn't talk very much about building. It's going to come up again today, but that's just worth knowing.

We started talking about the chapter last week, and I spent that time just basically — it really gets under my skin when I hear anybody on the political right who claims to be defending the voice of the worker, and especially blue collar workers. That's his focus in this chapter: blue collar people and blue collar work, in a way that's actually really problematic. But I spent that episode just basically highlighting the fact that for the last 50 years, it's his political party that has eviscerated blue collar working class America, and now he and everybody else in the MAGA sphere want to somehow claim that they are the voice for those people. So we talked about that. But there's a lot more to say about this chapter. I'm not even going to get to all of it today. The more I read this chapter, the more I get frustrated, like on multiple levels.

And one of the frustrations that I have when I read this chapter in particular — I feel like every chapter in Hawley's book is like a new fresh hell. It's a new way to get frustrated and just see how the discourse on the right works. But this is one that's really been with me for decades, in a lot of ways, going all the way back to my time in the evangelical Christian world, and it's on full display here. So what I want to think about today is how Josh Hawley not only supports the economic policies that have so damaged the kind of working class Americans that he claims to speak for — at least working class men, and pardon me, he has literally nothing to say about women in this book — but how he's baptized his views on masculinity and work so they contribute to Christianity and the Bible.

And one of the questions I get about American Christianity, generally, I get this from lots of people — from students, from people who listen to the podcast, from other people — and a question I began to pose for myself when I was a young assistant pastor in a Southern Baptist church: why do American Christians assume that free market capitalism is a distinctively biblical or Christian economic model? And to be clear, I recognize there are, and always have been, American Christians who challenge the core doctrines of free market capitalism. But since early in American history, not long after the Revolutionary period, white American Christians increasingly came to the view that capitalism was, you know, at first compatible with Christianity, and later demanded by Christianity. And if somebody's sitting there and saying, well, why would that be weird? — number one, that might already tell you that you've grown up in this kind of thought world already. But if you think about it, capitalism is a system that's built entirely about greed. It's built about pursuing self-interest. It clearly creates social winners and losers. And it doesn't seem like one would have to go really far to try to articulate a Christian alternative to that. But pretty early on, white American Christianity — especially Protestants — took this on board. And certainly the vast majority of conservative Protestants in American history have held this view, maybe not in all of American history, but for over a century and a half at least. And the dyed-in-the-wool historians out there — if you want to email me and give me more of the details, you can. I've got the books and things, but I don't know that specific history of sort of like the day and time when white American Christians became capitalists. But it's been a long time.

And over the past 50-plus years or so, as those same conservative Protestants have overwhelmingly come to support the Republican Party and its economic policies, the dictates of specifically neoliberal economics, as it relates to capitalism, have become articles of faith for these Christians. Literal articles of faith — I don't use that term lightly. Those same Christians, if you've had conversations with them, you know they will defend such things as so-called small government, or tax cuts, or deregulation, or attacks on organized labor — all those kinds of things. They will defend those with almost the same ferocity as they will use to attack queer rights, or to argue against abortion access, or something like that. Like it is part and parcel with a conservative Christian identity. And this isn't the place to tell that full story of exactly why that has become such a defining feature of conservative Christianity in America. But I bring it up as a preface to the discussion today, because it is absolutely on full display in Hawley's presentation of man as builder, and in this chapter.

The reason I say this is he trots out just myth after myth that structure the way that those on the right talk about economics and workers. Like he's a caricature of himself in this chapter. Nowhere does he actually argue that Christians should support a capitalist social structure. He never says, like, here's why capitalism and Christianity are compatible, or why Christians should be capitalist. And the reason is because he doesn't need to. Because on the right — and I recognize fully I am not his intended audience for this book — among those who are, it's completely taken for granted by Christians like him that Christianity and capitalism are linked, that to be a Christian is to be a capitalist. And I suspect that if he was confronted with Christian arguments against supporting free market capitalism, he would find those arguments completely unintelligible. Or he would just accuse you of being a Marxist. That's the Cold War piece of this — the godless communists and the good Christian Americans fighting them, which means capitalism is part of this Christian ideology. So he would maybe call me a communist, he'd already call me a cultural Marxist, but I think he would just be taken aback by the notion that one would be a Christian and for that reason be critical of free market capitalism. I think that would be completely foreign to him. And I think that's something to have in front of us as we read this chapter, because it's interesting that he's going to talk about all of these things, but he's nowhere going to actually defend the idea. And again, it's because he doesn't need to — he doesn't need to convince the people who are normally going to be reading this book of that.

And I think this taken-for-grantedness — that's an awkward phrase — the fact that he takes this for granted, I think it's evident in how little effort he actually spends in this chapter to make a, quote unquote, biblical argument for the things that he says. And that will circle back. What I want to do today is look at the way that Hawley mythologizes and imagines men's work. I've said over and over that we're looking at his book because it is typical of the right in so many ways. What he says is not unique to him. It's not special, it's not a hot take on anything. It's just typical in a lot of ways. And that's completely clear in this chapter. So looking at what he has to say about work really does provide a window into the way in which so many people on the right think about work and masculinity and America.

Okay, so I want to start — I mentioned that he trots out myth after myth. He really outlines a number of right-wing dogmas about work and masculinity. I just want to note some of these. And this chapter — I said this last time — this chapter is hard to read for me. The book is not well organized. It's not well put together. This chapter feels worse than most. So I've kind of reorganized it around these themes. We'll see how this goes.

I want to highlight some of these dogmas about work. So here's the first one. Dogma one: real work, men's work, is blue collar work. Hawley actually says — as I noted earlier — he says almost nothing about building in this chapter, and that's the supposed theme. He talks about his brother who lays concrete, and he talks about King David, who built Jerusalem. When I talked about that last time — King David didn't actually do that; a bunch of workers did. Whatever. But that's it. Most of the time he's not talking about building. What he's talking about is blue collar work. And obviously people who build — the actual tradespeople doing the work — that would be a form of blue collar work. But blue collar work really seems to be his focus. And his thesis is that men are called to work, and that properly masculine work is blue collar in nature. That's a key part of his thesis.

So he argues — blaming the left, as he always does, that's a whole other thing that's not even worth commenting on in this chapter — but he argues that blue collar jobs are hard to come by because people on the left attack them. And these people, he says — that is, leftists — quote, "prefer an economy built on white collar service jobs that produce nothing tangible and require expensive degrees favored by the leftist intelligentsia." End quote. So it's another kind of conspiracy by the left to get rid of blue collar work because we want people to have degrees. I could say a lot about this passage, and I think we're going to actually return to it next episode.

But what I want to note here — the reason I'm citing it — is just how dismissive he is of so-called white collar labor. He argues that the shift to a less blue collar economy — he doesn't talk much about the economic realities behind it. He does what lots of politicians do when they just talk about the need for high-paying blue collar jobs, and don't note the fact that, like, great, there's a need for them, but nobody's paying top dollar for that. Or if they are, and there are a lot of blue collar jobs that pay really well, we don't need as many of them as we once did because of automation and outsourcing and all different kinds of things, whatever. Okay, that's why people say we have to shift to these other economic models. But for him, it's notable how dismissive he is of white collar labor. He argues that a shift to a less blue collar economy — it's not about economic realities, it's not about changing social needs, it's not about any of that complex stuff. No, no, no, no. It's an attack on masculinity. And he essentially argues that this is why so many American men don't work. He spends lots of time going through data about men not working, and basically he's like, they don't work, and the reason they don't work is because of the attack on blue collar jobs by a bunch of leftists.

But why would this be an attack on men? Well, because for Hawley, men are made for and naturally desire blue collar work. We'll come back around to this. But he says men are called by God to do blue collar work. So to attack — and he sees it as an attack on blue collar work, on a blue collar economy — is to attack men. To shift to any other kind of economy, he says, is to expect men to change what they fundamentally are. So saying things like, well, maybe people could retrain, or get better education, or whatever — that's not enough for him. This is what he says: "The loss of high-paying blue collar work for men has been a catastrophe for this nation and for men, robbing them of employment, family, dignity and hope."

And then he gives us a really telling illustration to this point when he discusses efforts to bring more men into fields like healthcare and education and administration and literacy, or undertaking careers such as teachers and social workers — a bunch of more white collar fields. He talks about this. And so you could ask him: what about guys who do that kind of work, Josh? Like people who don't manufacture, or they don't build, or they're not working with their hands, or whatever? Well, listen to his response. This is what he says: "Oh, there's nothing wrong with those careers, of course." I mean, just — just pause there. That response was, "oh, no, no, no. Well, I mean, I guess there's nothing wrong with that" — which means I think there's something wrong with that. Like, Josh Hawley says there's nothing wrong with those careers, of course, "to take just one example, many boys benefit from having male teachers as positive role models." End quote.

To me, I read that as nothing but disdain. These are not real men. These are not men's men. I mean, okay, yeah, because if you can't do that other stuff, or you're not strong enough or good enough with your hands — I guess you could be like a teacher or a social worker. And then he says, like, in the next sentence, "The fact is, men are historically less interested in these fields." What he's saying is that those kinds of fields — and notice, those are teaching, caring professions, white collar work — they don't fit with what men truly are, as Hawley imagines them. There is no inherent value in those fields for him, and the best value they can serve is to be role models for boys. Like, well, I guess you could have male teachers because boys need role models. I guess it's not like, I don't know, teaching is important, or social work is important, or healthcare is important and noble and whatever. And so yeah, of course men should be seeking those jobs. Nope. It's this very secondary, dismissive kind of — well, you know, I guess if that's all you can do, you can do that. And I mean, yes, you can be a role model for a boy who will hopefully grow up someday to do blue collar work, to do manly work.

So throughout the chapter, that's dogma one: real men work, and their work is blue collar. If you do blue collar work, you are authentically exercising your masculinity. And if you don't, it sounds like you're a second-string guy at best.

Okay. Dogma two, and that relates to this, is that men have no value or purpose if they don't work, and specifically if they don't work in blue collar jobs. And Hawley says in one place, "work, all kinds of work, is worth doing." But you read the chapter, he doesn't really mean all kinds of work. We just talked about that. We just saw that. When he's talking about a man, his examples of real work are his grandpa's time as a short-order cook — which he didn't stay with — his uncle's concrete company, and he talks about a horse trainer that his wife used to know. Those are his examples of real workers. Okay. For him, men who do other kinds of work, they lack dignity. They don't have inherent dignity or worth unless they're working, and they're doing the right kind of work.

So for Hawley, and this is that other dogma: men are made for work. So much so that he mocks those who would limit their hard blue collar work to, say, a 40-hour work week, or to maintain work-life balance — he puts it in quotes. Okay. Insistence on those kinds of things — those soft things like a 40-hour work week and work-life balance and things like that — that's just more evidence of the liberal feminizing of American society. Men are made for work, and they're made for hard work, and they're made for blue collar work. And if you come along and suggest that there might be limits to how long you should work, or the hours you should put in, spending time with your family — it's funny, Hawley's got husband and father as his first roles men are supposed to play. But apparently if you're working and don't have time to be a good husband or father, I guess that's okay. I don't know, Josh. I don't know how those things fit together, because you're not telling me. Men are made for work. Work is not made for men. Work is not something that we do because we need to, or because — zooming out again — we live in this capitalist world where you have to work to make money, because we have money and so forth. We can imagine other kinds of societies. But that's his other dogma: men are made for work.

And next episode we're going to get into just the themes of, I think, elitism and exploitation in this chapter. And this is — oh, this is prime for that. Real men will work as many hours as they're told to work. Real men are not going to worry about that work-life balance and these other sissy, liberal feminist kinds of things. Nope. Real men work and they work hard and they work blue collar. That's what real men do.

Another dogma that he's got here — and this is sort of interesting to me — is that, again, it's just typical of the right. This one's not specifically about masculinity, but it's pretty clear that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy. Here's his climate denial — it comes in this chapter, in an ironically titled section. He calls the section "reject nihilism," because I think he's completely nihilistic. He calls it "rejecting nihilism." He spends a good deal of time engaging in climate denial. That's like what he does. And what he tells us is that the entire discourse about climate change — all the stuff about climate change, all the stuff about environmental degradation, all of it — it's all just a part of a left-wing conspiracy to keep men from working in truly masculine blue collar fields. It is all part of a left-wing conspiracy to emasculate men and keep them from working. He refers to — quote — "climate fiction and the apocalyptic environmental tradition" as false ideologies aimed at denying men the blue collar work that defines them. And so — I mean — that's the logic. If somebody says, hey, factories really pollute things, maybe we should have some environmental regulations, he says, see, you hate blue collar work, and you hate factories, and men are men and they're doing blue collar work. This is all about attacking men. It's not about fixing the environment. It's not about countering climate change. Nope. This is about attacking men.

And so his argument is that concerns about climate change and environmental destruction, they are nihilistic because they tell men that their work is insignificant and deeply destructive. Again, it's all about attacking men. And in keeping with broader GOP orthodoxy, there's no concept here of maintaining manufacturing industries or other blue collar fields while also working to minimize environmental impacts, or anything like that. It's also part of neoliberal orthodoxy: profit is everything. The environment is just a cost, so you've got to get rid of the cost, which means there can't be any regulation. But Hawley, ideologically, puts all of this as an attack on men. So that person over there — they're not actually worried about superstorms, or the fact that we keep having the hottest summers ever, or whatever. They're not worried about wildfires. They're not worried about being able to insure their home because they can't, because they live in a place with lots of natural disasters because of climate change. Nope, nope. It's all just a liberal plot to come after men. So we get a good dose of not just climate denial but conspiracism in this chapter.

Okay, so those are just some of the dogmatic assertions that he has about work that come through here. I also want to talk a little bit about what he does and doesn't say about the Bible here. So — and I mentioned this earlier too — for a guy who claims to be outlining a Christian vision of American society, and in this chapter, a Christian vision of work, it's pretty amazing how little his biblical arguments for this are in this chapter, or how weak they are. In all the other chapters, he has spent a fair amount of time trying to show that his views are biblical. He'll sort of dive into it. I mean, he gives some examples from the Bible here, but not in the same detail. What he does oftentimes in this chapter is just assert over and over that he's giving us the teachings of the Bible reflected in his work, but he doesn't try to show that the way he has with some of the other topics. And I think that's telling. I think that shows that this is just dogma for him.

It's also — as somebody who knows a decent amount about the Bible — I think it's hard to read the Bible as a defense of free market capitalism. And when he does give biblical examples, they're just silly. So like, here's one: he appeals to God's deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. According to the Bible story, they're in slavery in Egypt for centuries, and then God delivers them and so forth. And his takeaway — Josh Hawley's takeaway — is that God delivered them so they could work and have dignity. They had had to work for somebody else, and now they can work for themselves. I kid you not. That is his takeaway. Not fulfilling the covenant promises to Israel. Not — you know — slavery is bad, and God didn't want them to be slaves. Nope. They had to do their work, and it wasn't fulfilling because they were slaves, and now God has freed them so they can work and have dignity of their own. That's his point.

Okay, so that's one of his examples. Here's another one, and this is one I grew up with. I remember this argument going all the way back to church when I was a kid, and I would hear sermons and comments and things that were opposed to environmentalism and so forth. This is before the climate change discussion was really a thing in popular consciousness — it was just more general environmentalism. But this is the one I grew up with. It's the idea that fears of climate change and environmental degradation, they're all anti-Christian propaganda. Why? Because God told Adam and Eve to exercise dominion over the earth. And Hawley's been riding that horse since the book started — that "exercise dominion." You take one verse, one verse in the book of Genesis, where it says that God tasks human beings with exercising dominion. And boom, we're called to exercise dominion. We're not called to preserve the environment, to protect it. We're called to do whatever we want to the planet.

So he argues that — and while we're on the topic of Adam, we know, if you've been listening to this Josh Hawley series — God, he talks about Adam a lot. Like we are over halfway through the book, and he has spent so much time talking about Adam. Most of the book is spent in the first two chapters of the Bible. We have not made it very far into it for his so-called biblical perspective. But he revisits his Adam theology, and he says that, quote, "God appoints Adam to work." And specifically he says, "in a do-it-with-your-hands way" — all hyphenated, do-it-with-your-hands, like hyphenated to make one word of it. God called Adam, and he called him to work with his hands. God called Adam to be a blue collar worker. That was Adam's task. And again — I mean — that's just thin. It's the kind of thing where you can imagine if somebody who didn't know the Bible read this, they'd say, wow, so you're saying the Bible teaches this? They'd be like, yep, the Bible defends blue collar work and says that's what men are made for. You'd be like, whoa, okay. Like, where? And they cite a verse where God tells Adam to be a farmer — like that's it. God tells him to work and subdue the earth, told him to go farm. And you're like, oh, okay. And that's what Hawley says. Page 148, he says, "The Bible says the work done with one's hands is sacred work, because when a man produces something that's useful to himself and others, he demonstrates the goodness of creation." Except the Bible doesn't actually say that anywhere. That's all it is — just when God tells him to go, be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth — that stuff. That's it. That's only what the Bible actually says. And if it does, Hawley's not showing me.

He says about a page later, "The Bible tells us that when a man works, he moves the world." Doesn't tell us that anywhere. If you read Hawley and you didn't know the Bible, you would be like, man, this must be a theme that runs throughout that whole book. I had no idea that work was such a central theme in the Bible. And the reason is — if you do know the Bible, and I know some of you do, and you go and read it — doesn't say this. Doesn't say it anywhere. That's his biblical ideology of this.

What Hawley's really saying is that the image of God — so in the book of Genesis at the beginning, it says God creates human beings and creates them in his image — for Hawley, the image of God that men bear is essentially that they work. He says that the Bible teaches — and I'm quoting him again — that "man truly becomes God's delegate, his representative, his servant, as he works." He has already said early on, like first chapter, that when it says we're created in the image of God, it means we're called to be God's representative. And here he says we are God's delegate or representative when we work. The image of God in man is working. If you don't work, you're not living out the image of God. And it's not just any old work, as we've seen. It's blue collar work. And this is a problem, because what that suggests to me is that when men don't work, they're not really created in the image of God. So he's got a lot of theology running around there. But for a guy who says that he's building this on the Bible and repeatedly says "the Bible teaches this, the Bible teaches this" — I wish I had him here. I'd be like, tell me where, man. I've got the one verse where God tells Adam to be a farmer, like that's it. That's your whole thing. We have the image of God if we're working — like, I don't know, if we're pouring concrete or working on a factory assembly line, and otherwise we don't — come on.

In this chapter the dogmas about masculinity and work just keep piling up. I could tease out other examples. I could go line by line, but we don't have time to do that, and the way it's written up is a mess. So like, let me try to tie this together. Here are the takeaways for me from this chapter.

The first one is that real men are defined by their work, and real work is blue collar. Again, men might do other things, but they'll never be the alphas of society, and they won't be fulfilling their God-given masculine role. So yeah, okay, I guess a guy could be a teacher, he could be a social worker, he could be a healthcare worker, sure, but he's not going to be a real man. And I think that that's a key thing. But in defining working men in this way, Hawley just reiterates some of the most entrenched and well-worn ideologies of a Christian patriarchal society. Some of you listening, I know, are like, I've heard my dad say the same thing, or my grandpa used to say the same thing. I've heard this for decades. What is it? It's a very, very well-worn kind of Christian patriarchal vision of society.

I think he also — and anybody who pays attention to contemporary discourses on the right, or somebody like Donald Trump, one of Hawley's buddies — he gives voice to that typical right-wing nostalgia that finds America's true value in its past industrial age, that always looks back to America when most jobs were about manufacturing and heavy industry and so forth, and sees that as something sort of authentically American and manly. And by mocking notions like a 40-hour work week and white collar work, he effectively, in my view, advances a predatory social model that is built on employers' exploitation of their workers. And we're going to come back to that next episode.

I think that's the last thing I want to say about this chapter, is that piece. He's going to have a lot to say about men and working and independence and whatever, but at the end of the day, he is typical of neoliberal right-wing people, where he envisions a society in which most people are workers and they are subject to the predation of their employers. And I think the most important idea here — maybe if we think about religion, or ethics, or philosophy or theology or something — is that Hawley basically tells us that men who don't work in blue collar fields have no inherent value or worth. You are literally worth less if you are not working in a blue collar field. The value and worth of men comes from what they do, and what they do should be blue collar. That's authentic masculinity.

And then finally, the fact that he does so little to actually defend these ideas — he just kind of asserts them — I think that shows how much he is just spewing right-wing ideology in this chapter. So next episode we're going to sort of pick up here. I've kind of laid some pieces. I'm going to come back and revisit some of these pieces today, because I want to highlight another crucial element. I'm going to come back and look at some of this stuff Hawley says about the liberal intelligentsia wanting people to have college degrees and all these other things. Because what I want to highlight is how much he is an elitist hypocrite when he talks about work — Josh Hawley's own elitist hypocrisy in the way that he talks about work. And I'm going to argue that his discourse, the way that he talks about work, isn't meant to help men rediscover their meaning or their masculinity. It is meant to protect the privilege and social and political power and the economic power of men like him. So we're going to come back. We're going to revisit some of these themes. I'm going to try to tie these things together and look at — like, you know, here's the stuff he says about masculinity and blue collar work and men and so forth. But here's what that actually works toward. Here's how that actually serves the interests of people like Josh Hawley in the elite that he serves, the elite that he is part of, the elite whose voice he helps fill out.

So join me for that. Looking forward to it. Always look forward to my time talking with all of you. Again, thank you for listening. To our subscribers, thank you. For those who join us in all the other things, I've got office hours coming up, we have a live episode coming up, we have Discord — and you can get in the Discord if you're a subscriber. So lots of activity there, lots of ways to join us. If you're not a subscriber and you've supported us in other ways, thank you so much. You know, we do a lot of stuff. We put out a lot of content. It takes a lot of time and effort to do that, and you help us to do that. So thank you so much. Please let people know about us, if you like what we do. Tell others. Keep them coming. We live in what we think are important and troubled times, doing our little bit to try to help address those. Please keep coming with us. As always, thank you for your time. Thank you for listening when you could be doing so many other things. And please be well until we get a chance to talk again.