“Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out” (James 5:4). This verse serves as the epigraph to my most recent book, Tyranny, Inc., which documents the ways in which an asset-rich few lord it over the asset-less many, and explains why we need a renewal of the New Deal order that defined much of the American economic landscape in the middle twentieth century to overcome this state of affairs.

Given my reputation as a “public Catholic” of a theologically conservative bent, the book has caused not a little confusion on both ends of the political spectrum. In the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg has described me as “the right-winger calling for social democracy.” Meanwhile, one of my many critics on the Reaganite right has labeled me a “pro-life New Dealer.”

This crossing of ideological wires raises a vexing set of questions: Why is it that these days, it’s considered unusual, even exotic, for small-o orthodox Christians to champion labor unions, social democracy, and the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Does traditional religion deserve its reputation as the upholder of existing material hierarchies, however unjust they may be? Why has that reputation come to attach itself to traditional religious communities? And how can we – I address myself to those who share my orthodoxy – shake off that reputation, as indeed we must?

Behold, the wages you withheld cry out. It’s one of the most crystal-clear verses, among numerous others of the kind, both in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, that address the problem of just and unjust wages. Or to put it more sharply: verses that condemn unjust wages. The Catechism of the Catholic Church cites that verse from James, as well as Leviticus and Deuteronomy, in identifying unjust wages as one of the sins that cry out to heaven for divine vengeance. Yet today, the conservative corners of the Catholic Church in America are decidedly silent when it comes to widespread job and health precarity, systematically low wages, eye-watering inequality, the hollowing out of the real economy by Wall Street, and the destruction of the shared prosperity achieved by working people in the previous century. That is, when self-proclaimed “traditionalists” don’t go out of their way to justify, in the name of orthodoxy, some of the worst abuses associated with today’s model of neoliberal capitalism.

It wasn’t always thus. In August 1889, dockworkers in London’s East End mounted one of the longest and most consequential strikes in British labor history. The East London docks processed much of the trade that had catapulted Britain to global supremacy in the nineteenth century, generating the wealth that made possible the Victorian opulence satirized in the novels of Thackeray and Trollope, and whose aging relics to this day attract tourists. But for the workers who sought employment there, the docks were a site of hyperexploitation. I say “sought” because in addition to the permanent employees, some ten thousand itinerant workers, known as “casuals,” would show up each day desperate for work and wages. But only about a third would be hired on any given day, and of these, few could obtain a full day’s work and wages. This vast army of excess labor depressed wages for all dockworkers and made organizing them a steeply uphill battle.

Meanwhile, beyond the docks, the nearby slums inhabited by the dockers epitomized the working-class misery of the era. Here’s how a French visitor described the scene:

Street boys, bare-footed, dirty, and turning wheels to get alms. On the steps leading to the Thames they swarm.… More repulsive than the scum of Paris: without question, the climate is worse, and the gin more deadly. [As for the grownups,] it is impossible to imagine before seeing them how many layers of dirt an overcoat or a pair of trousers could hold; they dream or doze openmouthed. Their faces are begrimed, dull, and sometimes streaked with red lines. It is in these localities that families have been discovered with no other bed than a heap of soot; they have slept there during several months.

Compounding the physical deprivation was the routine social and psychological humiliation of the dockworkers. The socialist politician and labor leader Ben Tillett, himself a docker, noted how workers who couldn’t find work would

tramp hour after hour round the dock … picking the rubbish heaps … of refuse.… [This] was at times the only means of living and of hope to many. No wonder the contractors called the casuals dock rats. The dock labourer came in for the foulest contempt.… All of us who were dock labourers concealed the nature of our occupation from our families as well as our friends.

It was against this bleak backdrop that on August 12, 1889, the dockworkers resolved to organize themselves at a mass gathering led by Tillett and two other activists. Their demands were modest and eminently reasonable: a pay raise, overtime wages, and the guarantee of at least four hours’ work daily for each docker. The dock directors, however, refused to even consider the proposal, and so the Great London Dock Strike of 1889 erupted.

On August 16, when the owners continued to ignore the workers’ demands, Tillett led a rally of some ten thousand dockers that garnered national and international news coverage for the strike. Soon, a strike headquarters and fund were established, where sympathetic outsiders, especially clergy, delivered boxes of food. Activist women, including Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor, played an important role in supplying and organizing the headquarters and in the distribution of food rations to the striking workers and their families. Forced to publicly defend the abysmal wages they paid their workers, the owners were forthright: if they paid a decent wage, it would cut into shareholder dividends, and that was intolerable. This was long before large employers had the benefit of today’s slick PR firms and the euphemistically named “union-avoidance” industry.

In response to this callousness, workers in many adjacent sectors mounted solidarity strikes, and soon the industrial action was threatening the stability of the whole British economy. Her Majesty’s Government was forced to enlist soldiers as well as convict labor to unload strategic material from ships otherwise unable to deliver their wares. Still, the dock directors wouldn’t budge, hoping instead that they could starve the dockers into submission as strike funds were depleted. Things, in short, were dire, both for workers and the political community as a whole.

Into this maelstrom entered an unlikely labor negotiator. In the early days of September 1889, Henry Edward Manning, the Catholic cardinal-archbishop of Westminster, left his palace to address both sides of what was fast becoming a scene of industrial war. To the workers, he urged calm and nonviolence. As one of the strike leaders recounted, this prince of the Church “spoke to the dockers in such a quiet, firm and advising, fatherly manner that minute by minute, as he was speaking, one could feel the mental atmosphere changing.” To the managers and dock owners, meanwhile, he preached their duties of social justice. Joined by the mayor of London, the acting commissioner of police, and sometimes the Anglican bishop of the city, Manning would press the bosses into granting the workers’ demands.

Manning was born in Hertfordshire in 1808, the son of a prosperous banker. Tall and gaunt, he showed promise in athletics and considered the political life before becoming an Anglican parish priest. In 1851, he was received into the Catholic Church, right about the same time as that other great Victorian convert whom he would view as a rival for the rest of their lives: Saint John Henry Newman. In 1865, Manning was made the archbishop of Westminster, and a decade later he was elevated to the cardinalate.

This was at a time when the longstanding legal handicaps against English Catholics were being gradually dismantled. Even so, a profound anti-Catholicism persisted at the cultural level. Upper-class converts like Newman and Manning, especially, were seen as adopting the superstition of Irish maids. Both men also came to defend the doctrine of papal infallibility issued by the First Vatican Council: Newman in more nuanced and literary fashion, Manning with simple, uncompromising devotion to the new dogma.

Alongside his theological orthodoxy and ecclesiastical conservatism, Manning displayed a constant concern for the fate of the poor and Britain’s working-class masses – and a revulsion for the era’s obscene class-based inequalities. “The homes of the poor in London are often very miserable,” he observed in 1874, a decade before he was appointed to a royal commission on the working-class housing crisis. “These things cannot go on, these things ought not to go on. The accumulation of wealth in the land, the piling up of wealth like mountains in the possession of classes or individuals, cannot go on.”

Manning found this combination of views – religious orthodoxy married to social justice – perfectly coherent. Indeed, his commitment to social justice and his opposition to class-based oppression flowed from his orthodoxy. And it was just this that led him to intervene in the dock strike. Initially, the employers refused his entreaties, but Manning’s moral authority was decisive in leading other captains of industry to put pressure on the dock owners to make concessions and thus save the economy.

The dock directors indicated a willingness to make some concessions, but still not enough to end the strike. By early September, the mayor of London convened a conciliation committee composed of six members, including Cardinal Manning, who soon came to play the leading role. He spoke for the workers and demanded decency from the employers; he cajoled the strike committee into accepting compromises, though the final peace would require still greater exertions from the aging cardinal.

So what happened? Why is it that Cardinal Manning’s agenda strikes us as an oddity? Why is it that many Americans today associate traditional faith or religious orthodoxy with a dogmatic devotion to tax cuts for the wealthy and hostility to organized labor and social welfare? Why is it that the Reaganite gospel has come to occlude, well, the genuine article?

Here, I can only write from within my own Roman Catholic tradition, though I suspect my claims will resonate, at least in their broad outlines, with many of those belonging to other denominations and faith groups.

In our time, too many Christians have come to serve as apologists for “things that cannot go on,” owing to three broad trends. Each of these deplorable turns correlates theological developments with certain material conditions, in the life of the church and that of wider society. To be sure, ideas, including theological ones, have their own inner integrity, and they aren’t strictly reducible to class-based or economic formations, as a certain kind of vulgar Marxism would have it. But is it not also possible to reform religious ideas without addressing the material substrate on which they rest. Historic Christianity, especially, has never operated that way – on a purely immaterial plane. Christians are called to pay due respect to the mundane aspect of what it means to be human: its ordinary joys and miseries, and the ways in which the social backdrop of our lives can open us to divine love and the love of neighbor – or shut us out. After all, we profess that God himself came to inhabit those ordinary joys and miseries.

The first deplorable turn, then, is precisely the denial that human beings are social and political animals. Our sociality is a premise not of supernatural revelation, but of natural reason: more specifically, classical political philosophy. If human beings are indeed naturally social and political, as the Greco-Roman tradition insisted, then our religious lives are inextricably bound up with our social lives. Or to put it in explicitly Christian terms, individual salvation is bound up with, and dependent on, social salvation. Religious believers who hold otherwise must end up reaffirming a rupture between philosophy and theology, or reason and revelation, that forces them to choose between unreasonable faith (superstition, fundamentalism) and a soulless, pinched account of reason (scientism, relativism).

We should reject this unhealthy dichotomy. We should resist the rupture between reason and revelation. And if we do, it follows that human beings’ natural status – as social animals – doesn’t go away in their dealings with the things of God. We are still social animals when we kneel at the foot of our bed to pray (or lay down a prayer mat facing Mecca in a corner of our study). And the way we organize our society contours the spiritual lives of its members. Social organization, the way we structure our economy, regulates the conditions of access not just to material goods but to spiritual ones as well.

This is by no means to imply that the poor lack access to faith. Very often, it is they who, like the widow in the gospel, give their last cent to the Lord (Mark 12:41–44). The outrage is that our economic system would deprive them of even that last cent. If a single mother has to work two precarious, gigified jobs in the new economy just to make ends meet, she won’t have the time or the energy or even the sense of predictable regularity in her schedule necessary to play and do homework with her kids, let alone transmit her faith; the children will very likely be babysat by screens. And those screens, incidentally, are under the control of Silicon Valley oligarchs who have every incentive to addict children via algorithmic manipulation, even if it means the proliferation of suicide content, content promoting eating disorders, and hardcore pornography.

How we organize our society and economy structures the belief and the “moral conditions” of ordinary people, as Cardinal Manning might have said. This was obvious to historic Christianity, because it was obvious to the classical philosophy that the church made her own and purified beginning in late antiquity. Yet today it is a kind of lost wisdom, and self-proclaimed “conservative” or “traditionalist” Christians are often the most likely to be repelled by it.

Earlier this year, for example, when Jordan Peterson harangued Pope Francis for supposedly “saving the planet” instead of “saving souls,” the Canadian psychologist and pundit found his most receptive audience among the “trads” and conservative Christians. Right-wing Catholic influencers and media outlets rewarded him with reposts and praise, not pausing for a second to consider the public claims of their own church, let alone the demands of filial piety. Think of it as American Catholicism’s version of trading a birthright for a mess of pottage.

The birthright in question is a church that rejects the dis-integration of life’s various realms and insists, instead, on their proper ordering in relation to each other. The Catholic tradition teaches that you can’t neatly partition politics from metaphysics, the economy from morality, culture from spirituality, and salvation from how we treat the planet, “our common home” (as the subtitle of Francis’s 2015 encyclical on ecology, Laudato si’, has it). Starting from these premises, the Church has intervened in the crises of modern life long before Francis assumed the Petrine office.

In 1891, Pope Leo XIII published Rerum novarum, his encyclical on capital and labor that rejected socialism, even as it called on public authorities – note well: not merely the charity of employers – to ensure a living wage and the right of workers to organize in defense of their mutual interests. In 1937, amid the rise of Nazi racism and anti-Semitism, Pope Pius XI denounced these tendencies in Mit brennender Sorge (notably offering it in German, rather than the typical Latin). And in 1963, as the Cold War logic of nuclear brinksmanship and mutually assured destruction took hold and plunged the whole species into anxiety, Pope John XXIII called for disarmament in Pacem in terris.

One could cite many other examples; these are just three of the most prominent historical interventions. The point is that the popes have never confined themselves strictly to “religious stuff,” as Peterson types would have it. For one thing, their teaching authority extends to “faith and morals,” and that second part covers a lot of ground. Morals, for example, implicate justice: what is owed to each person and to the human species at large and the planet entrusted to our stewardship. As such, the “religious stuff” Peterson wants Pope Francis to focus on necessarily implicates law, economics, politics, and ecology. These and other material conditions structure the church’s relations with the world. A church that ignored them – or a religious community, to frame it more broadly, that didn’t pay heed to the conditions of access to faith – couldn’t fulfill its mission.

And yet there exists a vast apparatus of “conservative” think tanks, journals, publishing houses, and online influencers whose central purpose is to convince traditional believers otherwise: that the crises they deplore in the “culture” (alienation, atomization, low rates of family formation and fertility, and so on) have nothing whatsoever to do with the neoliberal economic model and the obscene inequalities in power and wealth it generates.

Assuaging the consciences of the donor class, while helping to uphold its economic power, these ideological institutions demand that we believe the incredible: that the miseries and dysfunctions of downscale America – the spiraling deaths of despair, declining life expectancy, the fact that “working class” has become synonymous with out-of-wedlock births and opioid addiction – all these and more are simply a matter of individual failure. Millions and millions of individual failures of virtue that we can only hope might be corrected by heroic individual effort on the part of the poor, with assistance from conservative think tankers and authors writing books and articles with titles like The Soul of Civility and “Stuck with Freedom, Stuck with Virtue.” Civility and virtue are central to the good life, to be clear, but it is a gross betrayal of two-and-a-half millennia of virtue ethics to pretend that we can develop a virtuous citizenry while maintaining a ruthlessly competitive political economy divested of all virtue.

The second deplorable phenomenon is related to the first: self-help ideology, which has returned with a vengeance. In truth, the brand of “traditionalism” we have been discussing has roots that can be traced not to the gospel or the magisterium of the Catholic Church, but to the Whiggish self-help ideology that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as a means to tame the democratic, populist backlash engendered by America’s nascent market society.

Back then, an emerging professional class reframed the stresses and miseries that bore down on the poor as defects of individual character. Benjamin Rush, the Founding Father and Philadelphia physician, averred that “disease is a habit of wrong action, and all habits of injurious tendency are diseases.” To steel themselves against the yearning for leisure, Americans had to adopt teetotalism, sparse herbal diets, and cold showers. Young men joined clubs featuring military-style discipline: early curfews, exercise in the dawn hours. Evangelical Protestantism, which had once sanctified the anti-market (and anti-slavery) ethos of backcountry democrats, came to narrowly promote individual salvation. Ralph Waldo Emerson preached that the harsh “laws of property” would be transfigured into “universality,” if only young men of means would “let into it the new and renewing principle of love.”

While he campaigned against slavery, William Lloyd Garrison urged Northern workers against making trouble for bosses, counseling them toward individual self-betterment. The abolitionist brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan founded the country’s first credit-rating agency, which specially flagged men with “intemperate habits,” those drawn to the “sporting life,” and those leading “large and expensive families” – that last measure of creditworthiness, as the historian Charles Sellers argues, was one of several disciplinary mechanisms that helped slash birth rates to 2.8 children per married woman by the latter years of the nineteenth century, down from 6.4 in 1800. The market squeezed American fecundity long before Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade.

Admittedly, the substance of self-help in the mid-nineteenth century was quite different from its contemporary iterations. Yet its ultimate message echoes unmistakably today: social problems must be overcome by individual effort, even in the heart. Everywhere you look on Christian social media, you will find an excitable young man or woman staring into a phone camera and urging you to save your family from the Gehenna of modern life, mainly by making the right consumer choices: you have to homeschool; eat the right kind of primitive, organic wheat; escape chaotic urban cores and settle new frontiers; lift weights; earn enough so your wife can exit the formal labor force and assume her God-ordained submissive role; invest in crypto!

Traditional and conservative religious communities are drowning in privatism and “lifestyleism”: the dream of a retreat to some boutique redoubt, away from the contaminated world. Some of these lifestyle recommendations are no doubt beneficial. There is nothing wrong with and probably much good about weightlifting or wholesome organic food or “classical education.” But these things do not a Christian politics make. Moreover, the movement as a whole can only deepen the isolation and solipsism typical of the very modernity its advocates deplore, and it represents a profound betrayal of faith’s public, social component – and especially of Christianity’s character as a mass religion. A religion whose founder delighted in the company of children; who made a point of not letting the multitudes go home hungry; who launched his public ministry at a wedding, conjuring wine, that primordial aid to human conviviality and sociality; who proclaimed that “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18).

As the French patrologist and Vatican II expert Jean Daniélou emphasizes, “the poor” in Jesus’ discourse aren’t just the abjectly poor, though they’re certainly included, but also the average masses: people who can’t afford to retreat to boutique religious communities, who have to make do with public schools and ordinary parishes and so on. Jesus addressed himself to such people, even as he also gathered an elite to himself (not that the elite exactly measured up to the Master’s demands when it really mattered at Gethsemane and Golgotha!). At Cana, when he wined and dined the multitudes, Daniélou contends, Jesus expressed this “simple sense of community.”

Civility and virtue are central to the good life, but it is a betrayal of two-and-a-half millennia of virtue ethics to pretend that we can develop a virtuous citizenry while maintaining a ruthlessly competitive political economy.

This is why Pope Francis speaks frequently of “a Church of the poor” or of “a poor Church for the poor.” But I’m afraid that in certain quarters of American Christianity, the gated-community church or the elite-trad-lifestyle church is edging out the church of the poor. If you have ample time and economic freedom, you can develop your boutique spiritual life. You can even enjoy the ministry of priests (or pastors) who essentially serve as private chaplains to the affluent. But you don’t care if your brothers and sisters lack the conditions of access to this spiritual life. And you might be blinkered by pride to your own deprivation as a result. Having abandoned the church of the poor – the church that places itself at the center of urban chaos, in the poverty shacks and messy conditions of the periphery – you never encounter the God-Man who appears as the least of his brethren: the homeless man or single mother or oppressed wage worker whose hands bear unmistakable stigmata visible to eyes of faith alone.

Knowing my critics, I can already hear them grumbling that all my talk of neoliberalism and class conflict and rich and poor puts me in league with Marxists and socialists, those who view modern society as a scene of social conflict, rather than a space for freedom congenial to the Christian message. Which brings us to the third and final development: “conservative” believers’ naturalization of social relations that are, in fact, perfectly contingent and thus should be subject to ruthless critique in the light of eternal truth.

Permit me to illustrate this with an example. One of my critics, a Catholic ethicist at a prominent business school, not too long ago published an essay in which he said, in effect: Doesn’t Ahmari know that with all this talk of unmasking hidden coercion and conflict in market society he is reenacting the discourse of leftists and feminists who seek to tear down everything that is orderly and established by pointing out the power dynamics lurking behind it all?

It’s a good question. My response in Catholic settings has typically been to read off any number of quotations from the popes in which they decry unrestrained capitalism and call for limits on accumulation. But initially, I tell my hearers that the quotation I’m about to read off comes from Karl Marx or Rosa Luxemburg or some other canonical leftist figure. Only afterward do I reveal that it was, say, Leo XIII in Rerum novarum who lamented “the enormous fortunes of some few individuals and the utter poverty of the masses” under industrial capitalism; or that it was Saint John Paul II in Laborem exercens who warned against “the danger of treating work as a special kind of ‘merchandise,’ or as an impersonal ‘force’ needed for production” and recalled “the principle of the priority of labor over capital” (emphases in original).

The strategy never fails to elicit a kind of uncomfortable laughter, even shock. But it’s more than just an effective rhetorical trick: to read the social encyclicals is to be reminded that Christianity bears its own imperative for questioning existing material hierarchies. Marx and his progeny don’t have a monopoly on the critique of exploitation inherent to, and the lopsided power dynamics generated by, a society based on commodity production.

This Christian tradition of critical political economy raises a pair of related difficulties for the “traditionalist” Christian defenders of our present market arrangements. For one thing, they must at least implicitly concede – the more honest among them admit it openly – that they view Christian social teaching through ideological bifocals: the church’s moral rejection of abortion, euthanasia, and similar practices is (correctly) treated as a moral absolute; by contrast, when the church cries out against the injustices of the market order and supports a living wage, labor unions, denser social safety nets, and the like, there is a relativization and a great deal of hemming and hawing – those are “prudential” matters, and anyway, the popes aren’t trained economists, and so on. But that maneuver entails a relativization of the entire edifice of Christian justice, because the same fundamental premises undergird both the moral teachings that are taken as absolute and the economic teachings that are relegated to second-class status.

The second difficulty is more bedeviling still and more interesting for our purposes. It has to do with the fact that “trad” or “conservative” apologists for the status quo are (at least very commonly in the United States) objectively on the side of the most ferociously unconservative and socially and culturally destabilizing force in human history: capitalism. It’s capitalism that reduces every human relationship to exchange value, constantly conjuring new desires in order to sustain demand for commodities, profaning all that is sacred, melting all that is solid into air.

Unlike secular Marxists, who dream of the abolition of one class by another, Christians are called to promote reconciliation between them.

This historical reality forces “conservative” and Christian apologists for the market order to focus relentlessly on various cultural evils, while pretending that “the culture” has no significant connection to economic organization. They might urge their readers to adopt “6 Ways to Detox from Marxist Feminism for a Happier Life,” but they won’t and can’t account for the fact that if women are prioritizing their careers and education, it’s partly in response to the “dull compulsion” of powerful economic imperatives.

That is to say, the corporate #GirlBoss feminism the trads rage against merely gives a lean-in gloss to what women are already compelled to do by the market: by a society in which the income needed to live comfortably alone, taking the national median, is just under $90,000 in 2024, while wages for the bottom half of earners have been stagnant for the better part of two generations, and the median single full-time worker earns about $60,000.

Nothing in traditional religion, rightly understood, obliges us to defend this state of affairs or to redirect popular discontent into self-help and mindless culture warring. More than that, traditional religion compels us to see – yes, after Marx – how a society centered around commodity production is constantly at risk of privileging the inanimate over the living, of subsuming social relations between living, breathing human beings into relations between things. Of all people, religious believers and Christians especially must reassert the primacy of people over things, labor over capital, subjects over objects.

But unlike secular Marxists, who dream of the abolition of one class of the living by another, Christians are called to promote reconciliation between them. What might that look like? As Cardinal Manning recognized in the course of the Great Dock Strike, true reconciliation involves counterpower mounted from below as much as exhortations to virtue from above. At its best, class reconciliation invites spiritual realities that no material doctrine can account for.

At one point, as the ordeal of the strike entered its final stages and an agreement was close to hand, the full strike committee met the cardinal at a Catholic school in the East London district of Poplar. The cardinal addressed himself to uncompromising workers. Two of the labor leaders later recounted, “Just above [the cardinal’s] head was a carved figure of the Madonna and Child, and some among the men tell how a sudden light seemed to swim around it as the speaker pleaded for the wives and children. When he sat down, all in the room knew in their own minds that [Manning] had won the day.”

Finally, on September 14, a formal bargain was struck that soon came to be known as the “Cardinal’s Peace.” As a 2015 pamphlet by Britain’s Unite union notes, “The following day, a final triumphant procession marched to Hyde Park.” The procession included “a multitude of crosses placed in honour of Cardinal Manning.” And when Henry Edward Cardinal Manning died in 1892, the London Trades Council passed a resolution that declared, “English, Irish, and Italian workers in London felt that by the death of Cardinal Manning, they had lost their very best friend.”

“Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out.” Perhaps what’s needed is a wider apprehension of the insidious nature of sin, how it embeds itself not just in individual souls but in social and economic structures. Acknowledging this reality isn’t tantamount to obviating individual responsibility. “The structure made me do it” isn’t an apologia I’m going to try when I meet Saint Peter at the pearly gates. But it does imply a duty to be vigilant against structures that lead little ones astray, just as, at the individual level, we are called to avoid occasions of sin. Woe to those who acquiesce to an entire economy that is a vast and hideous occasion of sin.