Workers everywhere feel very bad about their job security
By Studs Terkel (as if today)
I was talking to a fella the other day, let’s call him Joe. Joe’s a machinist, or he was, until the shop “realigned” its priorities. He’s got calloused hands and a Bible on his nightstand that’s seen better days. Joe told me, “Studs, they talk about Jesus on the Sunday shows, but on Monday morning, they treat me like a line item they can’t wait to delete.”
That’s the rub, isn’t it? We’re living in an age where the “Good News” has been traded in for a hostile takeover. You look at the GOP, the MAGA movement, and this fella Trump, they’ve wrapped themselves in the flag and the cross like it’s a high-priced suit. But when you look at the stitching, it’s all wrong.
The mythology they claim to follow is one of the “least of these.” It’s a story about a guy who told a rich man to sell everything he had and give it to the poor. It’s about a man who washed the feet of the tired and the broken. But today? The modern conservative movement has built a temple not to the carpenter, but to the CEO. They’ve taken the Sermon on the Mount and edited it for “efficiency.”
I see it in the data, too. Workers everywhere are feeling the squeeze, looking over their shoulders at a job security that’s as thin as a communion wafer. And what does the leadership offer? Not a hand up, but a finger pointed at the “other.” They’ve turned Christianity into a cultural clubhouse, a way to say “We belong, and you don’t.” It’s a badge of identity used to justify greed, to celebrate the hoarding of wealth, and to look at the immigrant or the struggling neighbor with a cold, hard eye.
Jesus spoke of a “peace that surpasses understanding,” but the rhetoric coming out of the rallies is built on a foundation of grievance and salt-of-the-earth hatred. They’ve swapped the “Gospel of Love” for the “Gospel of the Grind,” where selfishness is a virtue and empathy is a weakness. It’s a strange kind of magic trick: they’ve convinced the man in the blue collar that the man in the white collar is his enemy, all while they pick both their pockets in the name of the Lord.
In the end, it’s not about faith; it’s about power. It’s about using a sacred story to justify a very profane reality. Joe knows it. The woman in the cubicle, wondering if her health insurance will cover her kid’s medicine, she knows it too. We’re all just waiting for a version of the truth that doesn’t require us to hate our neighbor to save our souls.