Women Working for God: The Labor of Dissent at the Nexus of Christianity and Capitalism

• In Event: Faithwork, Fieldwork, Network

Abstract

In many evangelical churches, only men can hold paid positions that involve “church leadership,” while women’s labor goes uncompensated and unremarked upon. In response, white middle-class women evangelicals turn to a site where they feel their labor is valued: waged work outside the church. For these women, locating their faith and identities in their careers is itself a subversive move, even as it seems to reinforce what Kathi Weeks calls “the legitimating ethic of work[,] a mode of rebellion susceptible to co-optation” (2011:69). Here, caught between church and capitalist work ethics, it appears the women’s dissent from Christian patriarchy doubles as complicity with capitalism. In this paper, I examine how capital and Christianity both compete and collude over the subjectivities of white evangelical women, and how those women negotiate their own dissenting desires to be marked as laboring subjects by their church community. The paper contributes to the literature on the role of religious formations in shaping the meaning of labor (see Moreton 2009) by paying close attention to the affective relationship between women’s experiences in church and their experiences elsewhere, while also building on the work of feminist scholars who argue that capitalism marks some bodies as laboring subjects while obscuring, and devaluing, the labor of others (Vora 2015; Glenn 2002; Hong 2006).

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with women members of a Presbyterian church in North Carolina and a digital archive of work by evangelical women bloggers, the paper argues that these women redefine the labor of faith by blurring the lines between church, work, home, and elsewhere. As Christians, they need their labor to be visible within an economy of faith, so they describe their jobs using spiritual terms like “calling” and “gifts,” implicitly indicting the church’s refusal to recognize the labor women perform both within and outside it. Ultimately, however, the women choose a different path by framing the labor of faith as inhering in everyday experiences and relationships that do not fit neatly within the Protestant work ethic or even the care economy. More broadly, their choice suggests the mutually constitutive relationship between gender, faith, and labor in evangelical contexts.

Author

• Kelsey S Michael, University of Maryland at College Park