What churches and unions can teach us about the common good

Last week, I was invited to speak at the Center for Christian and Public Life’s inaugural summit, “For the Good of the Public.” CCPL is a nonprofit civic organization focused on the role Christians can play in building a healthy, inclusive civic pluralism and a society oriented toward the public good.  It was an important two-day conversation, and I was glad to be a part of it.

I spoke about how the only way we can tackle America's crisis of anxiety, withdrawal, and addiction is to build strong institutions that prioritize the common good. Churches and unions, which may seem like very different creatures, have historically been the kind of places that bring us together and help us find fulfillment. Supporting institutions that build community and grow social connections must be at the forefront of our work as policymakers.

I hope you’ll give it a watch (or read).

I'm going to talk to you this morning about how I believe we need a reorientation of how public policy meets what Marlon correctly described as 'the spiritual basis' for the problems that we face. You know this, but there are things happening in America today that just aren't normal. Things that we shouldn't accept as standard. It isn't normal for a young woman to be shot because she pulls into the wrong driveway. It isn’t normal that every day hundreds of Americans drop dead from taking a drug that is designed to dull the senses and facilitate a withdrawal from life. It's not normal for citizens to storm government buildings in desperate hopes of keeping their chosen leader in power.

These are things that exist outside the traditional norms and we can feel them multiply all around us. We know a disturbing trend when we see it.

America, in places, feels like it's unraveling a little bit at the edges. It's a kind of social disintegration with Americans checking out too often, turning against each other too often. And too often, sometimes just giving up on it all. You can feel this everywhere. From hollowed-out post-industrial cities to our fractured, who-can-scream-the-loudest politics to our willing retreat away from society and into our electronic devices.

Yes, this is still a great country and yes, there are still plenty, plenty of happy, fulfilled people all across our land. But in the aggregate, Americans are feeling less hopeful today and less happy than we used to be. And many are fumbling about the dark. They're searching for a politics that aligns with their plight.

I and many others refer to this as a spiritual crisis, not necessarily in the strict, religious sense. A spiritual crisis in the way that millions of Americans feel like they've lost their sense of purpose, their identity, their conception of meaning. A lot of people used to find it in church, but less people are going to church today. Many people used to find it in work, but work is just less fulfilling, more cold-blooded than it used to be. Many found it in connection to strong, unique places, but those places are weak and dying, all becoming part of one global, ubiquitous place. Wherever you found your purpose, it's likely a weaker source than it was 40 years ago.

And so I've spent a lot of time thinking about this unspooling of America that's happening. But I don't think enough of my colleagues are doing the same thing. I think a lot of the policy discussions that we have in Washington right now are kind of on autopilot without doing and being based in this hard work of discovering the actual sources of American angst.

For instance, ask yourself: are the measures of success that we have today for public policy truly meaningful? Are they actually rooted in the things that lead to a fulfilling, rewarding life? Mostly policymakers and pundits pay attention to things like GDP growth or unemployment rates. And by those measures, people should be feeling pretty happy today. GDP grew by an astonishing 5% in the third quarter of last year. The unemployment rate is down below 4%. About as good as it can get. Inflation spiked, but it's coming back down. By these measures, policymakers, check, have done their job. People should be content, but they aren't.

Despite all this, millions of people still feel pessimistic about the future of the country. They aren't happy with their political leaders. Now, some people in my business, particularly on the left I would argue, blame Americans for the way that they feel, suggesting that people are distracted by illegitimate animus towards others or they are just ignorant about the true economic reality, the gift the public policy has given them.

I don't think that that's the right way of looking at this. What I think is that Washington is not paying attention to the things that really make a person happy or fulfilled or connected to a meaningful life. And this is the work that you are doing as a part of this really important two-day summit.

We don't recognize that economic success is just part, and likely not the most important part, of the route to happiness. Now, I get it. I'm asking this enormous question, right, the most important question of all, what makes a good life, and that's a topic for another much longer speech, but I think there's a pretty easy consensus on two starting points.

First, people feel better when they're connected to a common higher purpose than just the one that's connected to their own survival and well-being. It's why being part of a sports team feels so good. It's why people gravitate towards groups of friends. Our biology just knows that we're better off being members of a collective with a collective purpose and our hormones, they just perk up when we do work for the common good.

Second, we thrive off of personal connection. We are a deeply social species. We are happiest when we have deep, impactful relationships with other humans. Harvard has this really important wonderful 85-year longitudinal study of what makes people flourish over the long course of their life, and what it shows is that money and career and success and luck, they just don't matter as much as quality relationships, time with family and friends.

And so if those are two of the things that matter more than most everything else when it comes to constructing a good life, I don't need to tell you that we value those two things less than we used to. It's harder to maintain solid relationships today. The common good feels further away from us than at any time in our lifetime. And you know, the data here—let me give you a couple for-instances:

Record numbers of children today report caring more about individual achievement over the health of their community. 80% of students report, for instance, in our elementary schools, that their parents and teachers care more about their grades than about how they treat others.

Friendship is becoming just as inaccessible. Thirty years ago, only 3 percent of Americans reported having no friends. Today, that number is 12 percent. And on a daily and weekly and monthly basis, Americans just report spending much less time, much less time today with family and friends than they did just decades ago. Friendship is dropping. Social isolation is growing.

And that's the bad news. But it's not terribly surprising news, right? Because there are all of these social and cultural and economic factors, drivers that cause us to disappear into ourselves, withdrawing from one another and our sense of obligation to each other. We've got a culture that glorifies celebrity over everything else. It infects us with this bent toward self-aggrandizement and narcissism. Our smartphones, they trick us into thinking that our value comes from likes and follows not contributions to the common good. They also just pull us away from in-person connection. This cold-blooded economy that we have, obsessed with short-term profit, it sends us these clear signals that sacrificing money for public benefit is for suckers. And then flat wages just mean people have a lot less free time. They got to work longer and so they don't have as much time to build friendships or spend time with companions.

This to me is a big part of the explanation as to why Americans are feeling so bad, despite the economic news being so good. And so here's another question – maybe the most important question – that I want to give you today: why does public policy care so much about economic success and so little about spiritual success? Why can't we reorder our public policy priorities to repair the damage done by the triumph of individualism over the common good or to give more people access to social connection and less incentive to withdraw? And if we made that change, what would it look like?

I think it would start with admitting that left our own devices, isolated on all of our own individual islands, we are a weak match for these big, growing anti-connection, anti-community forces. If we're serious about giving people a better shot at friendships or restoring the value that America places on the common good, an atomized society is of little use.

What we need is strong institutions that have at their core these values of connection and community. Institutions that are powerful enough to move cultural norms and reach millions of people. And there are two institutions in America that provide the most space for people to connect with others, that most prioritize the value of the common good over individual achievement. Two institutions that have more in common with each other than they have in conflict: churches, which I am going to use as shorthand for all religious institutions, and labor unions.

Now, I'm convinced that if we want to restore the spiritual health of this nation then we have got to have a more purposeful and more powerful policy of supporting strong, healthy religious institutions and a loud, vibrant labor movement.

I grew up a member of First Congregational Church in Wethersfield, Connecticut. I was an active member of the youth program. I showed up every Sunday night for the fellowship meetings. First Church didn't necessarily give me a real defining theological theory of the case, but there's no doubt that I'm a different person today because of my church experience. Everywhere I turned at First Church there were clothing and food drives, fundraisers for local and global campaigns. Every Sunday morning, our minister listed off the church members who had ailing spouses or children so we all knew to offer a kind word to at the service. As a member of First Church, there was just no way not to internalize our congregation’s commitment to treating people kindly and putting the health of the community over personal gain.

I also just met a lot of amazing people at church. I had friends from school and friends from sports, but I also had church friends. How couldn't you? The whole exercise of greeting everybody in the morning at the pews in services to the post service coffee hour, it was designed to facilitate social connection. Now, we're in the midst of a rapid retreat from church.  Just 20 years ago, there were 20 percentage points more of American citizens that were belonging to a religious institution. That means that millions of people who very recently derived their meaning and their identity from religious affiliation, who found community and connection from church are now searching, grasping other places for that grounding, that companionship. There's no way for this not to have a really significant impact on our culture.

And unions may feel like a pretty different creature than churches, but they really aren't. Organized labor, it's a mechanism for workers to fight for better wages and working conditions. But unions are also a place where people find inspiration in joining together to fight for a common purpose, just like what happens in church environments.

Unions breed selflessness. A strike is the most selfless act that you can engage in. You take action that would have zero impact individually, but by locking arms and trusting your fellow union members, a collective strike like the one that we saw at the UAW this summer and fall, you can change the world. Through collective bargaining you learn to live for others.

Now, unions also build connections. Union halls may not be the social centers that they used to be decades ago, but the act of engaging in collective action, it builds personal bonds. And happier work lives are more likely to result in work friends, and studies consistently show that if you're in a labor union, you are more satisfied, you are happier at work. Finally, unions tend to deliver more reasonable working hours, which means union members have free time, which is really important. Free time, in the weekends and evenings, to engage in pursuits, sports, hobbies, social clubs, or church where friendships and connections are forged.

Now none of this is news to you. I get it. You're here because you agree with this case. You believe in the benefit of religious life. Many of you are champions of strong labor unions. What I believe is that supporting institutions that help build the common good and help grow social connection, it just has to be at the center, not the periphery, of our public work.

First, for progressives, that's about the way that we talk. Yes, there's a lot that we can object to when it comes to how certain forms of organized religion are practiced, and there's far too much division and intolerance that springs forth from political religiosity. But that should not mean that progressives can't and shouldn't speak the language of religion. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't actively lift up the benefits of religious belief and church life and the meaning of connection and the attachment to community that comes from being part of a church or a religious institution. After decades away from church, I've gone back. First, because I want to find that same connection and selfless spirit that I recall for First Church, but also because I just want to reconnect with the language of church so that I can help lead a conversation within the progressive movement about spirituality, belief, and the value of religious membership. That should not, that cannot be the exclusive province of the right.

And when it comes to the way we talk about unions, we just set our sights way too low. There are few things more critical – I believe this – to the spiritual rebound of America than unions. They kind of do it all. They deliver economic empowerment. They give us control back over our economic lives. They build community to help protect the common good. And so we shouldn't be arguing for a level playing field between management and labor. We should be arguing for a tilted playing field toward unions. Workers make more money, they're safer, they're happier in a union. Neutrality isn't good enough. We should be supporting policies and incentivize people to join labor unions as a mechanism to deliver spiritual health to this country. So churches and labor unions, part of the same mission, restoring America’s soul. And progressives just need to be bolder in the way that we talk about both and how we link the two institutions today.

Shawn Fain, now everybody knows him, the President of the UAW, speaks openly about his Christian faith, and how that faith guides him as a labor leader. He says that his favorite passage in the Bible is Ecclesiastes, chapter 4, verses 9-12: “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone?”

Churches and unions. These are places where people often find the sources of contentment and happiness. The good stuff, the stuff that matters more. These are the kinds of institutions that provide the building blocks of spiritual fulfillment.

In a speech last weekend, President Obama recalled remarks made long ago by Robert Kennedy who reminded us that GDP is not a measure of true value. Kennedy cautioned that GDP counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. We want economic growth, we want low unemployment, but those are not the true measures of happiness, and as government officials don't we have to be first and foremost in the true business of delivering happiness? I think we need to be. I think that is actually our business.

And if that's the case, then we need to be thinking about community and common good and connection –  not just employment, cost, and growth. And that requires a massive reframe of American political debate that starts with empowering institutions that give us the best chance to access that good life.