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The purpose-driven labor priest

The purpose-driven labor priest

Last updated on: October 15, 2026 at 6:17 pm by Fred Clark

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The purpose-driven labor priest 2026-10-15T18:17:14-04:00 Fred Clark

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Naum at AZspot points us to this fascinating post from Eric Blanc’s Labor Politics blog, “What Evangelicals Can Teach Us About Organizing.”

This is an enthusiastic appreciation and recommendation of Rick Warren’s book The Purpose-Driven Church. Blanc looks at the spectacular growth of Warren’s mega-church and realizes, hey, this looks a lot like organizing — and these folks are really good at this. And not only that, but Rick Warren wrote a whole book about how they did this, what worked and what didn’t, and how to apply the lessons he learned to bring people together in your community.

Warren has always been a frustrating figure to me, he’s prone to blurting out some truly awful, callous statements and to flinching away from potential “controversy.” He’s often done that thing where you say you’re avoiding “politics” but in a way that relegates lots of non-political things to the realm of “politics” while treating lots of other extremely partisan political things as, somehow, not.

But yes, also, Blanc is right, Warren is good at this thing of building community. Saddleback wasn’t built on his celebrity charisma or on him being a preaching superstar.* It was built on small groups and belonging and community and a thousand little things that become big things when you bring enough people together. And there’s a lot there for anyone to learn from if they’re interested in bringing people together.

Blanc isn’t doing a bit here. He read Warren’s book and he genuinely, urgently urges labor organizers to read it because he thinks they could and should learn from it.

It would be fascinating to hear Blanc and Warren in conversation. Such a conversation seems highly unlikely, but that’s part of what would make it so interesting.

It might be like a scene from Charles M. Sheldon’s Heart of the World.** That 1905 novel was subtitled “A Tale of Christian Socialism.”

The plot of that now-obscure and out-of-print novel is set into motion by encounters between a sincere but sheltered pastor and a secular labor activist. It expands on a scene and a theme from Sheldon’s earlier, far more famous novel, In His Steps.

That book was a runaway best-seller and a publishing phenomenon — partly due to Sheldon’s publisher dropping the ball when it came to copyrighting it. It was already selling well for them and then every other publisher began releasing and promoting copies of it as well and it really took off. Sheldon saw this as providential. He was a pastor and a preacher who had written the novel as a serialized sermon and he was more interested in getting that sermon into the hands of millions of people than he was upset about all the money he lost because his publisher screwed up.

In His Steps is best remembered today as the book that gave us “WWJD?” — “What Would Jesus Do?” The presumed answer to that question for most of the 20th- and 21st-century white evangelicals wearing WWJD? bracelets and T-shirts was not “democratize capitalism,” but that was a big part of how Sheldon thought it should be answered. Sheldon also thought the answer would include advocating for full racial and gender equality and religious pluralism. (And also temperance, vegetarianism, and an end to animal cruelty in circuses.)

Sheldon’s “What Would Jesus Do?” has become something like Bellamy’s Pledge of Allegiance — a kind of cultural totem now employed by people who would be dismayed to discover it was an artifact of 19th-century Christian Socialism.

All of this makes Charles Sheldon an interesting case study for the whole “evangelical definition wars.”

Matthew Avery Sutton poked a hornet’s nest with his description of evangelicalism as a “patriarchal, nationalist religious movement made up of Christians who seek power to transform American culture through conservative-leaning politics and free-market economics.”

That prompted a heated response from the Bebbington Quadrilateral-consensus folks who were appalled and offended at such a reductionist description, indignantly pointing out that 81% is still less than 100%, after all.

But just as contentious was the rest of what Sutton argued:

Contemporary evangelicalism is the direct descendent of early twentieth-century fundamentalism, North and South. Both movements are distinct from Antebellum forms of Christianity. There is no multi-century evangelical throughline.

Sheldon was an evangel-ist, and he wrote a book that is now revered as an “evangelical” classic — so much so that it even had its own Spire Christian Comics adaptation. Those seeking a “multi-century evangelical throughline” or, in Donald Dayton’s language, “an evangelical heritage,” could make a strong case for including Sheldon as One Of Us. He checks all the boxes in the quadrilateral.

But if we christen Sheldon as a turn-of-the-century “evangelical,” does that mean we also have to include, say, Walter Rauschenbusch? If not, why not?

This whole period of biblicist/activist/conversionist Christian progressivism seems helpful for clarifying and probing the argument between Sutton and his detractors.

I can imagine those on both sides arguing for or against the inclusion of William Jennings Bryan, at least at various stages in his life. What better retort to those who would say that “white evangelicals are those who voted for Trump three times” than to respond by saying “white evangelicals are those who voted for Bryan three times”?

But then, you know, it’s Bryan — Scopes trial Bryan — so that’s kind of a point in favor of Sutton’s whole “direct descendant of early 20th-century fundamentalism” argument.

I dunno. I am nothing like an expert on that period. But if the various warring professors turn to this subject I will pay close attention (while continuing to ask rude questions from the back of the classroom).

P.S. The title for this post includes a hyphen in the compound adjective purpose-driven because I still feel like that hyphen belongs there even if Warren’s publisher disagrees.

In a post filled with potentially inflammatory contentions about capitalism, organized labor, and evangelical historiography, it’s possible that debate over that hyphen may be the most heatedly divisive matter discussed here. But please be kind — I do not wish to reinflame the horrors of the Oxford-comma comment wars from back in the ’00s.

* I’ve seen him preach (via video) and he’s … fine. But I wasn’t thinking “Wow! I bet this guy draws tens of thousands of people every Sunday!”

Worth noting, too, that apart from sometimes Saying Dumb Things, Rick Warren is one of the few examples of a scandal-free evangelical mega-church pastor. Yes, it’s a low bar to clear, but Warren clears it while so many others do not. I suspect that’s related to the way his church was not centered around a single charismatic leadership figure who needed it to be centered around himself.

** I read that book back in the ’90s and wound up on a failed, pre-internet quest exploring whether or not it may have shaped the epigram from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Sheldon’s novel uses strikingly similar language about “the heart” as the go-between for “head” and “hands,” and a conversation with a friend who had seen Madonna’s “Express Yourself” video but not Metropolis itself sent me down a rabbit-hole (again, pre-internet — so a library rabbit-hole) trying to figure our whether this novel by a Kansas preacher might somehow decades later have gotten into the hands of a European atheist filmmaker from a Jewish/Catholic/Moravian background.

Inconclusive, but highly, highly unlikely.

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