Beatnik Christianity Flips Off the Social Expectations of the Protestant Work Ethic

Christian culture in the United States is distracted, disjointed, and dysregulated. It’s especially bad in non-Catholic and non-Orthodoxy faith communities where there remains the capitalistic and Northern European values of what historians and sociologists call the Protestant work ethic. In this cultural paradigm, godliness is tied to overcoming the weakness of exhaustion. It’s this social expectation of damn near non-stop action accentuated by frenzies of highly caffeinated hyper-productive activity. Instead of On or Off, the options are pretty well limited to On or Manic.

Carl Honore contrasts the “cult of speed” with a lifestyle of slow. He writes, “[Fast and Slow are not just rates of change but] are shorthand for ways of being, or philosophies of life. Fast is busy, controlling, aggressive, hurried, analytical, stressed, superficial, impatient, active, quantity-over-quality. Slow is the opposite: calm, careful, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity. It is about making real and meaningful connections—with people, culture, work, food, everything.”1 That’s a transformational insight about life and spirituality.

Honore’s distinction became crystallized in my mind as the world reopened from the pandemic. While most people longed for a return to the hectic normalcy of Fast, for some of us the forced experienced of Slow turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It was like an at-home cross-cultural experience that inadvertently yet permanently influenced the daily rhythm of our souls. Those who are obsessed with Fast often teased us as becoming shut-ins, or accused us of living in fear, but what was actually going on was an unfolding epiphany about our unsustainable way of life.

My conscience now demands a recognition that the anti-sabbath nature of the Protestant work ethic is utterly incompatible with The Way of Jesus.2 To use a biblical metaphor, the Church needs Mary and Martha. Whereas so much of our frenetic society is focused on “Doing,” we need sacred spaces for “Being.” Our Jesus-centered spiritual communities must learn to re-emphasize rest and restoration. To quote Howard Wolowitz from The Big Bang Theory, it’s a “non-optional social convention.”3 It’s countercultural and uncomfortable, but that’s precisely the point.

The original beatniks were ruthless in criticizing Western capitalism. They loathed its shallow consumeristic and materialistic values as well as how it exploited workers, ran people into the ground, and manipulated people into thinking their ultimate worth was found in productivity and financial success. They thought this culture sucked and I do, too. This is an area where beatnik Christianity unapologetically and completely assumes the mantle. American Christian culture is quite simply anti-Christ in the way it obsesses with synchronous Doing and wealth.