To Praise Ambitious Men

David Bahnsen, Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life (New York: Post Hill Press). 208 pp. $24, cloth. 

I sometimes tell people, when recommending that they read A Severe Mercy, that they should know the book presents as a love story but, in reality, it is actually a conversion story. If you understand that going in, your whole experience of the book will be better.

A similar comment might apply to David Bahnsen's Full Time: Work and the Meaning of Life. If you take the book to be a reflection on work, you're only getting part of the story. Really the book is a vindication of what John Piper might call "holy ambition," and a clear argument that "holy ambitions" are not only ambitions toward missions or vocational ministry, but that an ambition to succeed in one's profession can and should be regarded as holy as well. Indeed, everything I love about the book is bound up in its treatment of ambition and much of what I disliked is related to its treatment of "work."

What drives Bahnsen is the sense that most of his readers and most Christians in most churches are not afflicted by too high a view of their work, but too low a view; work is regarded as something that gets in the way of family or of one's piety or that simply forces one to spend one's time in ways one would prefer not to.

I recall once hearing a Catholic friend expressly encourage others in his friend group to work the least amount they needed to in order to make the money their life required and to dedicate the remainder of their time to church functions and family life. There is, perhaps, a way in which Roman theology might excuse such an attitude, though even there it is likely hard to square that with some Roman encyclicals on work, such as the much cited "Rerum Novarum" or the less read but equally important texts "Quadragesimo Anno" and "Laborem Exercens." For Protestants, such an attitude seems even more unfathomable. And yet I've spent enough time in evangelicalism to believe that Bahnsen's assessment is largely correct.

Against this mentality, Bahnsen calls for a rightly placed emphasis on work as one of the primary places in which we live out the Christian life, offering ourselves to God and to neighbor in a spirit of love and service. For Bahnsen, it is simply a category error to suggest, as one popular book he cites has done, that a successful computer scientist should look to secure a nest egg for himself so that he has the freedom and means to instead direct his energy to aiding ministries or churches with their computer needs. Bahnsen hears such advice and rightly responds, "why couldn't he bring his computer and business skills to the computer business?"

It's the right question, I think. Or it at least seems to be from where I'm sitting in southeast Nebraska. Here in Lincoln, we have a quite large evangelical population, and yet there is very little we have to show for it in the city. Indeed, at this point the city's evangelical population is largely isolated in one quadrant of town and has remarkably little presence outside its own small cloister. We haven't lacked for people or resources, but perhaps we have lacked a vision for the flourishing of the city and for the role that a holy ambition can play in helping to realize that vision. There is, so far as I can tell, very little presence in the university system, state politics, or the tech sector—and those are the three primary economic drivers for the city. Moreover, because Lincoln's evangelicals have persistently chosen to withdraw from the life of the city, retreating further and further into the southeast part of the city where their presence is dominant, they have effectively opted out of robust participation in much of the city's public life.

In this, I think one can detect two of the vices Bahnsen warns against:

First, there is an indifferent attitude toward excellence and a quiet acquiescence to mediocrity. We tend to care more about whether or not a person is one of us, judged by cultural norms and lifestyle practices, then whether that person is a faithful follower of Jesus endeavoring to serve him with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Second, there is a lack of ambition, a lack of interest in trying to excel in one's work, to serve the city, and see the life of the city built up for all her citizens. To be sure, there are exceptions to this; I do not mean to condemn all of Lincoln's evangelical community. Yet this, at least, is quite apparent: Today Lincoln is an increasingly arch-secular progressive town in a way it very much was not 30 years ago. I expect that if more of our city's evangelicals had read and internalized Bahnsen's message, then things would look quite a bit different.

There is another reason to value ambition and a desire to pursue excellence in one's work. As Stiven Peter will argue in his forthcoming review of Aaron Renn's Life in the Negative World, much of the danger evangelicals are now exposed to is downstream of evangelicalism's love affair with mediocrity. When we pursue excellence, we make ourselves indispensable to our neighbors, which is good in itself. But it also means that the soft and hard threats facing orthodox believers today don't always have the same weight because those who have dedicated themselves to excellence will often have options and security that the mediocre do not. If you are a lousy programmer working for a corporation radicalizing on DEI issues, for example, you won't have the same leverage if you raise concerns about an HR policy as you might if you are exceptional in your job. Ambition and excellence, rightly understood, not only help us to love our neighbors well, but they also provide us with a degree of material and professional security. 

I say all of this to state my basic agreement with Bahnsen's call for a higher view of work and ambition within Christian communities. What follows, then, isn't meant to condemn the book, but rather to raise some further questions about "work" which I think got lost amidst Bahnsen's entirely understandable desire to rescue ambition and praise the goodness of work.

What Work is Made Bad

In general, human beings thrive and do their best work when they feel as if their work has significance of some kind, that their particular contribution is important, and when they are given some level of agency in how they go about their work. This isn't to say that only people engaged in obviously altruistic work can be engaged. Most of our common lines of work in this country can be experienced as significant and valuable to society.

The plumber's work allows people to have water and modern sanitation in their home or office, a benefit we take for granted until we have to do without it—and something which provides immense public health benefits. To take another example, my family was deeply grateful for HVAC technicians when our heater died on Christmas weekend while we were having sub-zero temperatures in Lincoln. Our nation's truck drivers insure that Americans have the food and other goods they need or desire. Service workers in stores insure that people can access those same goods. These forms of work should be experienced as something significant and a source of real aid to our neighbors. Yet they often aren't. Sometimes that might be because the individual worker's attitude about work or understanding of work is poor. But often I think it's because the conditions of their work are awful. It is this breadth of analysis that was lacking as I read Bahnsen's book. The book is laser focused on the problem of individual people with a lack of appreciation for the goodness of work, but for being a book on "work and the meaning of life" it was surprisingly narrow to me in its approach to the topic.

For example, I will never forget an evening shift I had at my first ever job, working as a clerk at a local grocery store. The particular location I worked at has since closed and the building been dramatically redesigned to accommodate the new occupant. But at the time our front doors faced one of the city's busiest streets. In fact, much of that entire side of the building was made up with large windows, so you could basically see the entire front of the store from the street.

One night a few minutes before my shift ended, we heard the night manager paged over the store's intercom. It had been a slow night—it was early in the week following a huge weekend sale, so there had not been many customers. So the other two clerks and I were standing at our register talking. We weren't doing anything we shouldn't be doing; we simply didn't have any customers to assist.

Moments after our manager was paged, however, he came running out of the back room: "Get busy, guys. Find something to do. That was Darren (the store manager). He's sitting in the parking lot on the other side of the street and he's mad that you're all just standing at your registers." So we spent the next ten minutes trying to look busy, which mostly meant looking to see if there were any candy bars to pull to the the front of the checkout displays or looking in the coolers by the registers to see if the bottled drinks needed to be fronted. Mostly all that work was already done because we had already done it because it was a slow night. But that didn't matter to the store's manager: He was, apparently, watching us all the time and when we did not appear to be sufficiently busy, we were being bad employees.

This decision by Darren didn't just affect us, of course. It was soon common knowledge to everyone that Darren would set up in the parking lot after seeming to go home in order to watch us. So that meant basically everyone who worked there in the evening now did so with a certain sense of fear, not because any of us were stealing, damaging company property, or anything like that, but fear that we were being surveilled. It created an atmosphere that felt tense, on edge, and anxious—not an atmosphere, in other words, where ordinary people want to work or where ordinary people want to shop, I imagine. (Before you suggest that a manager who behaves in this way would be so bad for employee morale that he wouldn't last in the role, I can tell you that the man I'm referring to is now a senior VP with the same company.)

This happened back in 2005. I can only imagine how much worse this has gotten in the era of smartphones and more robust surveillance technologies. Certainly, the experience of Amazon and Walmart warehouse workers suggests that the daily experience of a large number of American workers is fairly grim. And in that case the atmospheric affects of the surveillance are contained in warehouses and delivery trucks, making them largely invisible to customers.

Work and the Meaning of Life?

In one sense, these observations could be taken as a bit unfair and unprompted given the subject of the book. Virtually all that Bahnsen says constructively about work is good, I think. So why criticize something that isn't there and, one might argue, isn't altogether germane to the book's subject anyway? There is a type of book review where the reviewer complains for several hundred or thousand words that the author didn't write the book the reviewer would have written if given the chance. I hope that isn't what I'm doing here, though.

Ultimately, I left Full Time wondering if Bahnsen's conception of work is broad enough, given his ambitious subtitle and his equally ambitious opening chapters, which relate the issue of work to our society's pressing social problems arising around loneliness, anxiety, and meaninglessness. Given that Bahnsen and I both agree that work is vital to human health, community, and purpose, a too-narrow conception of work is a problem, particularly for a book written about the topic.

What he says is very good, but in this case what he doesn't address seems quite significant. And what is left out is not simply the possibility that sometimes forms of paid work genuinely are demeaning, immoral, or alienating. That exclusion is indicative of the broader omission, which is precisely the question of how work relates to the quest for meaning in our lives. Bahnsen seems to take for granted the notion that "work" equals "what one does in order to earn money." This, I think, is a mistake. In particular, it is the sort of mistake that neglects the older Christian conception of work as simply being the task of interacting with God's world in ways that bring order, beauty, or provision out of disorder, ugliness, or want. I don't think I'm being unfair in reading him this way either. Here is how he introduces his argument in the opening pages of the book:

I believe this book may upset people for reasons that are harder to ignore. Yes, there will be some who nod in agreement even as they ignore the real implications of what I am saying. But I believe there will be many more who are offended or bothered by the idea itself that work is the meaning of life. I sincerely hope they will hear me out.

On the other hand-and this gives me great hope-I believe there will be readers who have always believed work is good, but only to the extent that it leads to good things (a livelihood, family provision, tithes and offerings, a tax base). May they come away from this book seeing that work itself is inherently good, even when separated from utilitarian or pragmatic ends. I hold out hope that those who believe their career endeavors must create a certain success to enable them to enjoy a life of significance will instead appreciate their careers as inherently significant, vital and meaningful.

Note how "work," "career endeavors," and "career" are all used interchangeably. Of course, I fully agree with Bahnsen that "work" is inherently good. But I do not agree that "career endeavors" are inherently good—and that conceptual slippage in Bahnsen pervades the entire book.

If "work" is just "how one earns a living" then "work" basically means "working for a member of the capitalist class" (or "owners of productive property" if you prefer that language) or "becoming an owner of productive property oneself." All you're left with, then, in the essential human domain of "work" is "wage earners" and "owners." Given how essential work is to healthy human experience and human meaning, I worry that this narrower conception of work will do several things.

First, it will cause people to struggle to see their life as meaningful if they are not participating in the marketplace through directly earning a wage or owning productive property. If we are made to work and work is either employment or investment, essentially, then what of the parents who choose to stay home with children? They are certainly working. But their work isn't remunerated by an employer. All the same questions regarding parents who stay home with their children apply in a similar way to full-time caregivers—and, as Leah Sargeant has argued in these pages, our society mostly doesn't know how to think about the relationship between "work" and "care," and therefore often ends up exploiting the work of caregivers.

One option, of course, is to double down on the various talking points showing up with increased regularity on the left—demanding the abolition of the family, for instance, or the abolition of marriage or that the work of family life in a shared home would become paid marketplace work. Because many on the left tacitly reject the idea of organic communities of love in which people willingly forfeit opportunity or individualized freedom for the good of others, their (not terribly leftist) solution is to monetize these traditionally non-monetized relationships. I think that's a very bad idea, but that's because my conception of work and human communal life is robust enough to say that not all people need to participate in the marketplace, that many of us actually aren't called to the marketplace, at least for some seasons of life, and it is right and good for those of us who are in the marketplace to share what we have with those who are not. But to say that, I need categories of human community and work beyond "wage earner" and "investor."

When we define work in terms of marketplace participation, such a definition of work will leave many valuable things that humans do for one another outside the scope of our "work." To be fair, Bahnsen is entirely correct in observing and criticizing the kind of pietism that tells people "the work you do to earn a living is lesser and you should minimize that as much as you can so you can pursue spiritual things, like teaching a Bible study or volunteering at church functions." But, then, what of this case: I've told the story before of a man I knew who quit his job after his wife got a significant promotion at her job which paid her enough for them to both live off her salary. (Their children were all in high school or older by this point, so there also were not the same kind of questions regarding childcare for them that younger couples face.)

This man didn't quit his job because he wanted to be lazy; he quit his job because he saw many, many opportunities for things he could do that would serve his neighbors but which he couldn't do if he had a full-time job. With the time he gained by quitting his job, he now oversees a site for a food distribution ministry for the poor here in town and he also volunteers with a neighborhood association, youth sports, and his church. He's a competent, high-energy person who didn't need to earn a paycheck, but that doesn't mean he gave up working. He just shifted his work to forms of work that are generally illegible to the marketplace and, as a result, are often ignored and under-resourced in contemporary America. For making this choice, he obviously hasn't received a financial reward, but he has made himself indispensable to many of his neighbors. Is that a failure to work? I don't think so—and I hope that Bahnsen wouldn't either. But while I know why I think this is good, I don't really know what basis Bahnsen would have for saying so. Indeed, on the evidence of his own words in the introduction this man has given up his "career" and is therefore not pursuing the meaning of life.

There is a final point to make here regarding how we conceptualize work that, I think, relates to the thinness of Bahnsen's definition. For almost nine years, before moving full time to Mere O, I worked as a copywriter for a few different marketing tech companies. The first was an agency that built industry-specific tech for the multifamily housing industry. The second was a tech company that built SMS messaging technology for businesses.

I suspect that if Chat GPT had existed when I applied for those positions, I would not have gotten the job. Indeed, I doubt the job would have been created in the first place. Why pay someone a salary, with all the costs of that plus their training and the other costs of employing people, when you can have a person who dedicates, at most, a quarter of their time to editing and polishing text freely generated by an AI that can then be published as marketing copy? This, no doubt, is how many business owners are going to be thinking about copywriting jobs in the years to come.

And yet I don't think that's how they should be thinking about those jobs. The reason those jobs are seen as a thing that can be replaced by a free to use AI-powered machine is because we already treated copywriters like machines even before Chat GPT came online. It was assumed that good work in these areas was basically formulaic and you just needed to employ people who understood the formula and could replicate it, which is to say you needed people who behaved like highly programmed machines. But once we got actual machines that can do it instead of humans that behave like machines, the case for those positions disappeared. This is an important point to understand: If "work" is just "work done in the marketplace," then work is constantly answerable to the demands of efficiency not in a relative sense in which we place efficiencies alongside other communal concerns, but in absolute terms. But if we absolutize efficiency in that way, then in some sense we are already treating ourselves like machines. No wonder we're alienated.

There is a tendency in contemporary life to instrumentalize our encounters with other human beings, such that in most of our actual interactions with people we don't really think about the encounter as a chance to know, even a little, another human being with the same sorts of desires, pains, and loves that we ourselves have and I worry that this tendency is downstream of precisely the narrow conception of work that Bahnsen seems to affirm, or at least does not challenge in any real way.

We live in a desperately lonely world, as Bahnsen rightly says. But part of the reason for that loneliness is that our conception of work, identity, and purpose is so inhuman that we have made it remarkably easy to completely pass over obvious opportunities for human encounter. The work of a clerk isn't something best done by a cheaper machine, but is rather something that helps create the atmosphere of the store, making people feel welcome and comfortable as they do something that is an essential part of daily life. This video gets at the point I'm trying to make in a powerful way:

These encounters, far from being a regrettable line item on the store's budget, should be seen as an opportunity for human encounter. The experience at Chick-fil-A, in other words, would not be improved by greater efficiency, even if the bottom line of the company might be helped by that.

This, then, is the greater concern I have with the truncated definition of work I sense in Bahnsen and which certainly is more common in our society. If work is chiefly about making money, either as a wage earner or an investor, then jobs for both the wage earner and investor alike are necessary evils—a hindrance to what one would prefer to do with one's life in the former case and an expense on one's budget sheet in the latter case.

The irony in all this, of course, is that it is precisely the error Bahnsen is writing to condemn. Bahnsen doesn't want anyone to think about work in those terms. He (rightly!) has an extremely high view of work. And yet because his entire treatment of it seems to foreground only workers and owners, I think it is hard for him to close the doors I'm trying to warn against here. He says up front that we shouldn't regard work in such transactional terms because God made us to work, work is good, and work is, in fact, one of the chief ways we are able to serve others. All of that is gloriously true. But to say it you need a conception of work broader than simply what one does for remuneration.

How do you fix this? Well, minimally you need an account of work that treats the issue more expansively, first anchoring one's definition of work not in marketplaces, but in the creation mandate and the law of love. Second, you need a thick conception of a variety of human communities, a conception thick enough that the claims of those communities may well overrule the claims of the marketplace at many points. Minimally, you need to recognize that the family, church, and government are all prior to the marketplace. Here I expect Bahnsen would agree, though I'd then wonder why his account of work doesn't have a necessary acknowledgement or encounter with these three primordial communities. But then I also think, following Althusius's idea of "collegia," that organized labor, for example, has as much legitimacy as a human community as capitalist firms do. I expect David will disagree on that point, just given the somewhat predictable disagreements one expects to find between a Christian in the Austrian economic school, such as David, and a Christian in the social democrat school, such as myself.

So what does all this have to do with work and Full Time? To review: In what the book says about being a worker, about the value of work, and especially the importance of pursuing excellence in work, I think it's quite good. I can easily imagine giving this book to graduating seniors or to young people starting their career. So why take the time to spell out this larger difference regarding what work actually is if I think so much of what David says is so good?

One reason is simply that reviews listing out all the ways the reviewer and author agree are not terribly interesting or helpful. A charitable, careful, and sharp disagreement is more beneficial to readers, I think, and also more fun and challenging to write—throughout this entire exercise I've been trying to figure out how to simultaneously convey my admiration for what Bahnsen has said with my concerns that what he hasn't said actually undermines much of what he does say.

The second point is that I actually think David's own book invites this kind of critique. One of the key framing arguments of the entire book is that we live in a deeply lonely, deeply anxious world and much of this is because, he argues, we lack a proper understanding of work. So recovering a robust vision of the goodness of work will help restore the social bonds that have begun to fray in recent years. So far as that goes, I think he's right.

But the robust vision of work we need isn't limited to helping people find meaning and purpose in their marketplace work, important as that sometimes is. We also need to recover a broader conception of work, such that some of us can find meaning and contentment in unremunerated caregiving work and others can recognize the debt we owe to caregivers and gladly offer them our support, including our money. We need ways of recognizing how marketplace work itself is often disordered and isolating, and we need arguments for why marketplace work (and the firms it profits) must be accountable to the claims of other forms of human community.

In focusing so much on marketplace work, to the neglect of other work, I think David's book has itself suffered from a lack of ambition. It is relatively easy, I think, to imagine a world in which wage earners are more motivated and devoted to their work than many today are. It is harder to imagine a world in which work of many kinds is valued and supported, in which the marketplace is but one locus of human community and is, in fact, accountable to others, and in which accomplishment is not the chief measure of human value or worth.