In defence of the middle class?

Even the middle class tends to be very judgemental of the middle class. However, there is a reason why this class has expanded to include such a large percentage of the population. It is because it is actually what most people want; and in some ways, that is not a bad thing. A lot of biblical values do lead into a lifestyle that looks something like the middle class. Such values can, of course, be corrupted or used to serve selfish ends; but not everything about being middle class is bad. It is worth considering what we may want to preserve.

For instance, education is good. Christianity has always promoted literacy and learning; we worship a God who speaks and gives us his word, and who expects us to work to listen and understand. Christians have always built schools and preserved written sources. Education also helps people have more secure and interesting work lives. For all that the current university system is criticised and its failings acknowledged, it is still the case that having a degree means having a higher income; not an absolute value, but something that is good to have. It is reasonable to want people to have the financial benefits of education (bringing warmth, health and freedom from the stress of poverty) as well as the intellectual and emotional benefits. It is good for people to have some choices and the ability to thrive and develop their gifts. The power that goes along with this is a healthy power that can be used for good. We do not want people to be ground down by their situation.

There are good things about being middle-class; and becoming a Christian is at least part of what, historically and in the present, drives the creation of the middle class. Becoming Christian makes lives more ordered and moral. It teaches people to oppose drug use and alcohol abuse, it sees priority given to looking after children and teaching them well, it values faithfulness and truthfulness and hard work. These things can all be practiced in any class situation, but it often leads to the kind of upwardly-mobile society that develops a middle class. It is not surprising that working class Christians often become more middle class, and their children even more so. And that’s not entirely a bad thing.

It’s only since I came to faith in Jesus that I have started working full-time for the first time in my life, and now I take financial responsibility for my family in a legal way (Rob, early 40s).[1]

Academic studies have shown that faith has an objective effect on the ability to take on middle-class aspirations such as university education. For instance, faith helps British Black African Caribbean men achieve academically, because it helps them to overcome lack of middle-class educational habitus.

Middle-class players are more dominant within the field of education, as they enter the educational poker game in a more privileged capital position due to the habitus-formation process of their upbringing and family connections.[2]

For a working-class person, who did not grow up with middle-class assumptions embedded into their family and schooling, the higher education system can be extremely daunting. If reading books is not normal and praiseworthy, it can be a hard habit – not to mention skill – to acquire. How to listen to a lecture, how to take notes, how to understand what is required from an essay question – these can be real barriers. University teachers and educational research certainly take more notice of such issues now than in the past, but there are still a host of cultural assumptions and difficulties that make university life objectively much harder for someone from a working-class background.

[P]lacing a working-class habitus in a middle-class education system increases the likelihood of alienation and conflict for working-class students … In some cases, BACM culture is removed from White middle-class behaviourally accepted norms within the education field, which can lead to isolation of these students within such educational fields. However, it is suggested that faith may be an influential poker chip that can assist BACM to reduce some of the imbalance they experience in the educational poker game field.[3]

In other words, faith acts as a resource, or a kind of capital, that can help students with a working-class habitus ‘to address challenges and manage and/or acclimate within these environments’.[4] This can happen in five ways:

1. Faith as a motivator and a form of protection from destructive behaviours.
2. Church and faith as a source of skill acquisition, application and support.
3. Faith participation and protective and aspirational influences.
4. Parents, faith and effects associated with prayer.
5. Faith’s influence on civil society and community-focused goals.[5]

Going to church in itself can help with obtaining an educational habitus; the practice of sitting and listening to a sermon, being able to concentrate for that long and absorb a linear and (hopefully) logical flow of ideas is good training for education. Such skills are transferable to other contexts. Other ways in which working-class students testify that church helped their education was that ‘religious beliefs developed their character through discipline, respect and morality’. One student added that the church ‘acted as a network of support for him after his father’s death, which upholds previous research findings on the supportive benefits that faith may provide’.[6] Another learned:

How to read something and get some meaning out of it. How to communicate that succinctly to somebody else in public. And what was effective. You know like the idea of giving a speech or talking in public about something.[7]

US research has found that young Black people from socio-economically deprived backgrounds who attended church services and youth groups were helped in their education. If we think in terms of social and cultural capital, church can give these kinds of capital even when a person’s class background does not. This can help young people in behaviours and practices that are beneficial for educational settings.

Another quality that was seen to come from attending church was the ability to delay gratification.

I think because everybody (pause) everyone looked at things in a very short-term manner. They wanted everything instantly. This culture of instant gratification. Like quick money. You know get things quickly. They never thought long term. Most of the people around me ( . . . ) always thought about the now rather than the future. And from that you’ve got a lot of people who ( . . . ) were just working in order to just spend on material things like clothes, trainers. [But] ( . . . ) when I started getting into my church I found youths who were very long-term thinkers ( . . . ) and they knew what they wanted. And I wanted to be one of those people, you know. I wanted to know what I wanted.[8]

Do we want Christians to be middle class? Yes, in some ways, we do. There are good things about typical middle-class attributes such as the valuing of education, of hard work, of ordered lives, and of a certain quality of culture. Indeed, society in general appears to agree:

It's not just the church but society [that] wants people to be middle class, often even working-class people, or they want what middle-class people have got ... media portrays the lower working class in such a way that it's so undesirable; who wants to become a chav?[9]

Yet is it really necessary to be middle-class to have these things? Changing class is costly, in energy, in personal dislocation, and in relationships. It is emotionally costly. What is more, while we want to promote the educational skills that help in understanding the Bible, there is no requirement that these be translated into secular education and social mobility. The status achieved in this way can be challenged by the gospel itself. There are alternative ways to think of what a successful life is. There are certainly Christian advantages in helping people to stay where they are:

I'm living here to serve Jesus, no one else is going to do it so we are going to do it, so we are going to stay here. And that's something I try to, so some of my sermons are just encouraging people to stay living on the estate and say let's glorify God in this place.[10]

There is a good deal to be said in developing a new, working-class way of being a genuine Bible-based Christian; in gaining a sense of status and worth from God’s salvation rather than from societal ideas of upward mobility. We want people to live godly and quiet lives, obeying God’s commands and teaching each other the gospel. But it is not necessary to adopt all the manners and habits of the middle class in order to do so. The trick is separating out what is middle-class and what is actually Christian.

Do we want working-class Christians to become middle-class? In some ways, we do. In other ways, we do not. We should certainly not assume that the fact that the gospel and church-going can teach an ability to become middle-class that this is therefore the goal for all Christians. That is an assumption that, as we have seen, makes it harder for working class people to become Christians. We don’t want people to feel too uncomfortable at church, or in Christian groups, to walk in. That’s as bad as the 1 Corinthians 14:23 problem, where Paul chastised the church for being so disorderly that outsiders coming in think the church members are out of their minds.

Is that what we do to non-middle-class people who come into our churches? It seems that, at least in some cases, we are.

I had to go through a bloody culture war first, something that very few people back then understood, and nobody had warned me about. It turns out that there really is a great cost to following Jesus.[11]

We do not want people to have to go through an unnecessary culture war simply in order to be Christian. That is to tie millstones around converts' necks. People should not be made to feel unwelcome.

At the same time, there is a cost to following Jesus, and part of comfortable middle-class Christianity is to make that cost invisible for middle-class Christians. They were nice, polite people before; and they continue nice, polite people afterwards. Whatever class we are from, our churches probably could do more to make being Christian distinctive. Maybe it would be better for a lot of middle-class Christians if they did face a cost to becoming Christian. We certainly need to challenge the unconscious greed and selfish ambition that is so comfortably accepted in evangelical churches, and such a normal thing to teach children. It is good for there to be a cost to following Jesus; it forces Christians to be conscious about their priorities. It is a way to prove that faith is genuine.

NB: A word about communication

The English middle class are often described, criticised, derided and caricatured as being unable to express what they really mean. I have heard this from commentators of all classes, including the middle classes themselves. Sometimes it’s put positively; middle classes prioritise not hurting people’s feelings, whereas the working classes prioritize honesty.

I’m not sure that’s the right way to put it. Middle-class people can be honest and they do express what they mean. You just have to understand the language in which it is expressed.[12] And working-class people are concerned for feelings; they are honest in the interest of people’s feelings.

Middle-class people, for instance, will very openly let you know when you have outstayed your welcome. They will never do it, however, by saying ‘it’s time to go home now’. They will do it by other means, for instance, offering a second cup of tea. And this is very clearly understood, too, as I discovered when time after time my lunch guests would leave when I offered them a second cup of tea. I was usually dismayed; for me, it was a way of trying to extend their stay because I wanted them there. I just didn’t yet know the language. Once it was explained to me, I knew; and I eventually realised that the way to accomplish my goal, to express what I really meant (that they should stay longer), was by suggesting we go for an after-lunch ramble. That was usually very well-received, and would be followed by more tea.

It was a learning experience for me. I was not part of a class war, so for the most part I found it interesting and amusing rather than offensive and frustrating. When I listen to cross-class conversation between British people, however, offense and frustration are more common.

Working-class people are different from the middle class. They will express what they mean in more direct sentences. This does not mean they are favouring honesty over feelings, or don’t care about feelings. They just express their honest meaning differently; and they will care for people’s feelings by addressing them directly. (In many ways, the upper class do as well.)

The British classes are so different that we need to have a mindset of cross-cultural ministry, requiring learning a new language. This may help to overcome some of the mutual antagonism.

[1] Quoted in Mez McConnell, The Least the Last and the Lost: Understanding Poverty in the UK and the Responsibility of the Local Church, Evangelical Press, 2021, p. 80. Mez McConnell is one of several working-class commentators on the church who became a Christian and became middle class, in the sense of becoming educated and owning a home. His ministry on the Nidrie scheme has seen people get work, retrain, and go to university (p. 429).

[2] Constantino Dumangane Jr, ‘The significance of faith for Black men’s educational aspirations’ British Educational Research Journal, 43.5, 2017, pp. 875–903, p. 878.

[3] Dumangane, p. 879.

[4] Dumangane, p. 880.

[5] Dumangane, p. 887. Dumangane also mentions that ‘Excessive drinking as a social event at university was another factor that four of the six participants’ narratives discussed being able to avoid due to their faith involvement on campus’ p. 889. However, I have found that in many contexts, middle-class evangelical Christians drink quite a lot.

[6] Dumangane, p. 890. We should be encouraged that long sermons are a good thing; we can help attention spans increase, rather than reducing sermon length and depth to catch attention.

[7] Dumangane, p. 890. This, of course, only holds if people are given the chance – and encouragement – to take on leadership in church contexts.

[8] Dumangane, p. 891. See also Cheron Byfield ‘The impact of religion on the educational achievement of Black boys: A UK and USA study’ British Journal of Sociology of Education 2008, 29.2, 189-199.

[9] Joanne McKenzie, ‘'The Person God Made Me to Be': Navigating Working-Class and Christian Identities in English Evangelical Christianity’ Sociological Research Online, 22.1, 1-11, p. 9.

[10] Joanne McKenzie, ‘'The Person God Made Me to Be': Navigating Working-Class and Christian Identities in English Evangelical Christianity’ Sociological Research Online, 22.1, 1-11, p. 9.

[11] McConnell, p. 15.

[12] I was greatly helped by linguist Deborah Tannen in this respect (see her DVD That’s not what I meant!). She explains that people of all cultures are quite capable of expressing exactly what they mean; but you need to understand the language styles of different cultures to be able to hear what they mean.