140 - The Dream Betrayed: Religious Challenge of the Working Class

The Dream Betrayed: Religious Challenge of the Working Class
By Karen Bloomquist
Minneapolis, Fortress, 1990. 123 pp. $7.95.

This book challenges the churches to come to terms with the needs and struggles of the working class. The author writes from experience as a pastor in a working class parish, though she is now Director of Studies for the Commission for Church in Society of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Karen Bloomquist's thesis is that working people live by and for the American Dream, a dream of upward mobility and the assurance that either they or their children will advance through hard work. Economic reality today contradicts this dream. More and more workers are losing their jobs or being displaced into marginal service occupations. Moreover, working class people actually experience their work life as victimization by dominating forces beyond their control. Consequently, their real life is centered in home and family. It is private and individualized. Working people yearn for freedom from such control but tend to be resigned to their fate. The churches, according to the author, undergird this system of domination with their own theological and institutional structures of hierarchy. They also lend support to privatization with their separation of spirituality from public life.

The author argues for the unity of God's work and human cocreation, joining struggles for justice with the promise of healing through grace in faith. She reshapes her Lutheran heritage into a politically transformative dynamic for personal and public life.

This volume deals frankly with one of our taboo subjects: the crucial place of social class in America. Moreover, it brings out the idolatrous character of the American Dream with its ultimate faith in the self-made person and in salvation through achievements in work without regard for the fate of one's neighbors.

142 - The Dream Betrayed: Religious Challenge of the Working Class

However, the author leaves the troubling question unasked: Can any authentic form of Christianity make peace with this dream? One comes away from the book asking whether the betrayal is the failure of America to deliver on the dream or the dream itself? The author performs a real service in clearing the way for these difficult questions.

Gibson Winter,
Temple University,
Philadelphia, Pa.