The Bible Says ‘Don’t Work, Don’t Eat’: Does That Hold Up in the Data?
(ANALYSIS) So, there’s this verse you sometimes hear in an evangelical worship service. It’s from 2 Thessalonians 3:10: “For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”
From my experience, it’s not one you hear all that often, but it definitely comes up when discussions about government welfare arise. It’s usually cited in defense of free-market capitalism and a smaller government.
That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of biblical passages that discourage laziness. For instance, Proverbs 21:25 says, “The craving of a sluggard will be the death of him, because his hands refuse to work.”
So, there’s a clear message in both the Old and New Testaments that people should work if they’re able.
Well, if you’ve been around here for a while, you can probably guess where this is going: is it true that religious people are more likely to have jobs than non-religious folks? The variable in question comes from the 2024 Cooperative Election Study: “How many jobs do you have?” There are four possible response options — zero, one, two or three or more.
I’ve never really played around with data like that before, so I figured I’d start by giving you a sense of what it looks like before diving into the religious part of the equation. For example, here’s the share of respondents who say they have zero jobs, broken down by their year of birth.
It should come as little surprise that almost everyone born before 1940 has no job — those folks are in their eighties, for goodness’ sake. But among people born around 1950 (which puts them in their mid-70s), about 10% still have a job.
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Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.