ABSTRACT
Drawing on participant observation and analysis of religiously-informed wage activism in the United States, this chapter focuses on how wage activism has changed in advanced capitalism and what crucial shifts must take place to challenge new forms of Empire in the political economy. In the end, wage activism must be embedded in larger worker justice movements that seek to reclaim citizenry, build bridges, pluralize politics and shift frames. When they do this work, they are reviving a resilient Christian tradition of seeing Jesus as one who disrupts the patron-client system and establishes instead an egalitarian discipleship that cultivates new leaders, new skills and new visions of equity for non-elites that cannot be contained by the dominant political economys.
