Religion and labor.

THERE IS AN unfortunate tendency in conservative circles to think ill of labor unions. This tendency will no doubt be aggravated in 1984 because the AFL-CIO under the masterful Lane Kirkland is so strenuously supporting Walter Mondale and so strongly opposed to Ronald Reagan. Yet to give in to this tendency would be a mistake.

Laboring people tend to be quite "liberal" on matters affecting the labor unions, their jobs, their paychecks, and their security. Well they should be. But they tend also to be family people, oriented toward "conservative" social and moral values, and profoundly realistic both about power politics in the world and about the deceptive illusions of totalitarian ideologies. In foreign policy, I would trust labor-union leaders ahead of bankers 99 per cent of the time.

It is possible, indeed, that one contribution Jewish and Catholic intellectuals, in particular, bring to conservative politics is a deep respect for labor. This is true of some Protestants, too. Yet there is a deep tendency in Protestant cultures of a certain sort to value the "individual" so highly--and to reject even the suspicion of "collectivism"--that labor unions are made to seem somehow foreign.

In 1891, Pope Leo XIII came close, in his preparation for issuing his great encyclical, Rerum Novarum, to condemning Catholic participation in the labor unions of the North Atlantic nations, since they were then often dominated by the anti-religious tendencies of Continental socialists and Communists. This was not true in Great Britain, where the Methodists were in the forefront of labor, especially in Wales. It was emphatically not true in the United States, where the Catholic Knights of Labor kept the American Catholic Church in close and living contact with labor. One of the great acts of Baltimore's Cardinal Gibbons was to encourage LeO XIII to speak affirmatively of the labor movement, which the Pope emphatically did.

The Catholic and the Jewish traditions, as the great Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr often observed, have a stronger and more immediate sense of the communitarian nature of human life than the Protestant tradition. For one thing, Catholics and Jews for a variety of historical reasons have learned to trust the family more than any other institution. Under various persecutions or foreign occupations, many of them, too, have developed a strong sense of peoplehood--a recognition that the good of the individual rises or falls with the good of the whole people.

This instinct is not the same thing as collectivism; it includes a very strong love for individual opportunity and individual merit, and strong emotional resistance to the use of quotas and group entitlements. Has no one noticed that the much-defamed but immensely admirable panel of members added by President Reagan to the Civil Rights Commission is disproportionately Jewish and Catholic?

Common Goals

UNEMPLOYMENT is a profound emotional as well as financial blow to family-centered peoples. It knocks all family financial planning and all dreams of improvement for parents and children to smithereens, and it seems so unfairly unrelated to personal merit. It violates one's fundamental faith in the nation and its values. One must recognize clearly that unemployment--especially in the highly industrialized states, where Jews and Catholics tend to be concentrated--is morally repulsive, at far deeper levels than merely economic thinking reveals.

Conservative thinkers of a literary bent, with few exceptions (Robert Nisbet is a towering example), tend not to take labor into account when they speak of the "organic connectedness" of life and decry many of the atomizing forces of modernity. And one of the other powerful streams of conservative thought, more favorable to capitalism, seems to grasp for more quickly the glory and the risks of venturesome investors and entrepreneurs than the hazards of labor.

This is a mistake. The spirit of any political economy is no stronger than the sense among its workers of security, satisfaction, loyalty, and commitment to work of high quality. Conservative thinkers have every possible motivation--except historical tendency--to give more thought and effort to the world view of laborers. Surely, on the "social issues," conservatives of today are closer to labor than is the "new class" of publicists that has become so powerful in the Democratic Party. Finally, in their commitment to economic growth and a competitive international economy, conservatives and labor have much in common.

President Reagan made some very large mistakes in the opening year of his Administration in losing the contact with labor he had gained in his 1980 campaign. And there are not enough conservative thinkers paying attention to labor and coming to labor's aid and defense. Several conservative publicists--Pat Buchanan especially, Bill Gavin, the somewhat more erratic Kevin Phillips, and even Richard Viguerie--make a point of valuing "Joe Sixpack" and the view from the corner bar. But there are not enough such. A conservative movement without labor, including labor unions, is a ship without a hull, a plane without engines, an auto without "Made in U.S.A."

Conservatives facing labor need to "get religion" quick. Nothing is better for workers than to have both liberals and conservatives vying to include them; and that would be good for the soul of the nation, too.