Christians and “Hustle Culture”

June 24, 2021

If your personal Facebook profile is anything like mine, then it lays abandoned in a frozen, lonely corner of the internet, a relic of college days long gone. It’s a tomb that enshrines pictures of weekend trips, church retreats, and just random tomfoolery with friends.

I crack open its doors every so often to let the moths out. When I do, I inevitably fall down the rabbit hole of reading posts from people I used to know from church when I still believed. I discussed here my favorite kind of Facebook posts to read from these old friends, which entertain me in a morbid way.

But there’s another kind of post that makes me cringe almost as hard: the posts from people who are caught up in a multi-level marketing schemes.

I’m pretty sure some of these pyramid schemes were developed by Christians for Christians. Back in the day, it was called a “home business” and was usually something simple that the stay-at-home mom could do to earn extra income. This pursuit of money was okay because she purchased the license to sell the product from a Christian, or the company was run by Christians, or whatever.

These days the latest trend for Christian pyramid schemes is health products. Someone tries the product, likes it and gets results, and then decides they want to become a rep for the product so they can sell it (and earn additional income for their family). The company that makes the product earns most of its revenue from selling licenses to sell the product to reps than from selling the actual product itself. So what you end up with is a Facebook news feed full of people who are all reps for the same product, shilling it on their profiles despite the fact that all their friends are also reps doing the exact same thing. There’s no one to sell the actual product to and the company that sold all the licenses to these people makes out like a bandit.

This has become more prevalent these days due to “hustle culture.” If you’ve never heard that term, it’s essentially a movement that promotes extreme work ethic toward your goals and self improvement, usually for the purpose of earning extra money.

I was already out of the Church for the rise and fall of hustle culture, but as usual, I liked to keep an eye on it for my own morbid and twisted pleasure. I like to watch a trend rise and then watch its subsequent fall when the new trend is to come out against the first trend.

As best I can tell, this wave of hustle culture sprouted up when Christian blogger and writer Rachel Hollis rose to fame. She initially went viral with an Instagram post that showed off her stretch marks in a bikini. This is a great message, but Hollis capitalized on this popularity by releasing books not about body positivity, but rather hustling and working hard to accomplish your goals.

These books sold tons of copies and the hustle culture within the Christian community was born. If you weren’t creating content, online marketing, or signing up for pyramid schemes, then you weren’t trying hard enough.

That burned out fast. It didn’t take long for these same content creators to turn around and denounce hustle culture by invoking Bible verses about the Sabbath and talking about how all their hustle burned them out and left them with no time to spend with God. And just as quickly as it came, hustle culture went.

But why did hustle culture resonate so much with the Christian community? Usually Christians obsess over celebrity pastors or Christian musicians who get their music played on secular radio. What was with this sudden fascination with business and making money?

Well, as I’ve said before both here and in my book, a life lived under the umbrella of fundamentalist religion wreaks havoc on your financial life. I actually think it’s one of the more damaging aspects of fundamentalism that isn’t talked about nearly enough.

Even if your church didn’t directly screw you over financially, it still taught lots of damaging things about money: that money is the root of all evil, yet it’s needed to survive in the real word, yet pursuing it means you’re not relying on God. It’s complicated.

With the rise of hustle culture, it was like Christians finally felt they had permission to pursue money without feeling guilty about it.

And you know what? I think that’s a good thing—except for when their chosen money making strategy is a pyramid scheme.

When I went through my own deconstruction, I quickly realized I didn’t make enough money for the life I honestly wanted to live. I made enough to survive and get by, but I’d always been taught that I was supposed to rely on God for the rest and that wanting more money made me a greedy asshole.

After ceasing to believe that, I realized that any money that was to enter my life would be the direct result of my own actions.

And so I chose a period of time to hustle.

This was one of my favorite parts of my deconstruction: relying on my own skills, knowledge, and abilities to build additional income sources into my life. I got to give a big middle finger to “God’s provision” and provide for myself.

(No, this blog isn’t that income source. I have an entirely separate project that has nothing to do with faith deconstruction at all).

I think this is a really important step of the deconstruction process that most people don’t talk about. When you sit down and think of the ideal life you want to live post deconstruction, you must at some point determine if you can afford it. Not being able to afford it doesn’t mean you’re not meant to live that life or that you shouldn’t pursue it. It just means that building the income sources that’ll allow you to afford your ideal life should be a part of your deconstruction. Christians are the ones who, when they want something they can’t afford, shrug and pray that God will deliver it to them. I didn’t want to be that guy anymore and I don’t want that for you either.

Being able to actually afford your ideal life post-deconversion is so important that I included practical step-by-step instructions on how to build additional income sources in my book. And no, it has nothing to do with the crappy pyramid schemes that many Christians fall for.

So if you’ve deconverted from your religion and discover you can’t yet afford the ideal life you’ve envisioned for yourself, maybe a “season” of hustle is something you should consider.