Religion after work: Christianity, morality, and serious leisure

Through extended retirement, unemployment or underemployment, expanding joblessness is changing the traditional hierarchical balance between work and earned leisure. This chapter explores the implications of such changes in the context of established religious and moral systems, particularly Protestant Christianity, which has been connected to conventional capitalist ideologies of work since Max Weber’s ‘Protestant Ethic’ thesis. Focusing on the concept of ‘serious leisure’, in which an individual makes a systematic commitment to a leisure pursuit, this chapter uses the case study of church-facilitated youth-focused action sports projects in South Africa to explore the ethical challenges of a leisure-driven life. Embodying an autotelic approach to life, emphasizing commitment to one’s own actions, emotions and outcomes, serious leisure can promote a form of neoliberal self-governance. Through its autotelic ethic, serious leisure may be more capable of fulfilling the ideological values of work promoted by earlier Protestant and secular ‘bourgeois’ work ethics, such as authenticity.