The vanishing worker

When the federal government shut down and furloughed so-called “non-essential employees” on Oct. 1, its Bureau of Labor Statistics couldn’t issue the usual monthly jobs report. Yet sometimes the absence of data reveals as much as the data itself, pointing to another absence: working-age men not working.

The American workforce has long faced a quiet crisis: About 7 million men of prime working age—25 to 54—are neither working nor seeking, up from about 5 million in the 1990s. This persistent trend signals a broader societal issue—disconnection from the purpose of work.

We may have stopped noticing. Wealth manager David Bahnsen thinks that’s exactly the problem. “The problem isn’t a shortage of jobs,” he told me. “It’s a collapse of will.”

At a recent WORLD Stage event in Houston, Bahnsen made the case that every human being is created to be a worker—a producer, a co-creator with God. “The number of non-essential workers,” he told our audience, “is always and forever zero.” In his view, God made every person to build, to serve, to make something of the world.

That conviction anchors his book Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life. Work, he writes, was not invented after the Fall to punish. It began in Eden. Before there was sweat or scarcity, there was a command: “Rule and subdue.” God left the world unfinished, Bahnsen says, for humans to finish it—turn raw material into beauty and order. As he says, we were made to “draw out the potential of creation.”

Bahnsen’s strength lies in uniting economic realism with creational theology. He refuses to treat “ministry” as holier than managing a balance sheet. Drawing on Genesis 1–2 and echoing Dorothy Sayers, he argues that with productive work—the making of things, the meeting of needs—we participate in God’s creative purpose.

Bahnsen’s point isn’t that productivity defines a person, but that creative labor expresses what it means to be human. Work is not a curse to be managed; it’s a gift to be ordered. When men lose the habit of work, they lose something that no amount of leisure can replace.

The evidence of that loss is clear in the data. According to the Federal Reserve, the labor-force participation rate for prime-age men has declined almost steadily since 1990—a drop spanning roughly 35 years. During that span, the percentage of these men neither working nor looking for work has increased from about 8% to more than 11%. In a country this big, the change means millions of souls.

Bahnsen sees idleness as a moral malady: “Almost any marriable young man is employable, and almost any employable young man is marriable.” The breakdown of work and family feeds on itself—unemployed men become unmarriable; fatherless boys grow up without models of diligence. It’s a spiritual feedback loop.

That’s why Bahnsen pushes back on the pulpit cliché “You are not what you do.” Of course work shapes identity: “Nobody pictures Michael Jordan and doesn’t picture a basketball player.” Churches, he adds, often warn against overwork while ignoring under-work—a more common sin. Work is not everything, but it is one of the ways we image God. To strip it of dignity is to strip humanity of design.

He extends that logic to economics. Markets are moral goods precisely because they channel our creative impulses into mutual blessing: “In a free market, we can’t make our life better without making someone else’s life better.”

Properly ordered, exchange itself becomes a form of love—service rendered through skill.

Bahnsen can sound almost defiant in a culture that prizes victimhood over vocation. He rejects the phrase work-life balance as a false dichotomy: “No one goes home saying, ‘Honey, I can’t talk right now—I’m doing marriage-life balance.’” His humor disarms, but his point is serious. Work is not the enemy of life; done rightly, it’s one of its expressions.

Trade-offs, he says, are built into creation itself. The goal isn’t to escape them but to order them rightly—productivity without pride, ambition without idolatry, rest without retreat. Forget that, and a nation loses more than output. It loses a piece of its soul, because when people stop working, they lose sight of the One whose image they bear.

Economic statistics alone can’t measure what’s really missing. Bahnsen isn’t offering a policy solution anyway. His point is simpler, and older: The dignity of work is a divine calling. He argues that the curse of the Fall lies in futility, not in the work God ordained before it.