Who are the “salt of the earth”? The working class, the poor, the ordinary people who sustain the world through unrecognized labor and quiet endurance.
We get this phrase from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:13, where Jesus is alluding to the high value of salt in the Judeo-Roman economy. It was so valuable that Roman soldiers were paid with it, giving us the word “salary,” from the Latin “sal” for salt. Salt is valuable because it preserves and gives flavor, so Jesus uses it as a metaphor for his disciples’ role in the world. Today, Christians take this to mean that we are called to maintain our distinctiveness and integrity while engaging with the world in ways that promote justice, love, and compassion.
But is that what the world remembers from Jesus’s words? For most of us, “salt of the earth” has class connotations. That’s not the full story for Christians, but without it, what good are we? We might as well be salt that’s lost its saltiness.
I gained a couple of brownie points for tagging along on this after-school activity with Christine. The teachers called me a good sport, and the students whispered, giggled, and stared; it’s like they got to see behind the scenes of a tv show and they were pretty excited. A couple even bent over backwards to wiggle their ways into a conversation with me.
I really didn’t mind being there. Christine was right to lure me with the prospect of photo ops, and I was just happy to hang out after two nights away. I also enjoyed the contrast in work cultures that heading there as soon as I got back gave me; a spiritualized neoliberalism in the morning, and a proletarian ‘let’s just get through this night and maybe have some fun with it’ in the evening.
Salt preserves and gives flavor; workers sustain life and make history possible. Salt also tastes great with pepper and garlic on the signature wings they serve here.
“Salt of the earth” in its modern usage carries a tension: it risks romanticizing passivity, reifying the exploited as virtuous sufferers rather than potential agents of transformation. But “salt” has other properties; the metaphor invites re-appropriation.
The salt of the earth is a ferment: alive, subversive, resistant to being merely dissolved into the blandness of capitalist order. Salt controls microbial activity. It inhibits harmful bacteria that could spoil food, while allowing salt-tolerant, beneficial microbes (like lactobacillus) to thrive. Salt pulls moisture from plant cells through osmosis, creating a brine. This salty environment becomes the perfect setting for fermentation to happen safely and steadily.
Salt doesn’t start fermentation, but it shapes and protects the process, guiding it in a safe and productive direction. That’s why the metaphor of salt can carry a rich political meaning: not as the loudest or most adventurous force, but as the quiet agent that shapes and safeguards transformation over time.
To be salt, then, is not just to endure the world as it is, spicing up whatever circumstances we find ourselves in, but to preserve the possibility of what it might become.