The third chapter of Genesis describes God saying as a covenant curse, "'Cursed is the ground because of you, through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.'" "'If a man will not work, he shall not eat,'" Paul says in 2 Thessalonians 3:10. These are several parts of the Bible most relevant to the morality of work. If theft is sinful, as the Bible so clearly states on multiple occasions, then some sort of work either directly with nature or set up by other people is necessary to some extent so that a person can live without unjustly taking from others what belongs to them. But what of people who go further than this and asininely think professional work is some existentially, morally, and psychologically capstone of life?
Someone who has a gratuitously--and thus irrationally--high regard for professional work is more likely to overlook the genuine moral flaws of successful or socially important industries and companies, be less thoughtful about trading away massive parts of their life to a job even when they do not need to go quite as far as they do, and erroneously look down on others for not having a specific kind of job. The personal ramifications are clear, as are the philosophical ramifications: a person who thinks work grants humans some special metaphysical status by comparison to others believes this based on nothing but assumptions and non sequitur fallacies.
If someone is able to survive with whatever job they have and is still looked down on by someone else, the latter person has embraced philosophically flawed ideas about the significance of work, leaping into stupidity that is most likely to be associated with conservative evangelicalism. No one gets this arrogant stance from reason or the Bible, so it must be personal delusions or cultural pressures that led to it. It is rather obvious to any Christian who reads the Bible thoroughly and does not make assumptions about its texts that, since anything not in some way prescribed by the Bible is a matter of pure subjective preference (Deuteronomy 4:2), working for an income does not have to involve anything more than the bare minimum effort to not be incompetent and thus forfeit the job. Any attitude or effort beyond this can only be supererogatory.
Even the limited extent to which the Bible demands that able people work for a living is only as it is because theft and apathy to the point of allowing oneself to unnecessarily die are unacceptable on the Christian worldview, which is the only reason Biblical theology calls for people to work in order to make a living in the first place. Otherwise, the only reason to engage in any sort of work, professional or not, is for practical benefit or subjective self-expression. It is not as if having a job that earns income is a moral necessity in itself! It is not even practically necessary to have a professional source of income in order to survive, as people can live by growing their own food, building their own shelter with environmental as opposed to purely artificial material, and so on.
There is nothing morally praiseworthy about treating a job as anything more than a temporary means to the end of survival, as if apart from this, someone would be sinning if they neither cared about professional work nor had a standard job. They would not be, at least not according to the moral standard of the Bible. The conservative Christians who talk and think about professional work as if it has some special moral nature are just victims of their own fallacies. If a person can survive without a job and wanted to live that way, there is nothing sinful about them doing do. Work is hardly the height of philosophy and human life in any way.
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