Today's NYT Magazine story: Faith at work [View All]

[ikojo]

I worked for an insurance company here in St Louis and had a fundie Christian supervisor. When she found out I was Jewish she took that as an opportunity to score heaven points by converting a Jew. NO WAY, not this one. When I told her I didn't think it was proper to proselytize at work, she at first didn't know what the word proselytize meant. I told her the definition. She then said she was just sharing "Jesus" and saw nothing wrong with it. I was strong enough in MY Judaism and MY abilities to get a new job if I got fired for standing up to her (supervisors can come up with many reasons to put people on warning and fire them). I can totally see a new or younger employee feeling insecure about a job and fearful of standing up to a fundie supervisor. That is why, in power relationships at work, this mixing of religion and work is incredibly dangerous.

The fitness chain, Curves, is mentioned in this article. When I was at the insurance company, a co-worker had the book Curves gives to new members. All throughout the book are New Testament passages. I knew they didn't want me as a customer because those passages don't speak to me.


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/31/magazine/31FAITH.html


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The bank opened 18 months ago as a ''Christian financial institution,'' with a Bible buried in the foundation and the words ''In God We Trust'' engraved in the cornerstone. In that time, deposits have jumped from $5 million to more than $75 million. The phone rings; it's a woman from Minneapolis who has $1.5 million in savings and wants to transfer it here. ''I heard about the Christian bank,'' she tells Ripka, ''and I said, 'That's where I want my money.''' Because of people like her, Riverview is one of the fastest growing start-up banks in the state, and if you ask Ripka, who is a vice president, or his boss, the bank president, Duane Kropuenske, whose office wall features a large color print of two businessmen with Christ, or Gloria Oshima, a teller who prays with customers at the drive-up window, all will explain the bank's success in the same way. Jesus Christ has blessed them because they are obedient to his will. Jesus told them to take his word out of the church and bring it to where people interact: the marketplace.


...He's not literally a man of the cloth, but in the parlance of the initiated, he is a marketplace pastor, one node of a sprawling, vigorous faith-at-work movement. An auto-parts manufacturer in downtown Philadelphia. An advertising agency in Fort Lauderdale. An Ohio prison. A Colorado Springs dental office. A career-counseling firm in Portland, Ore. The Curves chain of fitness centers. American Express. Intel. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The I.R.S. The Pentagon. The White House. Thousands of businesses and other entities, from one-man operations to global corporations to divisions of the federal government, have made room for Christianity on the job, and in some cases have oriented themselves completely around Christian precepts. Well-established Christian groups, including the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the Promise Keepers, are putting money and support behind the movement. There are faith-at-work newsletters and blogs and books with titles like ''God@Work,'' ''Believers in Business'' and ''Loving Monday.''

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...According to the Gallup polling organization (which itself fits into the subject of this article, as George Gallup Jr. is an evangelical Christian who has called his work ''a kind of ministry''), 42 percent of Americans consider themselves evangelical or born again, and the aggressiveness with which some evangelicals are asserting their faith on the job suggests that the movement's impact, for better or worse, is going to come from them.

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A related factor is the surprisingly vague status of the workplace in the eyes of the law. You might think that the establishment clause of the First Amendment forbids religious expression in a federal workplace, but in 1997, President Clinton issued guidelines creating a broad area of religious freedom for federal employees, including the right to evangelize, while forbidding government endorsement of a religion. Curiously, the situation regarding corporations is less clear. Is a bank -- or a restaurant or a factory or a corporate headquarters -- in the public or the private realm? ''The separation of church and state is as firmly established as any doctrine can be, but the separation of corporation and state is not nearly as well defined,'' says Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. ''An issue like the role of religion in the workplace is fuzzy because we've never defined the public nature of a corporation. And I think many corporations themselves have been confused about how to deal with it.''