Today's NYT Magazine story: Faith at work

[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


snip

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.''

snip

...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.

snip

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.''

[chaz4jazz]

1. Sorry - I scanned the magazine article

Could not find a reference to Curves.

[ikojo]

2. Please see the second paragraph that I

snipped from the article....It references companies and government departments that have made room for fundie Christianity.

Here is the part of the article that references Curves...

...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.

[izzie]

3. This does not shock me.I was in a co-op that was like this

They got together and Prayed to JC that they made money. When it first was done I started to laugh and a friend aimed me off. Said after 'they believe it but watch your back' Us un-believers, in JC lack of being able to do this, finally left the co-op and in the next year we sort of made up mind to open our own store. We were taken to court by the Godly ones for doing this. They were very hard people to deal with. Their way of business was lets say odd in all things and then they would put God in as an OK reason for doing it.It is so hard to deal with people who say God gives him the rights to do any thing. It will come down to this if history re-peats itself when Churches take over.

[Ruffhowse]

4. Fundies are very dangerous people-overzealous cultist robots always are.

I believe WWIII will be a religious war between the fundies and the rest of us.

[punpirate]

5. In the very early `80s...

... with the strong rise of televangelism and Reagan's pandering to the religious right, I began to see things like "The Christian Yellow Pages" which encouraged people of Christian faith to only patronize, if possible, Christian-owned businesses.

That trend simply kept on going.

Workplaces are owned by people, and they're entitled to set their own standards within the law.

But, the place where we've seen this phenomenon become destructive is in politics and government, and no more openly and grossly than with Bush's administration. When Bush is voted out, and I am increasingly convinced that he will be, you can count on the religious right to say that his disenfranchisement was the product of evil intentions. There will be very few among them suggesting that it was "God's will."

They've embraced him because he evangelizes on their behalf, and promotes their views. And, look what's happened to the country in the process. I don't think anyone outside of the religious right believes that Bush's faith has improved the country--or improved the public's perceptions of Christianity.