The faith-at-work movement finds a home

The idea, instead, is to spread ethical business practices throughout an organization by modeling Christian principles of fairness, firmness, openness, inclusiveness and responsiveness. If colleagues and subordinates admire the way you do things and open the door to a discussion of Jesus and salvation, that’s terrific, leaders of the movement say, but most of them insist it’s not their overriding objective.

Graves’ company, for example, runs parallel leaderships programs, one Christian-themed and one secular. But the goals are the same.

“I run into a lot of people who are not churched at all,” he said. “But you know what? Once you start talking about the concepts of integrity and ethics and morality and care and excellence and skills and serving — a leader likes those terms. Every executive I know likes those terms.”

David Roth, who runs WorkMatters, acknowledges that his ministry is “very explicitly Christian,” but he stresses that “the first business of business is business.” He believes ethics and responsibility can filter down from corporate leaders, whom he tells to “walk out your faith.”

Still, there is a great hunger in corporate America, especially after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the “ethics crash” of Enron Corp. and WorldCom, for a firmer moral compass. “I don’t believe in evangelizing the workplace,” Roth said, but “when you walk it from a behavioral perspective, now the doors start to open to invited evangelizing.”

“My market is unlimited,” he said.

Shining a light in dark corners
A handful of major companies highlight the religious underpinnings of their corporate values: ServiceMaster Co., parent of such cleaning brands as TruGreen ChemLawn and Terminix, proclaims that its first business objective is “to honor God in all we do”; Tyson includes a similar statement in its core values; CFA Properties has never allowed its Chick-Fil-A restaurants to open on Sunday.

But even though many other of the biggest brand names in the country are clients of Cornerstone or similar consultancies, you will find no such explicit reference to God or religion in their literature.

That is precisely what troubles Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, a now-independent outgrowth of the American Civil Liberties Union. With companies like Tyson, ServiceMaster and the hamburger chain In-N-Out, which prints Bible passages on its sandwich wrappers, you know what you’re dealing with. But what goes on behind the scenes at companies whose leaders choose to remain quiet in public?

“There’s nothing wrong with proselytizing. We all have things we feel strongly about. We have every right to try to convince other people to agree with us, to join us,” Maltby said in a telephone interview. “But it has to be a voluntary process. It’s not a voluntary conversion when the proselytizing comes from your boss.”

However, there are no clear-cut protections for workers who may resent overt evangelizing at work. “The law in this area is not very good,” said Maltby, who is a lawyer. “The law doesn’t generally recognize the subtle coercion that goes on in this area. ...

“If your boss held a prayer breakfast and you were fired for refusing to go, you’ve got a case under Title VII. If your boss holds a prayer breakfast and you go because you’re afraid to stay away, you probably don’t have a case.”

Leaders of the faith-at-work movement in Northwest Arkansas say their approach is different because they understand business. Roth said that while he and others are eager to “open the box” of faith in the workplace, “you have to introduce some realism. When you open that box, you have to open it for everyone.”

Even Ronnie Floyd, who is no shrinking violet when it comes to evangelizing, acknowledges that faith should not overshadow sound business practices.

But “it is fair to open doors” to faith on the job, he said. Just as people’s beliefs color how they vote and what they buy and whom they befriend, “you can’t separate faith in the workplace.”

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