In this note, I am reflecting on the Faith at Work movement, which is aimed at integrating one’s work with their values and spiritual/religious beliefs and which is discussed in The Atlantic’s article titled Finding Jesus at Work.
First of all, this article brought to my attention the fact that one of the fundamental causes of why the Faith at Work movement has been growing is because many people do not have sufficient social support networks outside of work (e.g. at church, in the family, or community) yet they long to belong to a particular community, which their work can provide.
Why do more and more companies start offering access to chaplains as an employee benefit? Of course, this is done to help increase company’s profits: such benefits could potentially facilitate lower turnover rates, increased levels of focus, and reduction in stress-related illnesses. While companies might market such benefits as wanting their employees to have the opportunity to bring their whole selves to work and to find meaning and purpose, at the end of the day such initiatives are implemented with the goal of increasing profits. This point connects back to a talk I attended as part of my ethics class at Princeton last week. The speaker, Chief Financial Officer at a major bank, discussed how he debated whether he should publicly choose a stance on a particular social issue saying that choosing one side of the question would necessarily lead to losing some clients/shareholders, etc. who oppose this point of view and therefore negatively affect the business. The speaker therefore perceived engaging in social justice issues as an important personal calling that can often go against the usual business optimization formula of profit maximization. Yet to me it seems that in current political and cultural climate, it would be more damaging to a company to not choose a stance on a particular issue at all since there can be a lot of pressure from the public to speak up. Further, note that many of the recent events— such as George Floyd’s murder, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, etc. — are not really in the ethically gray zone and so picking a stance on such questions and articulating it should be straightforward and in fact beneficial to the company from the financial perspective, among others.
Going back to the question of companies bringing chaplains to work, the social services that the chaplains provide are there to increase a company’s productivity and thus financial returns. In addition, this practice can provide an avenue for turning a company’s employees into evangelists, i.e. making the employees more loyal towards the company as they become more reliant on the company’s benefits for addressing issues in their personal/spiritual lives and even for finding meaning and life purpose. I don’t know if this and other Faith at Work initiatives do in fact help create a symbiotic relationship between an employer and an employee —with the employer maximizing their profits and the employee bettering their health (physical, psychological, spiritual) — or if such initiatives primarily benefit the employer while creating an illusion of the employee benefitting substantially too. We know that religion can be misused and misinterpreted to manipulate people, and so the question of bringing a religious aspect to work, as opposed to offering counseling, psychological, and other benefits, should be investigated further.