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- [00:04]
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Employers that we have interviewed and surveyed are likely to think that suppressing faith in the workplace and having faith alongside other kinds of topics that you just don't talk about at all is actually better for the workplace, that there's too much risk of controversy and potential marginalization if people are to bring up faith in the workplace. We found, however, that from the worker's point of view, if they're not allowed to bring up faith in the workplace in sensitive ways, that they will start to feel like they cannot bring their whole selves to work, that they cannot bring the most important part of themselves in particular, that might actually have bearing on how they see their job. So people who bring their faith to work say that that's also connected to a greater commitment to the organization feeling like they're doing better work.
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Welcome to the Work for Human podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. Most workplaces don't quite know what to do with faith, so we simplify it or avoid it, or I think we assume it's going to be divisive. But if we can understand how people experience faith at work, we'll learn a lot about everybody, because everybody faces tensions about ethics and belief and the personal versus the corporate at work. And by looking through this lens, we can learn how to design work that works not just for people of faith, but for everyone. My guest today is Elaine Howard Eklund, a sociologist at Rice University and the director of the Bonieuk Institute for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance. Her research explores how people make sense of their work through the lens of faith and how that shows up in everyday working life. One of the big lessons I take from her work is that whatever you have in your head about how faith shows up at work, it's probably way too simple. The reality is super nuanced. So, of course, please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And now I'm very pleased to bring you Elaine Howard Eklund. Elaine Howard Eklund, welcome to Work for Humans.
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A
Thank you so much for having me. I've been looking forward to this.
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B
As a sociologist, you're interested in group behaviors and so how groups have an impact on individuals and how groups bring change to societies. And so you have focused very deeply in your career on religion and the sociology of religion, and beautifully how that overlaps with the world of work, either the relationship between how scientists think about faith, how faithful people think about scientists, how people bring faith to work. And so today, my hypothesis going into this conversation is that the challenges that people of faith feel at work are challenges that everybody feel at work, and that by exploring the challenges of. Of people of faith at work, we can learn a lot about how we can design both for people of faith, but also for everybody. And so does it matter that I'm not particularly a person of faith? Just as an orientation, I did not grow up in a house with faith or religion when I was young. And so there's a lot I don't know. And so apologies ahead of time if I say something that doesn't make sense. So let's just talk about the sociology of religion for a second. What was the state of the sociology of religion when you started your career and were your interests immediately accepted?
- [03:48]
A
Well, that's a great question. So two kinds of things. You mentioned that it's your hypothesis that trying to make workplaces potentially more friendly for people of faith will make those same workplaces also friendly to people who don't have faith, that there are some common concerns that undercut both groups. I would say the answer to that question is yes, I think so. And that was very much a part of how I entered sociology of religion. So I was very interested in trying to understand how people make sense of their world. So the largest questions of why am I here? What's the purpose of my life? Those things that we call the big questions, and how do the ways in which groups answer those questions have an impact on how they live their everyday lives? And I was looking around at different subfields in my discipline, and so sociology of religion seemed to be the subfield that was most concerned with those kinds of larger questions. Now, I would say that when I started sociology of religion, so I've been in this business, if you include my graduate degree work and my postdoctoral fellowship, probably a little over 25 years at this point. When I started out, I would say that that assumption that the kinds of things that religious people think about, the big questions are really relevant to everyone was not the case in my discipline. So sociology really started out as a way to study the social world apart from religion, apart from religious studies, apart from theology. So baked into the beginning of the discipline is this idea that there's a very much a sacred and a secular split. Although the first sociologists, so we think about Emile Durkheim and Max Weber and even Karl Marx and W.E.B. du Bois and others who are early forefathers and mothers of sociology, there was the sense that religion was something to be reckoned with. By the time I got to the discipline in the late 90s and early 2000s, it was kind of like fait Accompli that maybe religion's not something we should be so interested in. Although I would say over the course of my career the discipline has become friendlier and friendlier to sociologists of religion. And now some in the discipline, like some in immigration and race studies and inequality studies broadly, really think that, okay, we can't understand what's going on in the social world without also understanding religion.
- [06:31]
B
I have to say it's kind of a shocking blind spot to start off with. If one is interested in groups and group behavior, it seems to me that religion would be high on the list. We're going to talk about the separation between the secular and the sacred and how people divide it up in their lives. It's going to be one of the conversations and I can see how that division could have happened in a discipline. Let's start off with the Faith at work movement. When did that start and by whom?
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A
It started about 20 years ago. And there's a great book about the faith at work movement called Faith at Work by David Miller, who's it has a group at Princeton and he tells the history. He's a story and he tells the history of the faith at work movement. So really started with fairly committed Christians who felt like they were perhaps not being recognized or allowed to bring their faith to work. That many workplaces, but particularly workplaces where higher education folks tend to be like science and technology and those kinds of places, are particularly secular and unlikely to recognize that many people care about faith and really bring their faith to bear when making ethical decisions about work and really just when living their day to day work lives. And so Miller chronicled some of that and I think did a great job. So I entered in at the tail end of that period, my co author of the second book I wrote on this topic, working for a new approach to Faith at Work. My co author Denise Daniels for that book was very much a part of that faith at work movement and in our book together chronicles that as well. But I think the later incantations of the faith at work movement have become more concerned about religious minorities and providing accommodations for religious minorities for non religious people and making sure that workplaces are not implicitly Christian and have concerns only about taking care of the religious commitments of Christian people. So like, you know, just providing more options for days off from work to celebrate holidays and providing accommodations for religious practices at work for people who are actually needing to practice the prayers of Islam or partake in another religious commitment at work. And so I think the movement has really broadened and Diversified and become much more interested in a whole range of religious concerns at work and how one's religion overlaps with other kinds of identities, which I'm super interested in. So, you know, black people in the US are much more likely to be religious when compared to white people. So for African Americans in our workplaces, there often is a sense where religious and racial discrimination can really overlap. And so those kind of things are really animating my interest and wanting to broaden out that whole faith at work conversation.
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B
I have a couple of questions about the faith at work movement. So for everybody who's listening, if you're listening from outside of the United States, a lot of this conversation is going to be about the United States. But your research has been international.
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A
It has been when it comes to scientists.
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B
Comes to scientists.
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A
I have done about 20 years of work on the scientific community and trying to understand how scientists and more broadly those in technology work understand faith and the impact of religious communities and faith on their work, which has been quite a long term tension.
- [10:16]
B
I think we'll get to that along the way because we do want to broaden it out to international. But I'm going to be often be talking about things that are very US centric here because of where a lot of your research was in terms of faith at work and the faith at work movement. Was it primarily evangelicals who started it when it first began or did it start in a more broad based way?
- [10:37]
A
So it depends when you. Miller talks about this in his book, but when you are thinking about faith at work, in some ways this was always something that Catholics had thought about, you know, so how can we practice the presence of God and what does it mean to be a full time clergy versus other kinds of work? So there is a history within Christendom broadly that is concerned with work and the tension between work as sacred or secular. Is work only for the clergy or is work sacred work really for everyone? Can everyone have the possibility of thinking of their work as sacred? But this most recent movement within the United States was mainly evangelical Christians, mainly thinking about can they share their faith at work and what does it mean to share faith at work with others and what's appropriate and not appropriate? And how can we see occupations outside the clergy as having the possibility of being sacred? So I would say those were the two kinds of major concerns with that more recent faith at work movement that
- [11:42]
B
I referred to and you speak of witnessing at work. What does that mean?
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A
So I think to evangelical Christians that usually means talking about their faith. So having very Explicitly Christian conversation about faith, often with the aim to try to get others to be converted. Now, if you're an evangelical pastor listening to this show, and I hope there are some out there, if you want that to be happening, you might be a little bit disappointed because most evangelicals are not spending a lot of time at work trying to convert others. So what we found in our research is that evangelical Christians converting others or talking about faith in ways that might be offensive to those of no faith or to those of other religious traditions. Is one of the main concerns that workplaces have and workplace leaders have about bringing faith into work is that it will be super controversial that there are evangelicals everywhere trying to convert others. And we just do not see that happening. When people talk about wanting to bring their faith to work, they're thinking about it in quite different ways than explicitly talking to others and trying to convert them.
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B
But I got the sense that there's more to witnessing than that.
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A
Very much so, yeah. Very much so.
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B
It can also be living the principles. Is that right?
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A
So we found that there are several ways that are kind of at the top. We had a whole indices of ways that people think about integrating faith and work. And really at the top there is talking about your faith at work. Often that is not done with an eye to trying to convert others. There's wearing religious symbols. So women might cover if they're in Islam, if they're a Muslim. There might be symbols that you have on your desk or in your workspace. You might wear a cross. So there are those kinds of symbols. There are practicing holidays and talking about your religious practices over holidays is another way that people express their faith at work and then trying to integrate faith with moral decision making in the workplace. So we had lots of examples in our data of people standing up against what they felt were corrupt practices in the workplace in part because of their faith. So those are really the dominant ones, the say, top five or so practices. When people say, I'm integrating my faith at work, that's what they're talking about mostly.
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B
I think there's a word that we need to get out on the table just because we're going to use it a lot, which is, and I may even say it wrong, imago die. Did I say it right?
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Yeah, the imago DEI dei.
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B
Imago dei. How does that relate to faith at work?
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A
My colleagues and I wrote one book that is really for business leaders and academics in other fields, it called Religion and Changing Workplace. And that book really looks at all religious groups in the United States and the non religious and tries to create a story, really, about how people are bringing their faith to work and how business leaders can thoughtfully engage people around their faith traditions in a way that actually supports workplaces. Denise and I then broke off from the author team and wrote another book where we talk a lot about the imago dei. And we do that because that second book, which is called Working for Better A New Approach to Faith at Work, is really geared towards a specifically Christian audience. And why did we do that? Because in the first project, it was Christians who were the most distinctive thinking most about these issues, and Christians were the ones that others feared the most. And so we thought, wow, really, there's a need and a potential market here to write a book that's specifically for Christians. And in that second book, we talk a lot about the mago dei, which means being made in the image of God as being a core doctrinal principle within Christianity. That's actually incredibly useful for Christians living in a pluralistic environment. So Christians who really have a deep understanding of the imago DEI see that as meaning that everyone is made in the image of God, not just me. So not just people who are Christians, but those who are Muslims and those who are not religious and really any other group. And we argue in the book, based on the words of our respondents, that having that kind of stance towards other people is a very distinctively Christian way to relate to others in pluralistic environments in a way that a kind of stance you can have of humility as a Christian that shows that you want to understand others and you believe that since the other is made in the image of God, that you might be able to learn a lot from understanding other people's faith traditions. And we found that concept so helpful for Christians who sometimes feel caught. They're like, okay, I'm supposed to be convincing people of the uniqueness of my faith and convincing people that Christianity is a terrific religion, yet I'm trying to relate to others and be kind to them. And so that doctrine helps people understand. Wow. My tradition has something within it that will help me relate to others well and authentically. And we've just found that to be very helpful to Christian audiences. When we go around and give talks
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B
about the book, I'll tell you, one of the things that came through in the book, in every study that you have done, is that whenever you think any group of people is one thing, if you look at the data, they are many things. You take any group, and there were some respondents in your data who very much related to the Imago DEI idea. And then there were others who were very much away from that. And I think we're going to spend a lot of time talking about the variety of approaches to faith at work because, well, it's one of the principles of our show, actually, that people want very diverse things from work and that there's lots of books out there that say everybody wants the same thing from work. They want autonomy, mastery and purpose, or something like that. And our research suggests that that's incredibly incomplete and misleading and so discrimination. Have you gotten many accounts from respondents of feeling discriminated at work because of their faith?
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A
Definitely. All religious traditions feel like under certain conditions they're discriminated against because of their faith. But Muslims and Jews are by far at the top in terms of those who feel that they're discriminated really against across the nation. But here's where workplace leaders need to think a lot about geography as well as their particular type of workplace. So in the southern United States, for example, where it's much more likely to be very predominantly Christian in workplaces than say in the northwest United States, like Washington or California, really Northern California in particular, these places tend to be much more secular. They tend to have a much lower level of religious participation than the south does. And so in some of those workplaces that are in that region of the country, it's actually Christians who are more likely to feel discriminated against than they do in the southern United States. So there is, because the workplaces are predominantly non religious. And so I think it's helpful for workplace leaders to think a lot about what's the demography of my workplace likely to be, given the region that I'm in and the type of work, the science and technology industry, particular technology, is likely to assume a kind of secularity. And both Muslims and Christians feel like they're discriminated against in that particular industry. And so those differences can tell us a lot about how as leaders, as workplace leaders, we can really care. Well, for those who are in our
- [19:49]
B
workplace, that makes a lot of sense to me. One of the things that you brought up in Working for Better is the idea that many people of faith, and I think you were speaking about Christians at the time, felt what you called a minority identity, which is an interesting phrase, and I like it a lot. A minority identity, which is it means that you feel like you're unusual in the group of people that you're with set apart. And I thought to myself, are Christians a minority in this country? And actually, I don't know where we are on that. But I do realize that even as a Christian, you could divide Christianity into so many different pieces that you could certainly feel like a minority. In some cases, you could be a Christian of faith in an organization that's full of Christians of faith and still have a minority identity if they're of a different part of Christianity. And so it's super subjective, I guess. I'm sure that there's evidence and experiences of discrimination, but also, whether or not you have a minority identity might be something you carry, or it's just that having a minority identity is true because you have it. In other words, that's the experience of somebody in a workplace, and it doesn't matter what the numbers are. If that's the experience, then it's a design flaw in the experience of work.
- [21:18]
A
Let me riff a little bit off what you're saying, and then let's see if you want to add something else. So there is a way in which having a minority identity is a demographic reality, and the kind of minority identity that people tend to care most about is the one that's nearest to them. So Christians are a majority in the US that is the truth. So Christianity is by far the largest religious tradition in the US Even if you separate out mainline Christians and Catholics and evangelicals, any one of those groups is larger than all the other religious groups put together. So there's a lot of religion in the US but if I'm working in the Bay Area and I'm part of a tech startup, and I am the only Christian among 30 employees that I see every day, I'm going to feel like my Christianity is a minority identity. And that is a demographic reality in that particular workplace. And what I'm describing, I'm not thinking of a particular workplace, but I'm describing a condition that's quite true across certain kinds of workplaces. And so then that's going to be the piece of my Christianity. When I start thinking about integrating faith and work, that's going to be the most important to me. Sociologists find that a lot is that the groups that make the most difference in our lives are the ones that we experience most frequently, the ones that we identify the most with. For most people in the tech industry, they probably identify more with their faith and more with being in the tech industry, more with their work identity than they do, say, a kind of generalist American identity. And so that's going to be super important to them if they're only one or two. Right. In a whole tech workplace. And they may indeed face discrimination as a result of that identity. Now, if the person is a white, is a sort of dominant, also the racial group and dominant gender group and dominant religious group, we then start thinking about how consequential is that discrimination. Right. Is it hurting people's earnings or is it hurting their social relationships? Or we ask questions like that too. But the experience of discrimination is true for that person. Very much so. And can really direct their lives. When people experience discrimination or think, even think they experience discrimination. Right. Like I may as the researcher say, well, what you're experiencing is not really consequential discrimination, but if they think that it is and they're acting like it is, it has a huge impact on their day to day life, potentially.
- [23:48]
B
Yes, that very much aligns with what I was trying to express anyway, which is that a. It's very often true that the demographic reality is that one is a minority, but it's also, it's the experience of that feeling. And you know, it probably doesn't take very many instances of discrimination to really feel like you are an outsider. It was funny when I first started my career as a criminal defense investigator and I worked for the public defender's office and there was a very strong filtering. This is not on the dimension of religion, but on conservative and progressive.
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A
Yes, sure.
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B
And that filtering, when I went and worked in my first corporation, I'm like, they all mix together here. I was like, oh my gosh, this is progressives and conservatives right next to each other. I was very surprised. I didn't know how much of my life I had led in a filtered environment.
- [24:49]
A
Oh, and isn't that freeing at some level? You sort of don't know it's stressful until you're in a place where it's not as stressful. And then you're like, oh, gosh, wow, that's a weight off potentially.
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B
Honestly. And this is, I think it's an interesting question, which is that I felt I couldn't speak as freely.
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A
Oh, interesting. Okay.
- [25:08]
B
Because, well, you know, the principal reason is you don't want to make somebody feel like they don't belong and you don't want a team to feel divided. And so what you do is you, at least in my case, you try not to bring forward those things that might be divisive. On the other hand, if you could bring them forward and get past them, bring all of yourself to work, and then get past the divisive things, it could be so much richer. Hey, everybody. On June 16th, I'll be speaking at one of my very favorite venues. It's the Future Talent Summit in Stockholm, Sweden. To get Tickets, go to futuretalentsummit.org that's all one word. And enter my speaker promo code elevenfold, which is eleven fold to get a big discount. If you're in the area, I would love to meet you there. That's futuretalentsummit.org, promo code elevenfold.
- [26:17]
A
Yeah, I agree with you. And our research backs up what you're saying. So I would say that the employers that we have interviewed and surveyed are likely to think that suppress. Addressing faith in the workplace and having faith alongside other kinds of topics that you just don't talk about at all is actually better for the workplace, that there's too much risk of controversy and potential marginalization if people are to bring up faith in the workplace. We found, however, that from the worker's point of view, if they're not allowed to bring up faith in the workplace in sensitive ways, that they will start to feel like they cannot bring their whole selves to work, that they cannot bring the most important part of themselves in particular, that might actually have bearing on how they see their job. So people who bring their faith to work say that that's also connected to a greater commitment to the organization, feeling like they're doing better work, like they're more committed to their work, like they want to learn more in their work, that they are likely to see their work as calling and not just a job. And so there are all these, like, spinoff positives with bringing faith to work in a sensitive and thoughtful way. So our respondents were likely to say that's a very important caveat, that we are allowed to bring multiple faith traditions to work, not just some, that people are allowed to express their whole selves in ways that don't inadvertently marginalize others. So having that kind of nuance, thinking about faith at work, is actually helpful to the workplace. We found that over and over again in different ways. And I would say that wasn't necessarily what I was expecting. I was expecting more to, like, just find a lot more controversy and negativity than I did.
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B
You mentioned work being a calling. We've talked a little bit about witnessing, but it's one of the topics that you raised in some of your research, which is to what degree do people of faith feel that they can make work a calling or bring the sacred to work, or see sacredness in work? And, you know, we had Elizabeth Anderson on the show for three episodes, which we've never done before. All in one go. Because we had to go from the 14th century all the way through modern times. But one of the things there was that the work ethic was very tied to early Protestant traditions.
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A
Very much so. That's right.
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B
And so I expected to find in your work that that would be manifested as a central part of how people saw their faith at work. And it wasn't. And it's another place where so much diversity in how people bring faith to work and to the degree to which they think, no, that's not the place for that. So what did you find in regards to that?
- [29:07]
A
We found that an appreciable minority, but still only a minority of people see their work as a calling. So in the general population, well, less than 30%, more like down in the 20s, see their work as a spiritual calling. Evangelical Christians were higher than the rest of the population, Muslims were higher than the rest of the population. And even a small proportion of non religious people see their work as a spiritual calling. So it's a term that has a kind of traction among a wide variety of people in the general population. But people, when we interviewed them, said that in part because of this bifurcation where the sacred is kept out of most workplaces, it's hard for them to see their work as a calling. They don't feel encouraged in seeing their work as a calling. They can't bring their whole selves to their work. But for the people who did see their work as a calling, there were lots of benefits. There were potential health benefits, there were commitment benefits. From the organization's point of view, there was the benefit of this is the going back to Weber and the Protestant ethic. In the spirit of capitalism, there was the ethic of was working harder. You know, when you saw your work as a calling, feeling like, oh, it's not just a job, it's a calling. So I ought to stay there longer. I so identify with this because almost nothing can rip me away from students, right at the university or my research or I feel like most aspects of my work here are really a very significant calling for me. So identify. But people in other kinds of jobs maybe don't have the sort of luxury that I do as a professor to see their work as a calling for other jobs. It's harder to see that. And we found that religious organizations and religious leaders are not doing a lot to help people see their work as a calling. So even for very religious people, only a small proportion of them see their work as a calling.
- [31:02]
B
So one of the risks I saw in that research is the potential diversity in terms of how people think of the word spiritual.
- [31:12]
A
Yep.
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B
And hey, how do you deal with that as a researcher? But also what is the diversity of what people consider that word to mean
- [31:22]
A
in the United States? It's a very good word because we do. My colleague, co author, Denise Daniels, does organizational psychology. And so she is very much someone who wants to statistically validate measures before using them in studies. And so we used measures that had been quite validated in other studies. So just test it out in other studies to see if they approximate what we think they do for the listeners. So we found that that spiritual calling phrase is pretty good. So people who are religious can take it on. They're like, oh, that means me, right? That's spirituality word, means me. But sometimes people who are non religious feel like, oh, that spirituality word can incorporate me as well. And so it is meaningful to a broad section of the population. And we knew that we had hit it when our non religious respondents also felt comfortable using that word. And so I think that's important to point out. It is the case though, that this spiritual calling, I just want to mention this. You can pick it up if you want to talk about it. The spiritual calling can be a kind of double edged sword, and we've written some about this, that if you feel highly called to your work, your employer does find it easier to take advantage of you. And I think I certainly love my job here at Rice University, and I think, you know, I'm paid well as a professor, et cetera. Rice is a very good school in that way. But I know in the work as a professor that it's never done. And especially if you have a high sense of calling to that work, you could just never stop working. So there is a sense where overwork is more possible. We also found in our research that it's easier for people to look the other way when they're being discriminated against at work. If they feel their work is a calling. And that is very sad. They also feel like others should not complain about discrimination. So say you're in the social work field is another field where people are likely to feel called to their work. And you're being discriminated against because of your gender, your race or your sexuality, you might look the other way. You're like, well, I get to feel called to the work. Work is so meaningful and I feel called to it, so I shouldn't complain about it. And then you think also other people shouldn't complain about the work either. So it allows you. And this is especially true if you are the leader or the employer. You just set up this culture where this is a high calling kind of workplace. And so when people have concerns about work, they ought to just suck it up. Right. Because we're all called to be here. So there's like a perpetuating thing that's going on in the workplace. Do you see it? Does that resonate?
- [34:00]
B
I can imagine the virtue of sacrifice.
- [34:02]
A
Very, very much so. When you're called, you just keep sacrificing. That's right.
- [34:07]
B
Yeah. It's something that comes up on this show, which is we say we should design work that people find rewarding. And other people say, well, are you just trying to addict people to work? And we're like, well, it could addict people to work, but the alternative is to make work that's bad. Is that what we're trying to do? So we talk about it. But yeah, we may get to your discussion of rest. I hope we do. But one of the things that came up in your research, that a significant proportion of the population said, no work is for money. By the way, I really like the narrative approach that you took to the research itself. It's qualitative collection of people describing their work and how it fits with their faith. And so one of them was of someone who was a pastor on Sundays and a trucker for the rest of the week. And he said, trucking is not a spiritual calling. It's how I make a living. So I can do this on Sundays.
- [35:03]
A
Exactly. And we used that. So the way for the listeners who haven't had a chance to read the books yet, we choose these respondents who are typical of others. Right. So they're not outliers, they're typical. And that was a typical response for some people. We chose him in particular because there was an irony in his response because he actually is a pastor. So he's one of those that's probably not teaching his congregation how to integrate faith and work. That's probably not the highest concern for him because he sees work in part is just to make money. And so I think that's interesting. We also found in general, when relating to money, that it is harder for people who are in finance in general or who make a lot of money to see their work as a calling. And so there's that connection. And also interesting, given like the Weberian theory that you maybe had one of your other folks talking about the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, we have thought often that making money and accumulation Actually could be very spiritual. It really depends on how you use the money and those other kinds of things. And so as the researcher and when I'm doing an interview, I don't like, fight with the respondent. That's just not what we're supposed to do. You know, I'm just like creating a safe space for them to talk and say what they really think. But at times I wanted to say, like, oh my gosh, here's some readings you could do where you could reflect on that more deeply. Because there's centuries of thinking about how we can have an ethical approach to money.
- [36:33]
B
A part of it that strikes me. I'm trying to sort of unify these two realities, essentially these two ways of looking at it. There's the way of looking at it that Elizabeth Anderson describes in the History of the Work Ethic and then there's the way of looking at it that I heard from a lot of your respondents, which is no, work really is quite separate. And what strikes me is that when people are talking about other people working, they say leisure and vice go together. When those other people aren't working, I think that they might be vice ridden. And when they're working hard, I think that that's discipline and that's virtue. And so that was a part of sort of the history. But when I'm working, the first person experience of work might be very different from this sort of third person theorizing about other people's work and virtues. That's an unfinished exploration for me. But just this idea that, I mean, you did talk to a lot of people who said, no, my work is sacred. But there were a lot of people who said, again, I feel like it was their definition of sacred that was moving. Like sacred is when I am worshiping God at church. Or sacred is when I'm helping a patient at a hospital and I'm helping another human being. Or sacred is when I work hard, or sacred is when I'm honest. I heard so many different perspectives on it. What are some of the different perspectives on that?
- [38:05]
A
So it's relatively easy for people to see sacred as participating in a religious organization or to see particular kinds of symbols. So we tend to have personal histories and really global histories, right, of all kinds of teaching and even in like our advertising and marketing, where those kind of notions of the sacred are out there and readily available. What we have lots less of in our culture is a way to see like the act of doing the law. For lawyers, this was very hard as sacred. Or the act of being an accountant. So there was a great interview we did with a guy who was on the back end at a hospital and really had set up as a high level job, had set up a lot of their accounting systems and, you know, had done a really good job with that, at least according to his own estimation. And he said, I cannot see, I'm a committed Christian, I cannot see how what I do has any connection to my faith. But I can see what the doctors and nurses do who are actually touching people and having this real impact in individual people's lives. And the whole time I was talking to him, I'm thinking, anyone who has been part of a medical system in the US which is really all of us, probably has had the difficulty of dealing with horrible financial systems and how that can impact your care and make your life really hard and unpleasant. And so if someone were to set up a really great accounting system in a hospital, what incredible goodness there could be in that. And so I could think like, wow, there's lots of ways of seeing what this person is doing as having lots of sacred valence. But he had not been taught how to see it that way. And so that's what we were trying to pick up on. Like what kinds of occupations were people more likely to have been taught or exposed to something that would allow them to see that type of work as sacred?
- [40:03]
B
That's a very good way to say it. That's a very good way to say it. And you speak about the difference between personal responsibility versus creating systems that are ethical or that basically there's a systems approach to thinking about what I do at work. So when you were talking to the accountant, the accountant could have seen that they were helping a system that was doing good. But let's talk about personal responsibility first.
- [40:33]
A
It's pretty easy for people to see how personal responsibility relates to their faith. So when we ask questions about how you bring your faith to work, for those who did have ways of seeing that often a go to, and I think I mentioned this a little bit ago, is being personally ethical at work. A lot of people mention like, don't steal office supplies. I guess there's nationwide pandemic on stealing paperclips. But it was a hilarious as a go to my co author and I wanted to laugh because 15 people mentioned this and I don't think that's really where the rubber meets the road probably. But for some people, they feel like, okay, just being personally ethical in these small ways are sacred acts. And I think that's great. I don't Want to judge that. It was very hard to see for people to see how changing entire systems could be sacred or even how their faiths might compel them. We talked to a fellow who, I can't remember what kind of work he did, but he worked in a corporation in a middle management role. And he noticed that women he thought were being pretty systematically discriminated against by particular level of management in the organization. And he decided that he was really going to take that on. And he said that the reason that he did that is because, you know, he needs to look in the mirror every morning and be okay with himself and in front of his faith and his faith community. And he had a real desire to change the systems in his workplace to be more ethical. Now, often there are consequences to trying to evoke system wide change. And so that fellow actually was fired in the end.
- [42:14]
B
I was gonna say almost always there are consequences to effecting.
- [42:17]
A
He did end up going to another workplace where he made less money, but he said he would do it again. It was a very interesting, a very winsome story, but he said, I have to live consistently with my faith, even if it means taking on larger systems and structures I'm part of. Now that is an uncommon response. It's not likely for most people of faith to be able to see how their faith compels them to change systems. It certainly was in the civil rights era, it certainly has been, you know, in other eras of history, but it's not common. And so there's not a lot of teaching. We're led to believe in religious organizations and in writings and such. That is really helping people have that kind of spiritual formation which might allow them to take on systems.
- [43:04]
B
It's harder to do than personal responsibility. And I want to talk about some of the aspects of personal responsibility. Many of your respondents said, don't steal the paperclips. I try not to swear at work. I avoid drinking at work. If people want to go to a strip club, I wouldn't do that. It's very funny because to me those sound like paperclips. Like they all sound like paperclips to me. There's much worse things we do than those things. But they are very much in your individual control.
- [43:39]
A
Very much so, yeah.
- [43:40]
B
In my career I have always worried about ethics. Always. I say this as somebody completely secular. One time I was working as a recruiter and all the male recruiters decided to go to a strip club over lunch. I was new, I was new in this company and I said I couldn't do that. And the reason I said I couldn't do that was because I thought it created a bad environment for the women at work. The women at work got wind of it, and they all decided to go out to lunch together while the guys were going to a strip club. So I ended up sitting alone, eating in my cube, eating my peanut butter and jelly sandwich alone. But it was one of those things where it didn't have anything to do with faith. It had to do with teams. I don't know exactly how this continues on from personal responsibility, because there's a couple of different things that sort of seem to be the next step, and one of them is the LGBTQ question and whether or not people of faith felt that encouraging queer lifestyles was counter to their faith. But that's been talked about a lot in the news, and the news picks up things that are divisive and fun to talk about. Did it come up a lot in the research?
- [45:02]
A
It didn't, and we were kind of cautious. We thought that it might come up more. So we had questions about sexuality on our survey and people who are LGBTQ and religious. It's very similar to being black and being. Not in terms of the identity necessarily, but. But in terms of this double or triple marginalization where people can't quite figure out why they're being discriminated against, they face discrimination from every side. So that did come up in the survey results. And then sometimes it. Very occasionally, when we were doing the interviews, people who were conservative Christians or evangelical Christians brought up concerns about needing to ethically go to certain kinds of trainings and things like that. And I intimated that they meant trainings about sexuality, in part. But people generally were aware that they could not discriminate against others for any reason in terms of hiring or in terms of any of those identities. I was surprised at the extent to which Christians in particular felt like others might stereotype them as being discriminatory when it came to matters of sexuality, and so had thought a lot about their clarity that they could not discriminate. So I was surprised that they volunteered that. That people expect me to be this way. So I thought a lot about how I am trying very hard not to be discriminatory. So they saw themselves as bending over backwards because they might be stereotyped.
- [46:36]
B
That's interesting. You had a sentence in the book which was that the hot topics. I'm saying it not the way you said it, that the hot topics related to cultural change were more foregrounded in people's concerns, like, so for instance, LGBTQ issues. But some biblical values were sort of back burner. And one of those is to avoid envy or to avoid greed. And the sentence was that it was more about cultural change than it was about alignment with biblical values.
- [47:17]
A
Those sentences were in reference to what people actually experienced in their workplaces. So first we were talking about what came up for my respondents, but then we had questions about what was happening in their workplaces. And some of our Christian respondents had concerns that they would be forced to make judgments about abortion or about LGBTQ issues, and they were pleasantly surprised that those things didn't really come up in their workplaces. But what was interesting to us is that those were the concerns, right. That they went quickly to potential concerns about culture warrior kind of issues, rather than being concerned about the characteristics of the historic Christian faith, in this case. So things like envy, greed, lust, the character traits that allow us to embody the Ten Commandments. So those kind of things were not talked about as much. So it's almost like they were believing the media's portrayal of them. They're like, everyone thinks I'm going to be all about this stuff, and so I better be ready. And then were pleasantly surprised when their workplaces weren't forcing them to adjudicate opinions about these kinds of issues.
- [48:29]
B
Right. That makes so much sense. That makes so much sense. Yeah. Taking on the media's portrayal of us, whatever category we are, and dealing with the media's stereotypes of us, that makes a ton of sense. You had a very funny story in the book about wanting to do work at your church.
- [48:51]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [48:52]
B
Can you tell that story?
- [48:54]
A
Yeah. So Denise and I were writing this book for a Christian audience, and so we decided. Both of us have been part of churches, and we decided to just tell stories about the kind of othering that we've sometimes faced as professionals, people who have very expansive careers in our church environments. And when I first came to the Southern United States to work at Rice University, I was looking for a church, and I went up to the pastor after the service and just said, you know, how would I get involved in this church? And he said, well, you know, often. Many times, the women, they bring cookies. And. And, you know, actually, in my particular household, I am married. My husband is an excellent baker, so if you want someone bringing cookies, it's not me. And then I said, well, I'm not really that much into baking. And he said, well, other women bring muffins. So, like, he has this, like, conception that that's what women do when they're serving in a church. And most women who are professionals, and even some of those who are taking time out of the workplace to take care of children for a time, have diverse skill sets, want to bring pieces of themselves to church. It's very similar to what we were talking about before, about bringing your whole self to work. You want to bring your whole self to church too, perhaps even more so. And so there's not this sense that many churches, and this, to be honest, wasn't a particularly conservative church that I was going to. There is not the sense that many churches see the expansive lives of both men and women. Right. They tend to shoehorn men into a certain kinds of roles as well. Right. So the man who loves to bake, to relax is not often asked to contribute to baking for events at most churches because that's seen, I mean, it's kind of a funny example, but that's seen as like a woman's domain. And so what we are arguing in the book is that these kind of conceptions of gender that happen in churches often make their way into workplaces as well for Christians, because Christians haven't been taught in their churches how to honor the gifts of both men and women in an expansive way.
- [51:05]
B
You mentioned that evangelical women appear less often in leadership positions.
- [51:12]
A
They do, they do. It's hard to know with the kind of data we have, you know exactly why that's the case. But we do think that part of it is because women in evangelical Christian congregations are given quite a lot of subtle pressure, and sometimes not so subtle pressure to really devote themselves to home and family. And that sometimes can take away from work aspirations. Sometimes they are really pressured to have work roles that are less expansive than the roles that their husbands have. So there's some potential self selection out of leadership roles in organizations. And there's also could be a kind of negativity when they make it into those roles. So there could be both a hostile environment under certain conditions in the workplace, but also some self selection out because work is not supported for women. Work outside the home, I should say, is not supported as much in certain kinds of evangelical Christian settings.
- [52:15]
B
So I want to describe the thesis. First of all, so much of your research is essentially descriptive of what's really happening, what's really going on with religion and science, what's really going on in terms of how those who are religious think about scientists and essentially just messing up with data of many of the assumptions about what's going on there. But this book, Working for Better, is different because it's actually Stepping forward and recommending how churches might behave differently, church leaders might behave differently in terms of how they encourage engagement at work or how people at work might engage differently with work. First of all, that must have been, for somebody working in academia, a risk. Did you feel that way?
- [53:12]
A
I did. I really did. So here's what I see us as doing. And I think this is a place where scholars can have some freedom to be quite normative. And I think there's a place for the scholar to say, if you want your social world to be like X, then my data shows that you ought to do. Yes. And so it's almost as if from our interviews with religious leaders, and this is true, we were able to say, gosh, you want people to more thoughtfully integrate their faith and their work, and you want this to happen for both men and women. Well, if that's the case, then here are some practical things that you ought to be doing based on our data. I've done that to some extent in the science and faith work, too. I have this little book called why Science and Faith need each Other. Eight Shared Values that Move Us Beyond Fear. And this was based. It took me a lot longer with that project, perhaps because I was much younger and perhaps more fearful or something. But, you know, I wrote like four different books and about 70 articles on the science and faith interface and what scientists think, et cetera, before I wrote a much more normative little book aimed towards religious people and scientists and said, if you want to work together for the sake of science based on my data, here's what you ought to be doing. And that book, you know, both of those books, why Signs of Faith need each Other and Working for Better, have been much more popular than my academic books already because people like to hear a little push, you know, Right. Like they like to hear a good story. Also, both those books are a bit more personal and share some of my own story, but I still think the academic work is super important. I think, you know, for me as a researcher, I tried very hard to wait a bit to make those kind of normative claims or those pushes for people to change behavior until I have the data to both understand what the community wants and needs and to understand what the data says about how to get there.
- [55:13]
B
And it's funny. Well, it's sort of like complicated on a couple of different levels. What is sociology for if it can't make recommendations? 1. But making a recommendation to how religious organizations should function is totally different than making a policy recommendation for governments. It's not as much of a done thing. And so it sounds to me like you could be navigating faith at work yourself.
- [55:46]
A
I am. Thank you for noticing that. I'm very careful, partly because I have a lot of responsibility for a lot of people. So over the course of my career so far, I've worked with 128 junior scholars, undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows. I really love to mentor people and to try to contribute to their careers. And so whenever I do something, I know I'm affecting a whole host of people who I mentor. I also lead a fairly large team. I direct an institute, interestingly, an Institute on Religious Tolerance, that's an endowed institute at Rice University. And so I always have all of those people in my mind whenever I'm doing any kind of public outreach work, and I usually try to bring them into it. With this particular book, the Working for Better book, A New Approach to Faith at Work with Denise, we had our students vet chapters. We had students who we knew were not religious or were religious but not Christians vet things. And it was fun. I had one of my students, who's a pretty committed Buddhist, say, well, I wouldn't be embarrassed if you write this. I just want to write one for a more Buddhist audience, you know, and I want my work to be more international. So often our students have taken on this kind of approach of reaching out to their own communities, and, you know, it's sort of an example for them to do likewise, which I like that. I mean, if that ends up being one of the hallmarks of my career, I will be pretty satisfied with that, because I do think, as researchers, we have some kind of responsibility to the communities we've been part of, especially if we use them in our research, like
- [57:28]
B
I do the table of contents for one of your other books, which is, again, it's about disrupting stereotypes. And each of these stereotypes is something that you disrupted in this work. Religious people do not like science. Religious people do not like scientists. Religious people are not scientists. Religious people are all young earth creationists. Religious people are climate change deniers and so on. And for each one of those, you present data saying, well, sure, some are, but let's take away those stereotypes. I do want to speak briefly about scientists. And so much of your work is about faith in science. You did find faith in science among scientists?
- [58:10]
A
I did, yeah.
- [58:11]
B
Was it different by discipline? Did you do that cut. Because physicists and, you know, mathematicians and people who have their toes on the edge of what I would call the eternal, where they're looking at these eternal things There's a long history of physicists thinking in spiritual ways, but I was wondering if there was variation by discipline.
- [58:37]
A
So over the course of my career so far, I have studied the natural science fields of physics and astronomy, of chemistry and biology, and I've also studied social scientists. So I've studied sociologists, my own field. I've studied economists and political scientists. And I have found that the more important cut is not so much discipline, but the type of school that if we look just at university scientists, those at more elite schools, at more research active schools tend to be a little bit less religious than those who are at more teaching oriented, maybe less research oriented schools. And so that's where more of the cut is. And in general, social scientists in the US tend to be a little bit less religious than natural scientists. And I think that's in part because of the kind of political valence that's in much of social science. They're looking at the world and seeing perhaps that this came up in some of my interviews with scientists. They're seeing that religious people are not always doing good in the world and they have some concerns about religion. So it tends more. A more secular group of people tends to self select into the social sciences when compared to the natural sciences. This is really different when you get around the world. So I've studied physicists and biologists in eight different countries and from nation to nation it tends to be a bit different in terms of whether biology or physics is the more or less spiritual. In the uk, for example, biology is much less religious, so it's much less likely to have religious scientists when compared to physics. It's actually, it was quite strict, striking. And we think in part because the physicists in the uk, some of them, like you think about a Michael Faraday, are known for their spiritual sensibilities and they think a lot about the kind of integration of spirituality and science. And that allows them maybe more room for personal religiosity as well. Biology in writ large, but especially in the US and uk, has had a lot of pushback from the general public and from religious publics in particular about 20 years ago, more around issues of evolution and more recently more around issues of technology. So human reproductive genetic technologies and these technologies that some religious people think is really like, they want to set up some boundaries with these technologies because they might really be playing God.
- [61:18]
B
Certainly seen that with things like stem cell research.
- [61:21]
A
Yep. Human embryonic stem cell research.
- [61:23]
B
Yeah. In the case of the elite research institutions, I really have to wonder if that's a filter if that's essentially discrimination, which is that you just get into the elite research institutions if you're expressing
- [61:38]
A
religious beliefs, we have evidence for several different kinds of things. So we do have some evidence that the lack of religiosity in elite institutions is maybe changing just a little bit. So younger scientists are a little bit more likely to be both religious and or spiritual than older scientists. And it doesn't appear, we have a little bit of over time data and it doesn't appear that it's just like a secularizing effect from being in the academy. So you like look at a life course versus cohort kind of basis and it seems like it's a little bit more cohort leaning from our data. We also find that people in more elite research universities who are religious do disproportionately experience some discrimination. It's not an enormous problem. I think it's perhaps been overblown a little bit by some in the media, but there definitely is in the US We've written some about this with our research articles that Muslims and evangelicals do feel like they experience discrimination in elite research universities in the sciences. And I think that's in part because those two religious traditions are one where practice is pretty overt. And if you're practicing either of those traditions fervently, people would know it. It would be hard not to know. And so it's just harder for them to hide. And these are two groups in the US that tend to practice, so they tend to be similar on lots of different kinds of measures. Muslims and evangelical Christians.
- [63:11]
B
Interesting. That's very interesting. I mean, I have to say that I can't remember what it is philosophers say when a difference of opinion goes all the way down to essentially ontology, which is what even is there. But the sciences consider so faith as it implies, consider faith a virtue. Sciences consider skepticism a virtue. It's a deep, it's very deep, very deep.
- [63:40]
A
And the way scientists sometimes get around that, I mean there's these different ways, right? So Ian Barber talked about these quadrants of ways people can see things. He was a philosopher and a physicist, so he said people can see religion and science as being independent from one another. They can see them as collaborative, they can see them as in conflicts of these different ways that people see things. I find that those ideal types, or like you're sort of like looking at these as knowledge frameworks, I would see them this way really work out very nicely in the real world when people are doing stuff, right? So if you go to church a lot and you're going to work, you know, at a university, say you're at a big state school, an elite research university in the US you might be there for 35 years. It's going to be hard for you to, like, really hide for that long a period of time something that's part of your deepest piece of your life. And so if you're in a situation where religion is really important to a person, it's hard to say, well, here's I have my science domain and my church domain, and I'm just going to practice. Stephen Jay Gould said this to the late paleontologist, not overlapping magisteria. I'm just going to put those in completely different domains. Although people do go through great length sometimes to hide the fact that they're religious in the scientific environment. And going back to my more recent work on faith in the workplace, it makes me a bit sad for them because this could be something that's very fruitful for them to bring up with colleagues or as part of their whole lives. You know, science is a kind of calling for many people who are in science. And to have to separate, you know, your core identities from one another can lead to a lot of cognitive dissonance.
- [65:29]
B
Yes. And it's like passing is straight. Interestingly, I've seen accidental faith in science. And just as a quick example, a researcher who had more faith in evolution than evolution deserved, which was that the idea that was baked into one of their projects, that evolution was going to pick the optimum solution. Nope. Evolution picks the solution that survives. And there's a lot of bottlenecks and there's a lot of messiness in there. And so there was this sense of faith in evolution's ability to create optimum outcomes that actually messed up the research. So I have a few closing questions that I ask everybody, and everybody has to think about them for a second. The first one is, what job do you hire your job to do for you? Rice hires you to do something for it. What do you hire Rice to do for you?
- [66:28]
A
I do think of rice as a place where I want to have my calling fostered. And it's funny because there's a great question that you ask because I had never quite thought of it, but implicitly, I want to do work that I feel called to do. So I expect my workplace to provide that for me. And it's largely not disappointed. I mean, I do an incredible. I post about this on social media quite frequently. I'm in a really privileged, wonderful position, and it's hard to get to the kind of position that I'm in and I only wish more people could experience it. So I feel very good about that. I do expect that the institution will treat me fairly and so I expect not to be discriminated against. I expect to be treated fairly vis a vis other people in my institution. And I do expect that the institution provides me with wonderful people to work with. And that also has largely been the case. So those are the top three things I'm thinking of right now.
- [67:41]
B
What does it cost you?
- [67:43]
A
I think at times, and I really work with my mentees on this to make sure that they don't experience it. I do think that my work has cost me some health. So I have experienced, which is perhaps why I noticed in the data that sense where your calling can be this kind of double edged sword where you just can't stop working because the work itself seems so important and so even sacred or meaning and or meaningful to look at it another way. And so I do think that my work has sometimes cost me health. It sometimes cost me, I think, inappropriate removal from my family. So there is, especially for people in these kind of total occupations like you know, in physicians and some people in the law experience this where your work is a really an extreme piece of your identity. And there's a goodness to that because people in those kind of positions often feel very, very satisfied. But then the work calling competes with other kinds of callings, right? Like as a parent or a spouse or a friend or with a family of origin, all these kinds of other relational callings. And so I do think that it's cost me some inappropriately cost some time that I would sometimes like to have back to spend in different ways.
- [69:05]
B
We didn't get to talk about rest and we don't have time to talk about rest. Listeners, if you want to read the chapter on rest, the biblical recommendations around rest, you're going to have to read the book which is working for better. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today. It's great.
- [69:24]
A
You're a great interviewer and hope that you know the listeners enjoyed this and always love to be invited to give talks and things like that. So just look me up. I'm@elainehowardeclund.com and you can find out more about the work and also to my co authors Denise Daniels and for our other book, Christopher Scheidel.
- [69:44]
B
Great, thank you, thank you. Thanks for joining me for another episode, Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it. Believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.