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The Work-World (Context)
In this section, Diversity Praxis addresses the contextual issues facing businesses and individuals today. These range from globalization, rapid change, uncertainty, anxiety, and alienation. We will be regularly discussing issues of reorganization, immigration, and multiculturalism.
Religion In the Workplace: Religious Diversity & Ethical Pluralism
A Workplace Vitality Defense of Secularism and Enlightenment Values
The French Scarf Affair
by Gary Y. Adkins
Global Diversity Institute
On February 6, 2004, the intercom voice aboard American Airlines Flight 34 from Los Angeles to New York identified himself as the pilot. He asked all Christians aboard to raise their hands. He then suggested that the other passengers ask questions during the flight of those who had identified themselves as Christians. Many passengers were afraid, worried about their safety after being asked to openly discuss their religion. Is this a quirky footnote in an otherwise tranquil secular society free from religious evangelicizing? Unfortunately not - not at work, school or at your doctor's office.
Using the GDI methodology of disrupt-contextualize-construct, let's disrupt religious-relativism (anything goes) as we historically narrate (contextualize) the origins of secularism in society (and businesses) and then construct a proposal for U.S. based businesses from the present debate in France on the 'scarf affair'.
Religious Intolerance and Secularism
Religion and religious identities, unlike personal identities such as gender, race, sexuality, income/class, age, ethnicity or ability constitutes a theory of reality and a theory of value. All religions say that they are "the way" or "the path". They all claim that they know the absolute truth, the ultimate reality or the right way for you to live. Jesus, for example, said, "I am the way". Religion seeks to harmonize the way of living with the way of the universe or of life.
Conversely, a person's racial identity or sexual identity is the result of a social narrative of social worth, usually due to some biological marker such as color, that constructs and gives to you an identity. Society places a value or meaning, whether negative or positive, about your place in the social order, whether you use it or not. My racial or sexual identity is salient only when it is being questioned or attacked1 . It is not a worldview. It does not try to convert or recruit - as in converting you to my race or sexuality. I do not want to make you black or white like me. If I should hold my identity as superior to another, then this is seen as an act of prejudice and is an "ism" - something we have a zero tolerance towards. Yet, with religion it is different. It is a worldview; it does seek to convert, to 'save'. It speaks to all levels of the moral - not merely to your place in the social hierarchy. Consequently, we must disrupt the notion that a person's religious identity is the same as their social and biological identity.
An organization's embrace of human diversity allows for one's contributions, including the perspectives that living with our identities have to offer, to flourish. Yet, the business organization is agnostic on the wider (moral and philosophic) questions of what is the "good life" and what is a "just society" applicable to all (the universal) - questions that are at the heart of the 'moral'. Religions seek to answer these questions, businesses do not. Businesses are a-moral, in that they sunder fact and objective reality from value and objective worth (the above moral questions) for the individual under any and all (universal) circumstances. In place of morality rests a set of values, a vision for the business and a requirement of citizenship in the company that guides behaviors and decisions made by its employees. Without this ethical vision and system, there is a vacuum, and humans abhor a vacuum. They will fill it up with their own values and attitudes. Today, that is increasingly religion.
So lets look at (contextualize) the role of religion in understanding the ethical value of toleration and respect, crucial to today's diverse workforce. Simultaneously, lets look at today's challenge to 're-moralize' the work-world without giving up on secularism.
In Perez Zagoran's new scholarly book2 on the rise of religious toleration in the west, he explores the historical problem of religious intoleration and says: "Of all the great world religions past and present, Christianity has been by far the most intolerant." He goes on to write that "this statement may come as a shock, but it is nevertheless true. In spite of the fact that Jesus Christ, the Jewish founder of the Christian religion, is shown in the New Testament as a prophet and savior who preached mutual love and nonviolence to his followers, the Christian church was for a great part of its history an extremely intolerant institution. From its inception, it was intolerant of other, non-Christian religions, first Greco-Roman polytheism, then Judaism, from which it had to separate itself, and later on Islam. Early on...it also became increasingly intolerant of heresy and heretics, those persons who, although worshipers of Christ, dissented from orthodox doctrine...."3 The word heresy comes from the Greek hairesis to mean choice, or the act of choosing. Therefore, the sin of making a choice other than the orthodox faith was persecuted from the inception of monotheism, particularly Christianity. He goes on to reveal that regardless of a Catholic or Protestant regime, persecution and the death of countless tens of thousands of people accused of heresy occurred in the name of God. Wars, crusades and inquisitions were unleashed on those who may have considered themselves true Christians, but others thought otherwise - that they were, in fact, heretics. Persecuting heresy, in the name of orthodoxy, is in many respects, a precursor to group think and rigid/hierarchical conformity. If rigidity is about orthodoxy, then to pursue organizational vitality is to pursue heterodoxy while chaos is about nihilism.
Heresy was seen to be a disease, a contagious infection on the Christian body politic, dangerous to the social order, to peace and to our collective salvation. The scholar R.I. Moore has pointed out that medieval writers ransacked the language of disease for metaphors to describe heresy. It was called a plague, a cancer, an infection, a contagion, a lethal poison and it was compared to leprosy. The discourse of heresy as disease became a comprehensive model for depicting heresy and how it worked, justifying the death penalty. In fact, this language and narrative of disease was the forerunner to much of modern life's prejudices, whether racism, sexism or homophobia, and to its horrors.
Today, we see the same phenomenon occurring by politicized Islamic fundamentalists (also referred to as "Islamicists", in contrast to a Muslim or believer in Islam) such as Bin Laden and by the Muslim brotherhood, by fundamentalist Hindus in India and by extreme fundamentalist (and Zionist) Jews in Israel as well as by Christian fundamentalists in the U.S.. What is to be made of all of this religious identity militancy, orthodoxy and intolerance? How does this square with secularism and our embrace of human diversity, including religious pluralism or religious freedom in the workplace?
On some basic level, we must wonder along with William Cook's recent question in CounterPunch4 magazine, "which of the monotheistic faiths has the ear of God? Who among the various exponents of truth - ministers, rabbis, or mullahs - gather the 'real intelligence' from the purported 'sacred' texts that provide God's directions to his creatures?" There is no shortage today of religious speakers who claim that they have the answer. Whether Pat Robertson, Osama Bin Laden, Jerry Falwell, Minister Hagee or Effi Eitan, each one of the 'speakers for the faith' influence thousands upon thousands of others who believe that these men speak with and for God. They, in turn, tell others their truth, as they hear it. They, too, go to work.
Lest we believe that heresy and its inquisition was a thing of the past, let me give some contemporary examples. Whether it is the Texas minister Hagee's use of the Book of Revelation in the Bible to curse the Islamic faith and charge us to wipe it from the face of the earth or whether it is Osama Bin Laden, who said in his Letter to America (11/24/02) that "we will impose our religion on America - God wills it. The Islamic Nation despises your haughtiness and arrogance", these are clearly acts of intolerance. Or again, in Israel, where one of Sharon's allies (e.g. Eitan) cries out that Palestinians "are not ordinary people, but uncircumcised little people, and evil while the Jews are blessed and will come with vengeance against their terrible evil". Furthermore, he said, "Whosoever disobeys the rabbis deserves death and will be punished by being boiled in hot excrement in hell". Inquisition anyone?
William Cook has written that 'unfortunately, all of the monotheistic faiths today have entered the fray with lances ready, swords at their sides and hate in their eyes'.5 Each speaks with the absoluteness of his belief. And since each sacred text is written in an ancient language that uses abstruse words and images from between 1500 to 2500 years ago, relevant to the agrarian times they were written in, it can be interpreted in multiple ways. Consequently, these speakers become the conduits of meaning; they intercept and interpret the 'word' for the rest of us to follow. The metaphoric narratives of these ancient documents were originally designed to represent the interaction of tribes and the forces of nature, how to live in a community with the social, economic and political realties of tribal societies, and how to deal with the inner world of people's psychologies. There is no single answer to how we apply them to today's realities of science, technology, and hundreds of years of political and economic evolution - rather, faith is a deeply felt personal undertaking. Yet, the sacred texts have been re-manufactured for relevance by these speakers for our age of the Internet, computers, bioengineering and space travel technologies.
Faith based zealots offer little in the name of humility, reverence, gentleness, charity, forgiveness, faith or love but rather they offer arrogance, hypocrisy, castigation, self-indulgence, condemnation, fear and hate. They turn plowshares into swords, action into destruction. Although they represent a small minority of the faithful who find refuge in their faiths, they influence many in times of uncertainty, fear and insecurity. Remember, it takes a few to make war, but many to make peace. And today is just such an age of uncertainty, fear and insecurity.
Religion is not by nature tolerant, especially when more than one person claims that they have access to the one true God and to the one true interpretation. There are over 9,089 religions, with 19 major religions alone. And many are fractured over the 'true' or right way. For example, there are 34,000 Christian groups alone, over 200 Buddhist sects, and multiple Islamic sects (e.g. Sunni, Shitte, Sufi, Taliban, Wahhabi, etc). Such diversity requires the separation of church and state, the secular separation of organizational principles from moral beliefs. This is why businesses are a-moral or agnostic and that is why Thomas Jefferson found organized religion a threat to democracy.
This move away from theocracy (fusion of church/religion with the state) to the secular separation of one's private morality from the public morality of the organization (see below) represents the chief gain of secularism, of humanism and of the 18th century Enlightenment. Instead of beliefs and faith, enlightenment stands for reason, a critical attitude to authority (hence creativity), consent, humanism, beneficence of science, a universe ruled by natural laws, toleration, freedom of thought, and personal happiness. Its motto was "Dare to know - have courage to use your own reason". In spite of the historical problems surrounding its application, the Enlightenment principles of tolerance, like all values, orient our judgments before we make them. They guide our inquiries, our decisions and our thinking.
Why a Rise in Religious Identity -
Uncertainty, Anomie and the Politics of Fear
It is said that religions, like political organizations, can't live without enemies. Whether pointing to the image of Satan, witches, and heretics of the past to the Soviet Union and communism of the 20th century and some say terrorism today, fear keeps the flock afraid of 'excommunication' and hence becoming defenseless. This politics of fear is a deeply unsettling state for organizations in need of human energy, creativity and innovation. It promotes a psychology of siege, not generosity, of dread, not joy, of disenchantment and not enchantment. It promotes conformity and rigidity on the one hand or chaotic egoism on the other. "When Rome is in danger, all internal differences are forgotten" on the one hand, or "where's the exit?" on the other.
The modern age is increasingly one of pluralism and uncertainty that has lead to skepticism, to indifference and to relativism. In today's world of religious militancy, we are witnessing a quest to re-moralize the modern world, to usher in a new axial age like the one that gave birth to the original sacred texts. Its intent seems to be to recombine the moral with the rational, if not also with the sensual and sentimental forms of making meaning. Modernity's split between the religious and the scientific has left many with a yearning, a vacuum that is being filled with an absolutist morality, and it is finding its way into the workplace, into schools, and into our public spaces.
When Modernity began after the 16th century and gained political expression with the revolutions of the 18th century, the pre-modern life of certainty, of one religion, one law and one monarch, gave way to choice, to uncertainty and to doubt that has produced an abundance of anxiety. In the early industrial age until the mid twentieth century, an assimilationist, conformity-based world where science and progress went unchallenged, supplanted this uncertainty. For some, the top down model of organizations during the cold war provided some certainty of what you were ('us') as opposed to 'them' and it gave many a sense of security, in spite of the dangers.
Today's post industrial world of globalization, relentless monetarization of life and reengineering of jobs, increasing choice, and globalization's attacks on traditional societies (e.g. the former colonial areas of the 'third world') has given birth to a fundamentalist impulse, if not a search for a sense of purpose and value in life and work. This disenchantment with modern life and work is accelerated by the problematic notion of progress and causality due to science's continuous 'discoveries'. It is as if causes and purposes and values were expelled from the physical universe - rocks fall due to gravity, not due to their purpose (Plato), species progress and evolve due to natural selection and not to God's master plan (Darwin). The scientific modern age sundered apart that which was whole: fact from value, inquiry from the 'good life' and scientific explanation from purpose. A rise in modern confusions around values and creeping uncertainties replaced ancient received certainties in sacred texts. Modernism was born in doubt. Cohesion and coherence were lost.
Science's attempt to reclaim certainty, as with mathematics, is a continuous quest with no possibility of finality. A desired return to religious or ethnic certainty has resulted. A crisis of identities has given birth to an identity assertiveness and religious militancy (see my book, Diversity Beyond the Numbers for more on this) not seen since the advent of urbanization and industrialism.
Business Values, Ethics and Pluralism
This anomie, or confusion and void that we feel in contemporary life were to be settled not only by a rationalistic and scientific worldview, but also by life long careers and meaningful work. This hasn't happened - as stated earlier, religions have exploded to almost 10,000 (World Christian Encyclopedia). The contemporary search for meaning in work is wracked by fear from constant reengineering with its job losses and technological skills obsolescence. People are striving for the moral - a universal answer to questions of what is right and just for all, as in questions of justice. They are also searching for answers to evaluative questions of what has value in life and work. They are deliberating on whom one is and who one wants to be concerning the good life - these are ethical considerations on what is appropriate for us insofar as we are members of a specific collectivity with a unique history. But in the pluralism of modern life, the "how should I live" cannot be answered once and for all.
In today's complex and pluralist world, the search for justice has had the effect of reconstructing the moral point of view where claims can be fairly and impartially adjudicated. This is also true at work. It takes dialogue, it takes deliberation and it takes a procedure of moral argumentation and agreement. This means that we must empathize with one another, recognize that we are vulnerable and reciprocal in our public dialogue, that we demand mutual consideration to preserve the integrity of the individual and the web of interpersonal relations that form our identities. This moral search for justice must be codified in the business culture, in its constitutional project of ethics and purpose. Without it, the vacuum referred to above will demand that I bring my, or my minister's, rabbi's, or mullah's, morality to work.
Businesses are not merely instrumental associations of things for profit, but living social organizations of people with multiple and sometimes competing stakeholders (customers, employees, communities, shareholders or donors, and suppliers). Businesses are 'little societies' where citizenship skills such as civic tolerance, including religious freedom, can be deepened. It is at work where citizens of each country spend most of their lives outside of the home. And it is mostly at work where we learn and school ourselves after primary education. At work, the autonomy of the individual is conceptualized in relation to our shared form of life, of the common good, of the social and not of the egocentric. It is here, in organizations, that we have a chance to provide for a secular space based on the core moral (regardless of religion) values of human respect, integrity and justice.
Values serve as our behavioral glue. If we treat each other as cost-benefit calculations instead of as creative partners in collaboration, then this moral vacuum can easily be filled with disrespect, fundamentalist blame and shame games or with prejudice and discrimination. Ethics is behaving according to one's (or the organization's) values. Business ethics is about finding ways to create the conditions for respect to flourish between peoples through the practice of our values. Practice helps us to truly understand our values. Like with any skill, we must first be educated and trained in our ethical system and the values that anchor it. Then, as in religion or skills training, we must practice them as does prayer, Buddhist meditation, or Yoga does in religion. Persistently striving to meet the ideal of the ethical system and values for all employees means to continually dialogue about and practice these values to prevent future breakdowns. This prevents perpetrators of disrespect and unethical behavior from acting out.
The rise of the distinction between a public and a private morality, as in secularism, owes much to the growth of pluralism and pluralist values, religious tolerance, and intellectual freedoms. For example, modern conflicts such as those surrounding abortion, euthanasia, sexuality, and patriarchy are pluralist examples that occur today. Businesses do not take positions on most of these conflicts. Rather, it stands aloft from these debates, while allowing each employee their personal opinion, belief or attitude. Simultaneously, a business's obligation is to a public morality, that is, what we owe others even when we disagree with their private moral beliefs. Examples are respecting the right to live free from harm, or not treating others as a means to an end but rather as an end in themselves. We strive for a reasonable avoidability of these offenses at work via mutual respect for one another restricted by a grammar of conduct. A business has a legitimate interest in protecting and encouraging attitudes, practices, institutions, and social conditions that tend to sustain a sphere in which people can respect and be respected by one another. This cannot happen when religious posturing, witnessing or recruiting occurs. Respecting the right of an individual's religious identity to exist without coercion or harm of any kind underscores the public morality of an organization in its tolerance towards individual private morality. It does not allow for the individual to disrespect another's beliefs or being/identity in the name of his or her own private morality. This would mean taking and imposing one's private morality onto the public.
Hence, the education of employees into the public morality of the business, encoded in its values and ethics, is crucial - values such as respect, honesty, caring, responsibility, accountability, involvement, diversity. Otherwise, management is confused, in the name of diversity, on how to demonstrate tolerance for one's religious identity or other identities while disallowing those identities from becoming destabilizing to the social good, to the public morality of the organization. The first amendment to the constitution on religious freedom is an example of public morality, exercising your beliefs against another is not.
Businesses are not democratic institutions, but ethics and pluralism can survive even in authoritarian socio-political systems. The leadership of the organization hands down the values and ethical code to people in the organization. In democratic societies, it is the opposite, people decide on the values for the rulers to enforce. Yet, post-industrial businesses are also experimenting with 'moments' of democracy within an otherwise authoritarian system, such as in team decision-making and creative project sessions. Regardless, to make the values real for the culture and people of the business, it needs constant dialogue, education and practice for it to be real. Orientation educational sessions are the first place to start.
As businesses, societies, and organizations become more complex, deliberations and decisions concerning values and ideals for the good of the association must take place within a constitutional framework that guarantees individual liberty (respect, dignity, voice, justice) and the right of dissension to cultivate one's own distinctive identities and contributions to the team. This represents the 'moral' view in an otherwise a-moral institution and it answers some of the hunger that anxious employees are yearning to have fulfilled. To wit, leadership discourse must not be trapped in the language of cost benefit only, but rather must nourish and sustain a popular perception of social justice, inclusion and autonomy. This discourse promotes a constitutional citizenship steeped in the practice of social responsibility, not privatized altruism and marketplace narratives, but rather of justice, equality and mutuality. This promotes the socially responsible stakeholder balance ethic as it enables us to be living in the solidarity of a complimentary perspective, not the ethnocentrically isolated form of solidarity that pits 'us' against 'them'. It is a general form of will, motivating a generosity of collaboration that takes confidence, provides for hope and not despair, values and not nihilism, ethics to do rather than rules to not do. This requires encouragement, education and communicative practices - without it people retreat into transcendent 'truths' given them by their faith speakers. It enhances organizational performance as it enhances the moral view, freed from religiosity and exclusion.
Studies have shown that people go to new religious movements and sects to form relationships, to have things to do, to gain a sense of security and certainty, and to feel like they are taking part in something larger than themselves. Secular spaces that embrace the moral view, based in a values driven ethics and codified in a constitutional project, although not meant to compete with religions, can give people a 'safe space' for meaningful work, to build relationships, to feel secure, to have a sense of belonging, and finally, to learn civic tolerance on behalf of diverse others in our fractured societies.
The French Scarf Affair -
Does It Apply to American Businesses?
The above brief history on religious intolerance and the rise in modern European Judeo-Christian societies of the idea of religious tolerance, freedom and pluralism is especially meaningful in France. It was in France that the 30 years (religious 16th century) wars6 was fought, where the power of the Catholic Church was so determinant in public affairs. It was in France that the revolution of 1789 was fought for a secular republic free from religious interference and for religious freedom. Unlike the US revolution, the French revolution witnessed the sacking of Churches, the killing of priests and the complete submission of the Christian to the secular. In 1905, France went further to codify this separation of church and state, and in 1989 a law furthering the 1905 code was passed declaring that religious symbols could not be worn in public schools if they 'constitute an act of intimidation, provocation, proselytizing or propaganda', or threaten health, security, or the freedom of others or disturb social order. This is similar to what American businesses have called a zero tolerance policy towards intolerance. Yet, a recent commission assembled by French President J. Chirac declared that these laws were no longer adequate given the cultural and religious composition of present day France. The French commission of religious leaders, teachers, politicians, and sociologists declared that more was needed. In France, one celebrates one's French identity first, religious, ethnic, or racial identities secondly. It relies on a modified form of pluralist assimilation. In the US, on the other hand, being a nation of immigrants we celebrate our differences, our diversity alongside our American identity. Assimilation has given way to pluralism.
France has been undergoing dramatic demographic and social changes. For example, it has witnessed, in just the last three years, a dramatic increase in racism and anti-Semitism. Its Muslim population is the largest in Europe, at 5 million out of 58 million (almost 10%). The commission stated that they were "astonished to see that the situation was more serious than what we previously thought...the challenge today is to give space to new religions while at the same time to succeed in integration and struggle against political-religious manipulation". They declared that the wearing of the traditional headscarf for Muslim women was more of a political than a religious statement. They found that organized groups were testing the secular state by demands on public services in the name of religion while pressuring Muslims to identify first with their faith and then with their French citizenship. They declared the wearing of the veil or scarf a 'guerilla action' aimed at the heart of the republic.
This is a debate that is continuing in Europe, and in France itself, regarding increased immigration, religious pluralism including coming to grips with Islam, and with European Union expansion. Its intent is to reassert the state's traditional right to pronounce on how religion influences public life in France. Leading French women, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, printed an open letter in Elle magazine, calling for support for Chirac and an outright ban on the veil, while supporting the legislation. Many young Muslim girls face violence and pressure from their own communities if they do not wear the scarf - sometimes including rape. For this and for other reasons, most moderate Muslim imams, along with feminists, have supported Chirac. More orthodox and fundamentalist imams do not.
The law applies to the state school system (public schools) only. It does not apply to public life, nor does it bar discreet symbols such as medallions, small crosses, Stars of David, hands of Fatima, or small Korans. It bans conspicuous religious symbols such as large crosses for Christians, headscarves for Muslim girls, and skullcaps for Jewish boys. Chirac declared that state schools will remain secular, and for that, a law is necessary.
Tellingly, his cabinet went further to call for a law to prevent patients from refusing treatment by a doctor or health care professional of the opposite sex, for the development of the teaching of basic religious facts in schools, for a code of secularism for civil servants to use as a guide in the workplace, and for the creation of a watchdog agency to monitor violations. The law also requires students to attend physical education classes and accept what is taught on the Holocaust and human reproduction. It demands that public schools guarantee total equality, including coeducation of all teachings. Finally, it declares that schools are the best tool for planting the roots of the republican idea. Obviously, the challenge of immigrant integration into mainstream French society and the acculturation of immigrants into the value system of the republic have reached alarming proportions. The French, like most Europeans, have a long memory and the inter war period (1929-1939) is still discussed and analyzed with a "never again" intention.
So, why such a law now? Declaring that fanaticism is gaining ground, Chirac and France's parliament have taken a stand. Chirac acknowledged that France's Muslim youth are alienated and face discrimination based on the sound of their names, if not for their religion. It is an acknowledgement of France's failure to integrate Muslim immigrants.
Yet, school administrators are tired of students using religion to avoid gym or biology classes, questioning the veracity of the Holocaust, and classrooms that are divided up into militant religious communities. Besides disrupting teachers who teach the history of the Holocaust, denying that it ever happened, students have demanded prayer breaks within the standardized exams at the end of high school. As a result, the commission is declaring that secularism must govern French schools, it is demanding that coercion, and sexist abuse, intimidation, violence and ostracism against Muslim girls in public schools must stop. Reflecting the fractures that are widening in French (and parts of European) society over race, religion, language, culture and ethnicity, schools have become the new battleground. Students, Muslims, Jews, Christians and others, must be provided a safe space where they can study and be French students and citizens of the republic first, members of religious communities second. They need to be where they can learn and choose how they will demonstrate their citizenship later, as religious adults or not. It is a position that I support, given the context.
But would that work in the U.S., a nation of immigrants? Writers are arguing today that religious fundamentalism and references are obscuring our constitutional secular principles here as well. For example, N. Kristof has written that "America is riven today by a God gulf of distrust"7 As Americans are increasingly telling pollsters, more frequently than in Europe for example, that 75% claim to be Christian and most go to church, that they believe in miracles and prayer and that only 28% believe in evolution, we have a president who invokes God in his speeches, weaves biblical phrases throughout his public speeches, and says that the jury is still out on evolution. The vice president sends out Christmas cards claiming that God is on our side. The U.S. Attorney General claims that America's character is "godly and eternal, not civic and temporal"8 and President Bush publicly criticized France for practicing a too rigorous separation of church and state. This came from the leader of a government that is charged to defend the separation of church and state, not to criticize others who do it. It is as if secularism has become a dirty word.
When Howard Dean was the front-runner, he was forced to invoke God into his speeches, lest he seem too East Coast secular and hence, unelectable. More and more we hear that the American government was founded on divine authority rather than on human reason (an Enlightenment principle) although the Constitution deliberately omitted any mention of God and instead gave supreme governmental power to "we the people". Although the Constitution is a secular document and the U.S. is a secular immigrant based society, we must ask why is creationism being offered side by side with evolutionary science in public schools and why am I told in a Fortune 100 corporation by an employee, with management knowledge, that he was hired to save souls and witness against sodomites, not to fulfill his work tasks?
The challenge continues to exist, just look again at the American Airlines situation referred to above - holding AA passengers hostage, suspended at 35,000 feet, to the pilot's religious messages. One public relations professional and acquaintance of mine referred to this as the "Airship's Captain Ahab/Queeg. Who ya gonna call? Jesus Christ, Mohammad, or Allah? Praise whomever - Just get me down on the ground!! I'll tell you anything you want to hear. Then, I'll NEVER fly again on your crazy airline!!!" As he pointed out, "no amount of "Perception Management" press releases or spin about the obvious corporate failure to hold up their secular, not to mention security, obligation - to consumers and other stakeholders - will cut it".
Although these kinds of situations are unfolding differently in France and Europe than in the U.S., the dramatic need to separate public morality from private morality, the need to educate and enforce a 'secular code', is crucial. The U.S. has a long history of absorbing immigrants, acculturating them to the constitutional value system and integrating them into society. We also have a long history of failing at that, from slavery and racism, to women's and gay rights. Yet, in our struggles we have continued to press forward for individual identity recognition. For this reason, I believe that although this is a growing concern, we need to fully think through the notion outlined above on ethical pluralism and on professional conduct policies such as zero tolerance for intolerance. The American Airlines fiasco is an example of both the failure to regulate the grammar of conduct as much as it underscores the importance of pursuing a constitutional project in today's corporate workplaces.
In France, as in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, the challenge is a different one. Wearing chadors in public schools is a bigger issue due to Europe's communality views on immigrants (one community, not immigrant communities) and historic anti-immigrant attitudes. Here, immigrant integration has been a part of the ongoing dialogue since inception.
Yet, regardless of location and situation, explosions and conflicts continue to occur. Already, in many of our schools, and similar to the French system, is a law that forbids gang clothing and institutes the wearing of uniforms. Although I am not trying to identify religious symbols with gang paraphernalia, to administrators the conflicts remain similar. The zero tolerance for intolerance policy is an example of a principle within a grammar of conduct. It is equivalent to the 1989 law in France forbidding acts of intimidation, provocation, proselytizing, propaganda, or acts that threaten health, security, or the freedom of others or disturb social order. To my mind, if organizations continue to embrace the constitutional project9 with its grammar of conduct and ethical, regulatory and justice systems, then we can deepen our understanding of how to apply the zero tolerance policy without it becoming a draconian reflex action that will lead to blowback and to the need to take the next step. Yet, without immediate education of the workforce on the constitutional project, including its values, vision, ethics, and zero tolerance policy, then employees are working in a performance expectation vacuum and may feel unsafe promoting 'heterodox' (non-orthodox and creative) opinions. As we've argued here, that can lead to personal worldviews, such as intolerant moralities, to make their way into workplace social structures.
For this reason I also believe that making allowances for prayer during breaks and other periods is a positive pluralist gesture, while providing conference rooms and other facilities for religious study is not. The first is mutual adaptation; the second is 'state support'. These are complex tactical issues that must be viewed through a strategic prism of ethical pluralism and organizational secularism. If this is not made a part of the organizational culture, then the growing unease about the state of the economy and about the rising wars of identity, including terror and religious conflict, will only add to a transcendent desire to belong. As Bob Herbert has recently written (N.Y. Times) "The sense of anxiety is growing and has crossed party lines." People want answers.
ENDNOTES
1 Gary Y. Adkins, Diversity Beyond The Numbers; Business Vitality, Ethics & Identity in the 21st Century, GDI Press, Long Beach, CA., pgs 89-106, 2003.
2 Peter Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2003.
3 Zagorin, pg. 1-7.
4 William A. Cook, "Faith Based Fanatics: The Other Intelligence Failure", Counterpunch, February 14-15, 2004.
5 Cook, Ibid.
6 "Une foi, un loi, un roi" (ref: France www.france.com)
("One faith, one law, one king") This traditional saying gives some indication of how the state, society, and religion were all bound up together in people's minds and experience. There was not the distinction that we have now between public and private, between civic and personal. Religion had formed the basis of the social consensus of Europe for a millenium. Since Clovis (481-511 AD), the French monarchy in particular had closely tied itself to the church -- the church sanctified its right to rule in exchange for military and civil protection. France was "the first daughter of the church" and its king "The Most Christian King" (le roy tres chretien), and no one could imagine life any other way.
"One faith" was viewed as essential to civil order -- how else would society hold together? And without the right faith, pleasing to God who upholds the natural order, there was sure to be disaster. Heresy was treason, and vice versa. Religious toleration, which to us seems such a necessary virtue in public life, was considered tantamount to letting drug dealers move next door and corrupt your children, a view for the cynical and world-weary who had forgotten God and no longer cared about the health of society.
Innovation caused trouble.
The way things were is how they ought to be, and new ideas would lead to anarchy and destruction. No one wanted to admit to being an "innovater." The Renaissance thought of itself as rediscovering a purer, earlier time and the Reformation needed to feel that it was not new, but just a "return" to the simple, true religion of the beginnings of Christianity.
7 Nicholas D. Kristof, "The God Gulf", New York Times, January 7, 2004, Op Ed.
8 James O. Goldsborough, "Separating the Church from the State", San Diego Union-Tribune, January 5, 2004.
9 Gary Y. Adkins, Diversity Beyond the Numbers, pgs. 216-241.
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