The Pluralism Project at Harvard University
Dr. Douglas A. Hicks
University of Richmond
Religion and U.S. Public Life
Project Description
With God on All Sides: Leadership in a Devout and Diverse America
by Douglas A. Hicks
Cambridge University Press, 2009
http://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~dhicks
Perhaps no other nation is or has ever been as religiously diverse as the United States. For elected officials, school principals, corporate leaders, and many others, this diversity poses unique challenges. Leaders bring their own faiths to public life, and they daily encounter followers of similar and different faiths. Good leadership must draw together people from varied backgrounds in order to achieve something in common. This is no simple task.
How should leaders deal with menorahs and crosses, veils and turbans, prayers and holidays? How do they and their followers turn the cacophony of beliefs and practices into a kind of citizenship worthy of the American tradition of religious freedom? How can they honor the religious convictions of all Americans? In With God on All Sides, Douglas A. Hicks provides a roadmap for leaders as they traverse the post-9/11 landscape. Although the devout possess moral and spiritual resources that can enrich civic life, leaders must also be prepared to cope with nearly inevitable conflicts between people of different faiths. Yet wise leaders can find ways to transform the problem of diversity into an opportunity. Drawing on their moral and spiritual resources, Americans of all creeds have the capacity to enhance the quality of our civic debate. Their faith-based practices create occasions for mutual learning.
Hicks tells the stories of how diverse Americans have transformed public controversies into cases of cooperation. The key to good leadership, Hicks writes, is to engage one another across lines of difference with a spirit of humility, build communication and trust, and offer an inclusive vision that is true to America’s principles. Based on years of research and practical experience, With God on All Sides provides an invaluable and thought-provoking guide to leadership—and citizenship—in our devout and diverse nation.
Reviews
Douglas Hicks understands the power and the diversity of religion in America. In this book he breaks it down, analyzes it and offers suggestions on how our leaders can and should deal with it. A thoughtful, evenhanded work.
-Bob Schieffer, CBS News anchor
Among its many contributions, the Commonwealth of Virginia has offered two great Virginia values to the nation: equality and religious freedom. In our current politics, too full of division and fear-mongering, these are principles we can stand on. Douglas Hicks interprets these key ideas and invites us all into a public conversation about religious faith in America. His well-written book serves as a guide.
-The Hon. Tim Kaine, Governor of Virginia
In this highly accessible and interesting book, Douglas Hicks describes how religion in all of its diversity can help build common ground. He ably draws on studies of both religion and leadership to produce a book with practical implications for American public life.
-Diana Eck, author of A New Religious America
This is an exceptional book. I whipped through it in a day, and then went back and re-read my favorite parts again. For all those who want America’s mix of religious devotion and diversity to lead to cooperation instead of a clash of civilizations, this book is required reading.
-Eboo Patel, Executive Director of Interfaith Youth Core and author, Acts of Faith
Solidly based in history and attuned to today, Hicks’s book is a realistic guide to how we can positively live and work together. I highly recommend it as a major contribution to an effective leadership.
-James MacGregor Burns, author of Leadership and Running Alone
Douglas A. Hicks is Associate Professor of Leadership Studies and Religion in the Jepson School of Leadership Studies and Executive Director of the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement at the University of Richmond. He is the author of Religion and the Workplace: Pluralism, Spirituality, Leadership and Inequality and Christian Ethics.
Religion and the Workplace: Pluralism, Spirituality, Leadership
by Douglas A. Hicks
Cambridge University Press, 2003
http://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~dhicks/religion.html
How can company leaders and employees negotiate their different religious and spiritual commitments in the workplace? This book draws upon scholarship in religion, management, and leadership to tackle this question. At a time of international debate over religious conflict and tolerance, workforces in various parts of the world are more diverse than ever before. Increasingly, the workplace is a significant public sphere in which people of varied religious perspectives encounter one another. Religion and spirituality are, for many employees, central to their identities. From the perspective of the employer, however, they can be distracting or divisive influences. The book analyzes the current interest in religion and spirituality in U.S. companies. It offers conceptual distinctions and comparative examples (from the pluralistic contexts of India and Singapore) to trace the myriad ways that religion is present at work. It offers a model of respectful pluralism, asserting that the task of effective and ethical leadership in organizations is not to promote a single spiritual or religious framework but, rather, to create an environment in which managers and employees can respectfully express their own beliefs and practices.
Reviews of Religion and the Workplace:
"America's increasing religious diversity has challenged and changed our society in many ways, especially in the workplace where we meet and interact on a daily basis. In this important book, Douglas Hicks analyzes workplace issues from attire, office holiday policies, to discussions around the water cooler. He captures the challenges that religion and spirituality present in the world of the workplace. Above all, Hicks provides an invaluable moral framework in which office managers and coworkers can acknowledge conflict and create genuine, respectful pluralism. This book is a must-read for understanding religion in the rapidly changing workplace."
-Dr. Diana L. Eck, Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies and Director, The Pluralism Project, Harvard University
"A seminal analysis of one of the most important and original topics of our time, spirituality in the workplace."
-Dr. Warren Bennis, Distinguished Professor of Management, University of Southern California and co-author of Geeks and Geezers: How Era, Values and Defining Moments Shape Leaders
"A landmark study in its chosen field-religion in the workplace-but Hicks' practical proposals for 'respectful pluralism' have a much wider relevance. In the context of increasing religious diversity the book represents an important contribution to enhancing religious literacy and a most useful set of recommendations around the term 'respectful pluralism'. I can envisage a range of professionals finding it of great practical and theoretical use: health professionals, teachers, local government officers, city councillors, as well as those with responsibility for equal opportunities"
-Dr. Philip Lewis, Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford
"This is an exceptional book. Hicks has found a way to take a sophisticated
set of ideas and communicate them in a clear and straightfoward way to a
broad audience."
-Dr. Ronald Thiemann, Professor of Theology and of Religion and Society, Harvard University
From the book's Introduction (and slightly adapted):
The standard approaches in leadership studies, organizational culture, and human resource management pay inadequate attention to religious beliefs and practices at work. In models of the secular workplace, religion is clearly a "private" matter and should be excluded from "private" sector workplaces. My analysis argues that labeling either religion or business as private is descriptively inaccurate and morally problematic. The religious commitments of employees find their way into the workplace in one way or another, whether or not managers or scholars acknowledge it. Managers should create conditions under which employees are able to express their religion at work within certain moral constraints.
In contrast, advocates of "spiritual leadership" recognize that the workplace is not properly understood or managed as a secular sphere, but they depend upon an untenable dichotomization of spirituality (which is welcome at work) and religion (which is not welcome). Despite the fact that many practitioners accept such a spiritual-religious distinction, problems with its conceptual and practical applications persist. Most accounts of spiritual leadership disguise genuine differences of perspective and potential conflict behind happy (and often false) commonality. In addition, too many scholars and corporate leaders portray spirituality as the latest leadership tool to be used in the quest for increased efficiency and profitability.
In recent public discussions about corporate scandals marked by leaders' deception, greed, and corruption, journalists and scholars have called upon American corporate leaders to demonstrate more social responsibility, exercise servant leadership, and cultivate a moral character. Some commentators assert that bringing more "faith" or "soul" or "values" (and these terms are often thrown about interchangeably) into the workplace is a ready solution. Such perspectives overlook the diversity of moral values --which values?-- and they make a facile assumption that people from religious and spiritual backgrounds are more likely than their coworkers to act ethically.
In the United States, a solid majority of citizens claim Christianity as their "religious preference." (Fewer than half, however, are regular participants in a congregation.) A voluminous literature of popular and scholarly works advises Christians on how to live out their faith at work. Most of these authors rightly note that Christian theological and moral traditions have a great deal to say about economic life. Few of them, however, pay proper attention to the religious diversity of coworkers or to the problematic nature of culturally established Christian workplaces.
If the respective fields of leadership and management studies have avoided religion, the academic discipline of religious studies has overlooked the workplace. Scholars' most in-depth examinations of religion in public life have addressed politics or civil society. In the U.S., these discussions focus on "civil religion" in presidential pronouncements, predominantly legal debates over religious and government institutions ("church and state"), and the potential relationship of religious involvement and social capital. In terms of religion and the economy, religious ethicists have analyzed the "meaning of work," the social responsibility of corporations, and questions of distributive justice. Scholars of religion have devoted scant direct attention, however, to religion and the workplace. Increasingly, the workplace has become a significant and public sphere in which people of diverse religious perspectives encounter one another; it thus merits scholarly attention.
Supporters of models such as the secular workplace, spiritual leadership, and Christian preference will encounter challenges in this book. They will take issue with some points of my analysis, because I argue that each of those views is significantly flawed. At the same time, these scholars and practitioners will also find areas of agreement or complementarity with their perspectives. I intend my criticisms to be constructive and hope that the ensuing debates will contribute to workplace policies and cultures that respect, on equal terms, employees of all backgrounds.
Making sense of religion and spirituality in the workplace requires an understanding of the changes in U.S. society in the post-World War II period that have come to bear on religion in public life and the workplace. Chapter 1 examines how developments in immigration policy, especially in 1965, significantly widened the scope and degree of religious (and racial, ethnic, and cultural) diversity in the United States. More recently, the responses to the events of September 11, 2001, brought the questions of religiously based conflict and religiously based discrimination to the center of public debate. How has the changing American context transformed the relationship of religion and business in the past fifty years?
How has the current interest in religion and, especially, spirituality in the workplace arisen? What factors have contributed to the corporate interest in spirituality? Chapter 2 attributes the recent interest in spirituality to demographic, economic, and religious trends in the U.S. and to transformations in the nature and organization of work. Some of the factors that have led people to embrace spirituality in the workplace are positive, while others are morally troubling. Is it possible to determine how much of the current interest entails genuine respect for workers and their needs and, in contrast, how much reflects companies' efforts to take advantage of employees?
How can businesses adapt to increasing religious and spiritual diversity? Chapter 3 asserts that the literature on spirituality and work tends to emphasize the sameness or commonality that is supposedly at the root of spirituality-- rather than the religious particularity that appears at first glance to be (and often is) diive. Employees from different religious and spiritual perspectives may well be able to find significant common ground, but commonality should not simply be assumed.
Is religious expression more controversial, difficult, or incomprehensible than other kinds of potential conflict among coworkers? Chapter 4 considers individual-level and institutional-level issues concerning religion in relation to conflicts based on spiritual, political, and cultural expression at work. A variety of recent cases that have received media attention serve as examples. Are there ways to address conflict without subscribing to a reductionist view of religious difference?
Chapter 5 offers a map of various ways in which individual employees express their religious commitments differently from one another. What does it mean to "be religious at work"? Some persons, coming from minority traditions, wear distinctive garb that sets them apart from most of their coworkers. Other employees, for various reasons, keep their beliefs and practices to themselves and are thus not overtly religious at work, but their commitments still fundamentally influence their actions. Some employees do not identify as religious or spiritual; many (but not all) of these persons would prefer a secular workplace. Chapter 5 traces the variety of religious and spiritual forms, among other kinds of diversity, in the workforce.
What happens to religious diversity when an organization supports a religion of the workplace? Chapter 6 analyzes the institutional roles of religion in the workplace. The chapter draws upon the concepts of civil religion and established religion in the political sphere in order to draw analogies to institutionalized beliefs and practices in the workplace. The case of "corporate chaplains" is considered as a curious and problematic intersection of workplace spirituality and established Christianity.
Chapter 7 explores religion, public life, and the workplace in India and Singapore. These two very different societies experience tremendous degrees of religious diversity, each contrasting explicitly with a neighboring Islamic state. Given their distinct histories, how have India and Singapore shaped a pluralistic identity? My analysis offers neither of these nations as a wholly positive model for addressing diversity in the U.S. society or workplace-- indeed there are morally problematic features with each. Yet this cross-national examination informs the examination of the U.S. context.
My constructive proposal for respectful pluralism is developed and applied in chapters 8 and 9. Given the complexities detailed in earlier chapters, can a moral framework give adequate guidance to company leaders who wish to respect the diverse religious, spiritual, political, and cultural identities of employees? What can employees expect from their companies and what can companies rightly ask of their employees? This moral framework presupposes the legal minimums of religious expression guaranteed by U.S. laws, and it argues that a level of respect higher than the legal minimum guarantees is due to employees. Chapter 8 outlines the moral argument for respectful pluralism and applies the framework to specific scenarios in the workplace.
Chapter 9 asserts that respectful pluralism connects to various themes of leadership studies, such as organizational culture, ethics, diversity, and critical thinking. What requirements does the framework place on leaders? Is constructing respectful pluralism itself an act of leadership? Chapter 9 concludes with a discussion of some limitations of my perspective and some central implications and areas for future research on religion and the workplace.
How can leaders and followers negotiate religious differences in their workplace? Respectful pluralism is a framework, not a specific blueprint, for addressing inevitable conflicts that result from religious, spiritual, and other differences in the workplace. Pragmatic and moral issues that are context-specific will require that the view be adapted to fit well in any actual organization. Nonetheless, at a time in which Americans have endorsed a vision of a national community in which people of many faiths (and no professed faith) are invited to participate in all spheres of society, this framework of respectful pluralism can contribute to a conversation about religion and spirituality at work and in other spheres of public life. I hope that readers living outside the U.S. may also see applications and insights for understanding diversity in their own contexts.
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