New York Times Op-Ed: What Happens When the Boss Invites You to Bible Study?, by Jennifer Miller:
When Christy Childers moved from Austin to San Francisco in 2017 to start a marketing job at Facebook, she felt anxious about sharing her evangelical faith with her new colleagues. In Ms. Childers’s religious community, Silicon Valley has a reputation for being overtly secular and less than accepting of Christian beliefs. She now calls that view “unfounded.” Within a week, colleagues had invited her to a lunchtime Bible study and a happy hour attended by scores of Christians across the tech industry.
“I thought, ‘I can be out about being a Christian. I can do that here,’” Ms. Childers said.
During her three years as a brand manager, Ms. Childers’s evangelical identity became central to her work. She honed her managerial skills by leading the Christians at Facebook (now Christians at Meta) employee resource group. Weekly prayer meetings with colleagues led to what she called “real-time miracles,” like engineers suddenly fixing bugs they’d struggled with for months and solutions to P.R. crises. Company leaders also consulted her about the attitudes of conservative Facebook users.
In 2019, Ms. Childers founded Pray for Tech, a nonprofit that supports Christian prayer communities inside tech companies. The next year, she left Facebook to run the organization full time. She has since worked with Christian groups at 40 companies, where she’s observed a growing interest in supporting workers’ core identities, including their faith.
This corporate effort to create a sense of belonging at work grew after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, when many companies rushed to improve their diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I., efforts. Employees from underrepresented groups were encouraged to bring their “authentic” or “whole” selves to work, and companies increased support for identity-based employee groups organized around gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation.
Increasingly, faith is a part of this list. Human resources professionals, diversity consultants and scholars all say it’s become more common for employees to share their religious identities at work and to request the same corporate recognition and support given to other identity groups. Most major tech companies now have official faith-based affinity groups.
Fueling the effort are multiple Christian organizations including Pray for Tech; anti-discrimination nonprofits, like the Anti-Defamation League; and nonpartisan, multifaith nonprofits like Interfaith America and the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation.
“It feels like the train is moving and as imperfect as the D.E.I. vehicle is, hop on or hop off and get religion into the larger ecosystem,” said Simran Jeet Singh, executive director of the Religion & Society Program at the Aspen Institute. “It’s almost like, here’s a way for people of faith to say, think about us too.”
Twenty years ago, few secular companies recognized faith-based employee groups and those that did exist — whether officially sanctioned or not — were typically for Christians. Today, nearly 70 secular corporations officially fund them, according to the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation, and scores more allow them to exist. Many groups are new since 2017, some have thousands of members and represent Christians, Muslims and Jews, along with Sikhs, Buddhists, Baha’is and even atheists.
Scholars call this a cultural shift. The secular office has long been “a neutral space, where there is separating out of religion,” said Helen Chung, an assistant professor of industrial-organizational psychology at Seattle Pacific University who studies faith-based employee resource groups. This is partly “a carry-over from the separation of church and state,” Ms. Chung said, and partly a way to keep the peace. “What are the two things you’re not supposed to talk about?” said Brian Grim, president of the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation. “Religion and politics.” …
Americans may be turning away from organized religion, but a fifth still view their work as a spiritual calling, according to a nationally representative survey from Rice University. …
Mr. Grim, of the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation, recalled hearing about another incident in which an employee sent a mass email inviting staff to a Bible study. Mr. Grim says that the appropriate employer response should depend on the situation: If a supervisor sent the email, it could be considered coercive if it is viewed as mandatory or somehow consequential to an employee’s place in the company. But if a rank-and-file employee is permitted to send a mass email invitation to a baby shower or Pride parade, then Bible study should be fair game.
Not every company is prepared to grapple with these questions. It’s possibly why only 43 Fortune 500 companies officially recognize faith-based affinity groups, according to an assessment by Mr. Grim’s organization.
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