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The New York Times Magazine: Workers can be religious? At work? Really?
God bless Russell Shorto: In this week's New York Times Magazine cover story, "Faith at Work," you can tell that he's really, really trying to present a fair, understanding, even sympathetic portrait of marketplace ministry. But he really never gets beyond being agape that some businesses, CEOs, and workers wear their beliefs on their sleeve—and that it's all so … legal!

"This is strange-sounding stuff," he writes. "To someone unfamiliar with marketplace Christianity, the questions pile up. Is this legal? Aren't there separation-of-church-and-state issues here somewhere? What about discrimination?"

It's a long piece—7,777 words, to be precise—but the basic structure goes like this:

• Astonishing anecdote about religion in the workplace.
• Reminder that it's all above board.
• Note that it's still a bit strange.
• Another andecdote about strangeness.
• Disclaimer about it being legal and, in some ways, positive.
• Acknowledgement that being legal and, in some ways, positive, doesn't stop it from being odd and, in other ways, troubling.
• Repeat.

Shorto, whose writing style is a true delight, is up front about his biases and intent:

My own orientation is secular but that I also believe that all religions have more or less equal dollops of spiritual truth in them, which become corrupted by personal and cultural dross. …

My task … was to try to understand a phenomenon that has, from my perspective, an inherent conflict in it. One of the movement's objectives is to give Christians an opportunity to ''out'' themselves on the job, to let them express who they are, freely and without feeling persecuted. Few would argue with such a goal: it suits an open society. And if it increases productivity and keeps C.E.O.'s from turning into reptiles, all the better.

Then again, the idea of corporations dominated by a particular religious faith has a hint of oppressiveness, a ''Taliban Inc.'' aspect. … There is probably no more insidious form of bullying than religion.

It's important to note that Shorto's point isn't that religious expression should be banned from private workplaces. Instead, it's that such expression is surprising to him. His bottom line (literally) is, "It feels weird."

The article's repeated assurances that companies like Riverview Community Bank aren't breaking any laws are probably more directed at readers who think that such businesses must be. But the path Shorto takes goes through some troubled territory.

One of the more problematic paragraphs is this one:

As it happens, thanks to the value American law places on religious expression, proselytizing on the job is perfectly legal, even in a government workplace, even when it's the boss who is doing the pushing. If the legal aspects of the Christian-workplace phenomenon seem bewildering, it may be because, while the United States has always been a deeply religious nation, until recently it has also been fairly resolute about keeping faith out of the public sphere. Thomas Jefferson's famous metaphor of a wall of separation between church and state has long been a part of the national psyche. The historical reasons for erecting that wall are worth restating. The European experience of the 16th and 17th centuries, the effects of which carried over into the 18th, was of state-sponsored religious warfare, of populations decimated and minorities oppressed in the name of one branch of Christianity or another. Part of the genius and daring of the framers of the American system was in their decision to break with the European tradition of establishing a national church, in their conviction that religion was too combustible a material to be fused with political power.

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November (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48