by Preston Moore, Intern Minister

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

I have a friend named Tom with whom I have coffee now and then over at Boyd’s, across the freeway.  We talk about books we’re reading, headlines in the newspaper, what’s going in our lives, the usual stuff.  And theology.  Which is not so usual, because Tom is a lay leader in an evangelical Christian church. 

He’s been working at a small but fast-growing heating and air conditioning company.  The owner brought him on recently because of his strong interpersonal skills.  This job looked to him like a chance to get in on the ground floor of something that might become really big. 

A few months ago, the distributor for one of the major product lines carried by this small company came calling.  The distributor knew that his customer had dissatisfactions with this product line—in particular, with the costs they were absorbing in servicing these products.  He was anxious to keep the company as an account.  So he suggested a way of reducing the burden of these service costs:  just change the dates they recorded on the warranty documentation for some units in the field, and substantial service costs could be shifted over to the manufacturer.

Tom was surprised and disturbed by this; but as a newcomer, he hesitated to react immediately.  He watched as the owner and the other key managers around the table made notes on their pads and nodded knowingly.  The meeting rolled right on.  In the post-meeting wrap-up session, it became clear that they intended to do just what the distributor had suggested.  Later, Tom asked his boss if he knew it was a crime to defraud the manufacturer by misdating the warranty documents.  His boss seemed surprised and said no, he didn’t realize that.  Tom asked, “But you did realize it was wrong, didn’t you?”  His boss shrugged and deflected the question with a comment that “business is business,” and that distributors often help their customers shift expenses to the manufacturer in order to keep an account.

Tom handed in a resignation letter the next day.  He knows it won’t look great to be leaving a job so quickly.  And he has a family.  They can’t expect to make ends meet for very long on just his wife’s paycheck.  But Tom told me he didn’t agonize over his decision to leave.  Staying, he said, just wouldn’t square with his religious convictions.  What I took away from this story was not a rule that everyone should leave his job as a response to ethical lapses.  Rather, it was Tom’s insistence on living out his values, connecting his actions to his religious convictions using his own best judgment.  To me, my friend’s decision to quit his job made some pretty thunderous spiritual statements:  that his religion isn’t something he leaves behind when he goes to work; that he will not desecrate his work by doing it in an unethical way; that he will not desecrate himself by making himself an instrument of somebody’s unethical plans; and that he will not subordinate his spiritual well-being to his material needs, or even to those of his family.

I don’t think Tom was being an ethical purist.  In a different situation, maybe he would have made a different decision.  I do think he realized that there is no point in being materially intact if the price is being spiritually compromised.

If most people had this level of ethical conviction, we wouldn’t have an ethical crisis in the business world.  But it’s very obvious that we do—from Enron to Martha Stewart to Halliburton cheating the government out of millions of dollars on military supplies in Iraq, and on and on.  And although public confidence in business ethics is badly shaken, it’s also obvious that this crisis represents an opportunity, in that way that many breakdowns do.  Things have gotten so bad that business ethics is now a hot topic.

Books on the subject are pouring out of the publishing houses.  Specialized journals have sprung up, like Business Ethics Magazine and the Journal of Management, Spirituality, and Religion.  Organizations like the Centre for Spirituality at Work are offering three-day conferences and retreats.

The workplace itself is showing signs of change. It’s corporate policy at Intel to support religious groups if employees want to form them.  There are several such groups at Intel’s local facilities here, involving hundreds of employees—including Christians, Jews, and Muslims.    The company provides meeting rooms, a small budget for expenses, and time in the work schedule for these groups to convene. 

This heightened level of interest reflects a hunger among people working in the business world.  In their book entitled “A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America,” Ian Mitroff and Elizabeth Denton said this about the “moral split” they discovered in their interviews and surveys of business managers and executives:  “People do not want to compartmentalize their lives.  The soul is not something one leaves at home.  People want to have their souls acknowledged wherever they go.  They especially want to be acknowledged as whole persons in the workplace, where they spend the majority of their waking time.”

The business ethics crisis was the single most important influence that carried me out of law practice and into ministry.  More than anything else, I wanted to find a spiritual way of changing the ethical no-man’s-land I saw in company after company as a courtroom advocate.  I was motivated by this not only as a justice issue but also as a matter of compassion for the way the machinery of business chewed people up—including highly successful ones with privilege and power. 

My conviction that the solution to the ethical crisis lay in spiritual deepening was reinforced by my own experience in seminary. I saw my new spiritual path causing a shift in my own ethical sensibility, my own capacity to connect my values to my actions in the world.

So you can see why I find the buzz about business ethics encouraging; but I know it will be unbelievably hard to shift this climate.  The ethical culture is the business world today is weak—so very weak that we cannot expect the business culture to reform itself.  It would be too easy simply to blame everything on the bad culture—and to tell ourselves it’s somebody else’s problem .  We can’t afford to be distracted from the most important reality:  that the power needed for such a fundamental change will have to come from outside the business environment itself.

There are two important outside sources of such power.  One is law, and the other is spirituality.

We live in a cult of legalism in America, and so we often look to legislation to solve social and cultural problems.  And of course law is a basic tool for any society to use in expressing its values.  Laws provide handrails for frail humans to hang onto.  Aggressive enforcement of laws that set ethical standards is important, but we should not delude ourselves to think that we can work our way out of the current ethical crisis simply by passing more laws.

In the wake of the Enron debacle, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.  It sets up procedures to assure accurate financial reporting, and personal responsibility on the part of business executives for compliance with these requirements.  Sarbanes-Oxley may reduce the really egregious forms of misconduct in business.  But many see the new law as mainly a lot of mechanical “box-checking” that, ironically, actually relieves executives of the responsibility to wrestle with ethical dilemmas.  As the General Counsel of DuPont Canada observed, “we can say with complete certainty that Sarbanes-Oxley will do nothing for corporate ethics.  [Its provisions] should be read as a Codes of Legal Compliance.  Ethics in the sense of social responsibility was never on the Sarbanes-Oxley radar screen.”

My friend Tom didn’t need the coercive power of the law to bring himself to behave ethically. The power he drew on came from his own spiritual experience, which he came to in a religious community.  This power was so great that it broke down the door between his personal life and his business life; made it impossible for him to compartmentalize; and made him ready to pay a big price—giving up his job—to preserve the spiritual values generated by that power.

How did that happen?  How can that be replicated on a larger and larger scale?  Our U.U. theology commits us to a faith that everyone actually has the ability to connect religious convictions with his actions, just as Tom did.  I don’t consider him to be cut from a better moral cloth than anybody else.  Rather, something in his spiritual experience just made this universal ability more accessible.

It’s sad that many people in the business world cannot bring their whole selves into their work environment.  But an even sadder truth is that they may not be able to bring their whole selves into their church environment either.  In particular, their experience of church may not include many opportunities to deal with their sense of spiritual deprivation at work.  It is the responsibility of churches to ask themselves how they can expand those opportunities.

One way would be for ministers to bring these issues more fully into their prophetic preaching.  Ministers also need to explore from the pulpit those parts of our lives outside the workplace that contribute to these spiritual deprivations.  The title of today’s worship service doesn’t fully capture some of these other parts.  We need to reunite our worshiping selves not only with our working selves but also with our investing and consuming selves.  More Americans than ever before own stock, either directly or through retirement plans.  We like it when the price of our stock goes up.  But stock prices are simply an expression of profitability, and when we invest our money or let others invest it for us solely on the basis of which company is most profitable, we are reinforcing the very culture that upholds the bottom line as everything and discards business ethics as irrelevant.

And as consumers, we sure do love getting the best value at the lowest possible price.  Businesses that give us what we want as consumers thrive; businesses that don’t just don’t survive.  But when we buy solely on this basis, without regard to how the product is made, we are reinforcing the very culture that upholds price as everything and discards business ethics as irrelevant.

Many ministers are reluctant to take on themes like these because of lack of experience with the business world, which makes them afraid of looking uninformed or unrealistic.  Others are afraid that preaching on business ethics will alienate business executives in their congregations who are important donors.   There is a study of spirituality and business called “Church on Sunday, Work on Monday.” It includes a series of interviews with ministers and business managers.  This comment from one minister is typical:  “I do not try to interfere with their business.  I couldn’t have the expertise, even if I thought it was right to advise them.  But I am very close personally to several businesspeople in my congregation.”  . . . .  How close can a minister be if he considers engaging a congregant about business to be interference, or something that has to be left to “experts?”  Experts in what?  How can a minister compartmentalize what is “business” and what is “personal”?

These ministerial hesitations also raise questions about whether the whole selves of people in the business world are being brought to the pastoral side of churches.  You don’t have to be in business to be knowledgeable about business ethics.  Ministers who have had enough pastoral contact to really get to know congregants working in the business world are not so worried about looking uninformed.  And through hearing their congregants’ experiences, they develop a compassionate understanding of how to preach prophetically about business ethics without alienating or demonizing business people.   But many business managers are leery of this kind of pastoral contact.  A typical comment from the “Church on Sunday, Work on Monday” survey went like this:  “I see many tensions between my Christian beliefs and what I do at work, and I feel deeply responsible to be a ‘good Christian’ in my daily life.  But my pastor is the last person I’d discuss this with.”

Even in the best of circumstances, we can’t depend solely on the efforts of ministers to bring business ethics issues into the life of the church.  Adult religious education is another way, and pastoral attention from lay ministry is yet another.  So are covenant groups and other forms of small group ministry in which congregants open up to each other.  There are people sitting in this sanctuary this morning with stories like Tom’s—people whose spiritual experience spoke to them so powerfully that they insisted on living out their values at work.  There are people sitting in this sanctuary who were confronted with situations like Tom’s and could not bring themselves to insist on their values—and who felt ashamed or hurt because of this.  And there are people here like the business owner or distributor in Tom’s story, who feel as trapped by the machinery of the business world as the everyday employees do, who see their competitors cutting corners ethically and wonder how they can keep up if they don’t do it too, who have had it drummed into their heads endlessly that it’s a dog-eat-dog world.  We recognize ourselves in these stories. They inspire us to righteous indignation, courage, and compassion; and, we hope, to activism.  Church is the place of trust and safety where we can tell each other these stories.

Our church is no stranger to activism in the field of business ethics.  In its commercial dealings, this church is governed by policies that call for socially responsible investing, fair trade, and a living wage for its own employees.  Its social justice action groups have engaged in many activities designed to keep business ethics issues in the community consciousness.  But we should challenge ourselves to move into this field more deeply.  It is wonderful for our church to model exemplary behavior concerning business ethics in its own commercial dealings, but the significant statement still to be made is for us as members to do the same.

I believe the most significant challenge we can give ourselves in this area is to provide a supportive pastoral presence—particularly through covenant groups and other forms of small group ministry—for those in the business world who don’t fit our picture of sympathetic victims.  I’m talking about those who own or lead businesses, who are directly involved with major decisions that have significant ethical implications.  People of power and privilege.

Some liberal churches may have difficulty with this.  For First Church, it is a natural expression of our core values.  In this community, we know we can integrate our prophetic challenge to unethical behavior with a compassionate pastoral response.

As we push further into this work, we should ask “who are our potential interfaith allies?  I have to tell you, the most visible ones are evangelical Christians.  Businesses are springing up everywhere that declare themselves to be Christian.    A chain of fitness centers called Curves.  A career counseling company in Portland. A branch manager for a company called Christian Financial Services who says “I want to help people invest their money in a way that would reflect their Christian standpoint.” A Christian bank near Minneapolis that “gives more grace” to customers who are struggling with loan payments and checking account overdrafts, and helps churches in the African-American community get loans. 

Undoubtedly some customers turn to Christian businesses simply as birds of a feather that are flocking together.  But another pattern at work here is a growing expectation that such companies are more likely to treat customers, suppliers, employees, and even competitors in a way that lines up better with basic values like fairness, generosity, and honesty. The idea of making common cause with evangelical Christians makes most of us pretty uncomfortable.  Many of them are dogmatic and heavy-handed.  Worse yet, sexist and homophobic.  But listen to this declaration on business ethics from an evangelical Christian website: 

“[M]anaging a business to further God’s agenda may require making choices that hurt the company’s bottom line. Taking actions to protect the environment, ensuring that employees are paid at least a livable wage, or declining to capitalize on a competitor’s mistake may all cost a business some of its profits. Success for the Christian in business, however, must be measured on a different scale. Christians need to be prepared to ‘fail’ for the sake of the gospel.”

With a little retouching to soften the Christian gospel language and the talk about “God’s agenda,” couldn’t this declaration have been written by a business ethics action group in a very liberal UU church?  Last fall the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents over 50 religious denominations and about 30 million conservative Christians, added global warming to its list of initiatives.  When you think about your possible allies in a campaign like this, don’t rule anyone out too quickly. 

We can’t say exactly what forms spirituality in the workplace might take or how long it might be in coming.  We can’t say what all the obstacles might be.  What I believe we can say with confidence is that engendering deeper spiritual experiences in religious communities across America is our best hope for moving our society toward a large-scale rejection of compartmentalization of our lives—with our spiritual selves allowed expression in some parts and shut out of others, such as the workplace.   

CONCLUSION

When we experience something as sacred, we do whatever is necessary to assure that it receives the respect and reverence it deserves.  We make common cause with those we don’t usually consider our allies.  We speak up in situations where we usually remain silent.  We take risks instead of hanging back and waiting for others to go first.  Our work is sacred.  The expression of our spirituality in the environment in which we spend most of our waking hours is sacred.  The way we treat each other when we buy, sell, invest, invent, and manufacture is sacred.   May our own church and religious communities everywhere be the first places in which we undertake the work of awakening ourselves and each other to this truth.  Amen.