Rethinking the Conflict Narrative

Research on evangelical business leaders has generally emphasized conflict wherein evangelicals struggle to carve out a niche in the corporate domain or stand their ground as they are swept along toward unchristian choices. On the contrary, evangelical executives experience conflict not because they are concerned that their faith and their work are incompatible, but because they are made to feel like second-class citizens by members of their own faith communities. Most of any reservation evangelical business leaders experience regarding their chosen profession concerns the opportunity cost associated with what they are not able to do—including especially more explicitly religious work—rather than what they do but perhaps should not. For this reason, evangelical executives seek to elevate “worldly” concerns to spiritual significance. Instead of accenting distinctions between themselves and non-evangelicals, evangelical executives make a point to blur lines—between sacred and secular, laity and clergy, and business and ministry.

Introduction

While some are wary of trends that encourage the interpenetration of faith and business, others welcome such integration, seeing in Christianity and other religious traditions dispositions that could challenge unhealthy characteristics and consequences of modern capitalism. Some have in fact come to believe that religious faith represents a wellspring of resources and concern that might help reshape corporate America by re-humanizing business and fortifying its ethical moorings. Given the world-changing energy evangelicals possess, evangelical business leaders in particular are candidates to initiate such reform as they attempt to do business in ways that are compatible with their religious convictions. For better or worse, evangelical executives could also advance a religious agenda if they join together in common cause, as some have suggested characterizes the faith at work movement. While evangelical business leaders certainly state that their faith influences their work, the nature and effect of such influence is often unexpected.

Affirmative Religion

Evangelical Christians are typically known for what they oppose, often taking hard-line stances against certain behaviors. Yet trends in the character of both American business and American religion enable evangelical executives to affirm the spiritual value of business and the choices required of business leaders. Evangelicalism is an individualistic religious tradition, encouraging spiritual improvisation, including personally interpreting the Bible. The Bible, in turn, is sufficiently diverse and ambiguous as to support all manner of priorities and perspectives. Paralleling this diversity, the panoply of stakeholder interests urged on companies by proponents of corporate social responsibility presents an array of possible contributions on which to base the spiritual worth of business. While evangelicalism, like religion more broadly, is often understood to be self-consistent, characterized by proscriptions and prohibitions, and rigidly dogmatic, in fact it is flexible, adaptable, often incoherent, and abundantly capable of affirming institutions and activities, including business.

Into the Headwind

For aspiring evangelical women, already subject to the metaphorical glass ceiling, evangelical perspectives on gender roles represent an exacerbating headwind. Ironically, though, when female evangelical executives advance arguments from distinction in advocating for greater representation among the business elite, they may actually reinforce the complementarian theological perspectives that undermine the legitimacy of evangelical women in leadership roles in the first place. Female evangelical executives are indeed more likely than their male counterparts to articulate concern for people relative to profits, embrace broader corporate social responsibilities, and cite feelings and intuition in support of career and business decisions. But women also disproportionately occupy the types of contexts that prompted evangelical executives more broadly—whether women or men—to articulate these particular orientations. Thus, the perspectives of women suggest that professional context and associated expectations supersede gender norms when ordering faith expressions in business.

A Place for Saints

In order to establish that business is a sacred domain and a worthy profession, evangelical executives emphasize that business is a moral order in which virtue is rewarded and vice punished. Like other advocates of the connection between virtue and success, informants point to relationships such as that between a favorable reputation and customer acquisition and retention, and between principled leadership and employee morale—the likes of which are presumed to translate to healthier financial outcomes. To these utilitarian arguments evangelical business leaders add theological arguments, namely that God both established the framework in which virtuous behavior is beneficial and actively intervenes to ensure that biblical behavior is rewarded. While the connection between virtue and profit is often grounded in natural relationships, layering on evangelical perspectives on God’s providential control over all things transforms the connection into a non-falsifiable spiritual principle that holds even in the absence of corroborating evidence.

Conclusion

For most evangelical executives, being an evangelical Christian in a corner office is not so much confusing or tension-filled as lonely. While the faith at work movement encourages evangelical business leaders to integrate their faith and their work, evangelical executives do not lack ways to implement their faith. Rather, they thirst for companionship and legitimation—for reassurance that their vocational choices have been sound and their time and energy well spent. Such is the primary effect of the faith at work movement for evangelical executives, the gist of whose rhetoric is to baptize business, or provide symbolic justification of business as a sacred enterprise. Eager indeed to integrate faith and work, for them, integration works in reverse. Evangelical business leaders are as likely to export business concepts into other contexts as to import religious concepts into the corporate domain, prompting reconsideration of the direction of influence between religious and economic life.

Islands of Influence

While some are wary of concerted attempts by well-connected evangelicals to advance a religious agenda in corporate contexts, evangelical executives demonstrate little desire to turn companies into explicitly “Christian” organizations or to transform the core values and objectives toward which businesses are oriented, or indeed much evidence that there is any shared agenda around which they might coalesce. While the Social Gospel movement of the early twentieth century—a precursor to contemporary emphases on faith at work—was concerned with structural and institutional change, this preoccupation does not characterize evangelical executives today. Even those who share core religious convictions and overriding dispositions toward business express their convictions in diverse ways. But this diversity is not simply idiosyncratic. Rather, it is conditioned by executives’ professional histories and the norms and priorities that characterize their particular occupational contexts. There is, therefore, no one evangelical approach to faith and work.

Success to Significance

While scholars generally posit upward mobility as a secularizing force, for evangelical executives, success in business catalyzes a deeper commitment to faithful living. Fame and fortune do not quench evangelical business leaders’ appetite for spiritual things, but rather activate or intensify such longings. Evangelical executives are deeply committed to exercising positive influence at their companies and beyond. But the executives who do so are those—and only those—who have acquired sufficient discretion and resources to exercise influence without compromising their professional standing or altering their lifestyle. While the deferral of significance is not unique to evangelical executives, their explicit endorsement of the transition from success to significance is important inasmuch as the ability to point to activities of significance that are facilitated by success in business strengthens the case that business is a worthy spiritual calling and legitimates lofty career aspirations, along with the accompanying sacrifices and eventual perquisites.