We don’t do God in the work place?
How do you start a meaningful conversation in the work place? I don’t mean a conversation about football, or last weekends family barbeque, I mean a conversation about the meaning of life, God, vocation, purpose, why are we here and does any of it matter, and is there more to life that what sits in front of your eyes? Can we discuss anything spiritual at work? Does it have a place, or no place, in the conversations of the water cooler, or the team meetings? The answer I seemed to imbibe over the past decades was a resounding “No!!!”
Legend and the Daily Telegraph has it that one day, when Tony Blair was Prime Minister of the UK, he was being challenged about his faith. The journalists were pushing him hard in relation to his decisions over going to war with Iraq. They wanted to flush out any potential blurring of the boundaries between church and state, any sense of a flaky Prime Minister ruled by his irrational heart, rather than his Oxford, legally educated head. Alistair Campbell, his Press Secretary, overhearing the direction the journalist’s questions were headed, stepped in front of his boss’s replies and uttered those now famous words,
“We don't do God”
Legend also has it that as far back as 1996 Blair’s team were trying to stop him discussing God. The speculation never went away. Was Blair, the nations Prime Minister, a believer in God or not? Did he in fact kneel with George Bush on the carpet of the Oval Office at the White House and pray? The best defense against all speculation was to make sure that in the world of this Prime Ministers work, God was most definitely off the menu. Of course, we all understand Campbell’s nervousness, apart from the fact that he himself was an avowed atheist, that there should remain a clear separation of religion from politics, church and state. This goes without saying. The dangers are all too obvious when anyone in power starts claiming Divine backing for their own point of view. Leadership becomes open to all kinds of dangerous seductions. The same would be true in business. One cannot imagine Paul Polman, previous CEO of Unilever, turning up to work on Monday morning and addressing his senior leadership team with the words “I’ve been praying over the weekend and God has told me that we should launch Product ‘x’ and take Product ‘y’ off the shelves immediately”. He wouldn't have lasted long and for good reasons. Good decisions need good rationales, thorough and rigorous challenge and counter challenge. Even a phrase like “I’ve got this hunch…”, is more acceptable, because it is full of humility, rather than the “God has told me” arrogance.
I also get the other good reasons for “not doing God”. Reasons like avoiding the risks of magical thinking. “Everything will be ok; it will all work out”. Religious groups have been well known for holding on to ideas that are blatantly nonsense. The world wasn’t made in 7 literal days and would you really want someone who absolutely believed that, running your company in the twenty first century? Having said that, we do see irreligious politicians today making exactly these same kinds of magical or wishful thinking statements. So, “not doing God”, doesn't guarantee, robust thinking. David Lammy, London and Harvard educated politician, hits the other danger of religious groups clearly on the head in his new book about Tribes[1]. Given that 60% of the world is still stuck in a tribal or ethno-centric view of the world, rather than global-centric, then the religious, “our group”, “our sect”, “our faith”, easily leads to the idea that my group are the only true group, and so you are either in or out. This kind of dualistic and ethno-centric thinking fails to own the realities of an interdependent, richly diverse, global reality.
Just because Campbell[2] told us that Blair “didn't do God” in his public statements, did Blair stop believing in God? From 1985 Phillip Gould was a key strategist for New Labour and Tony Blair, so Gould knew him very well. In a very poignant interview[3] with Andrew Marr just before he died and in his strategic masterpiece The Unfinished Revolution[4], Gould says that if he has one criticism of Blair it was that he tried to separate his faith from his politics. Why? Because in the man these two were inseparable – the motivation and the prgamatisim. The result was that Blair focused on the pragmatism, the actions, the observables and did not talk about his underlying motivations behind his public work. Did that matter? The very failure of New Labour was clearly not its success in reforming when it was in power, it was that no one had understood the underlying philosophy that had created it and motivated it in the first place. New Labour had one of the most thought-through strategies and underlying principles of any political party of the modern era….but no one had heard what they were! The pragmatism’s had been separated from the founding heart. Once the scrutiny of the Iraq war turned the spotlight on Blair, as well as the internal leadership self-harming, the New Labour project didn’t have any foundations or convictions that could last beyond the Blair years. So much so that he words New Labour evoke the same emotion in many as ‘the devil incarnate’. The separation of the man from his core beliefs and values did have a lasting impact.
“We don't do God”, at one level, makes total sense. It creates the understandable and necessary protection of our public and business institutions from being hijacked by anyone’s particular groups views, from being tribalised, or trivialised.
But I also have a hunch that it also creates dishonesty in the work place. If you have to leave what are possibly the most core of your beliefs outside the Board room, then who are you when you go in? There is no substance behind your sword and no strength behind your shield. If your values are rooted in what is called the Perennial Philosophy, the unity that all main religions share around common values of love, respect, and a deep inclusivity, then what does that do to the leaders’ ability to make moral or values-based decisions? Our values come from somewhere, whoever we are, religious or not, and to cut you adrift from your roots is to undermine the very strength of your values.
We never thought we would witness, at the most senior levels of politics and business, that your character doesn't matter and that your values can be anything you like. For centuries it was a well-respected tenet that a person’s character shapes their decisions, that a person’s talents can only be supported in high office, by the strength of the persons underlying character. No longer is this true.
Integrity means integration. It means that I am able to bring all of myself to work. It needs to be a place of human flourishing and if my faith is part of my humanity then it needs to be welcome too. If I have to leave my faith out in the street, when I walk into the office, then integrity is destroyed and it’s clear that I can’t bring all of myself to work. A few simple examples. A Muslim prays five times a day. You can try to dismiss that from having anything to do with work or you can see that stopping to reconnect with your deeper self, five times a day, has a very deep wisdom to it. The busier we get, the more we lose access to the deeper filing cabinets of our own experiences and wisdom. We now know that leaders who step back from busyness, who pause and reflect, actually make better decisions. The Muslim who prays may bring a wisdom with them into the Board room or the team meeting. Or take the devestaing role of ego within leadership of organisations and countries. Unchecked ego has at least twelve negative impacts on business. So, the Hindu, when they practice the discipline of Being in the moment, separates themselves from getting caught up in their ego, and is therefore able to listen more deeply to other people. Christians often start their religious meetings with prayer. If we put aside the idea of praying to a God at the start of a business meeting, but keep the principle of a minutes silence to allow busy people to reconnect with themselves, to reflect, to create an emotional firebreak between all that has just happened in their previous meetings, with this new meeting, then this is a practice of wisdom not religion. Alan De Botton, like Campbell, an unashamed atheist, has shown that while you may dismiss a particular religion, the underlying principles of the major religions actually are the distilled wisdom of millennia that business discards at its peril[5].
I am not advocating that we should have to talk “God” in the work place, but what I am saying is that we need to challenge the culture we work in as to whether we can talk about our faith, bring all of ourselves to work. Someone may express a view point that contains deep, perennial wisdom, but present it in slightly more religious words than someone else feels comfortable with. But another person’s atheism and pure rationalism makes the religious person feel equally uncomfortable. Differences make us all feel uncomfortable, because that's the gift that difference offers us. It allows us all to become bigger, richer people. Differences work by loosening us up at our edges. Holding one’s religious faith, or atheistic faith, with humility, is different than pretending one doesn't have a faith at all. Wisdom means we all take a longer historic view and honour the fact that just because, at the current time, atheism shouts loudest, it wasn't always so, and past views shaped much of the values and moral compass of entire civilizations east and west. Current views also need to be held humbly against modern trends of where religious thinking is headed. Things change and humility owns that.
There’s a more subtle reason why ‘we don't do God’ is dangerous today. Faith is usually about the unseen. Unseen forces, powers, energies, ideas ….call them what you will, but they are out of sight. Atheism has taught us that the ‘out of sight’, is not real. It’s magical, it’s fantasy. The reality is what you can see, touch and feel. Because of this, the modern western mind no longer has the muscles to deal with what it cannot see. But there are so many things we cannot see. We couldn't see the influences of memes, Facebook ads, shifts in consciousness to the political right or political left, people feeling disenfranchised or angry, brain hacking, …the list is growing of things that are happening that we cannot see. Putting aside the question of the existence of the Divine, more than ever we need to learn to handle the unseen things. Our faiths used to give us some help, some apparatus, to negotiate this unseen world, but no longer and there is little help to replace it.
I really do get the “We don't do God” rally cry. It may well be a necessary caution, but we should be able to talk about God, faith, religion, or not, as fits with the core of our beliefs, our integrity and thus our humanity. It’s about who shows up to work today. It’s about being human at work today.
Humility is king, in how we talk about everything. If people speak from a place of humility then my discomfort is the disruptive gift that these conversations will bring to us all and wisdom will be the fruit that it brings forth in the work place.
[1] Tribes David Lammy Constable 2020
[2] Let me clear – I am actually a great respecter of Alistair Campbell, so my challenge to his “We don't do God” isn’t my judgment on the man himself
[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-14963478/philip-gould-i-feel-such-intensity
[4] The Unfinished Revolution Philip Gould Abacus 2011
[5] https://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_atheism_2_0