Work shapes identity, community, and meaning—but how should faith show up in professional life? Sociologist Elaine Ecklund discusses religion in the workplace, drawing on research conducted with co-author Denise Daniels. “I think our faith compels us to hope for and enact flourishing for everyone.” In this episode with Evan Rosa, Ecklund reflects on vocation, gender, authenticity, and principled pluralism in modern workplaces. Together they discuss workplace identity, gender discrimination, calling across occupations, boundaries around work, religion’s public role, and pluralism in professional life. Episode Highlights “I think our faith compels us to hope for and enact flourishing for everyone.” “People use their religion to bring justice to their workplaces.” “They don’t want to pretend they’re someone different.” “There are ways in which our faith traditions can put needed boundaries around our work.” “I am being fully who I am and I am oriented toward the other.” About Elaine Ecklund Elaine Howard Ecklund is a sociologist of religion and professor at Rice University, where she directs the Boniuk Institute for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance. Her research focuses on religion in public life, science and faith, and workplace culture. She is the author or co-author of numerous books, including Religion in a Changing Workplace and Working for Better: A New Approach to Faith at Work (with Denise Daniels). Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and featured in major media outlets. Helpful Links And Resources Working for Better: A New Approach to Faith at Work https://www.ivpress.com/working-for-better Religion in a Changing Workplace https://academic.oup.com/book/58194 Boniuk Institute for Religious Tolerance https://boniuk.rice.edu/ Elaine Ecklund website [https://elaineecklund.com](https://elaineecklund.com/) Show Notes - Religion and workplace life - Sociology of belief research background - Studying scientists and religion - Expanding research beyond science workplaces - Collaboration with Denise Daniels - Academic and practical faith-at-work books - Defining work as paid labor - Honoring caregiving and volunteer labor - “People don’t want to pretend they’re someone different.” - Bringing whole selves to work - Calling across occupational sectors - Workplace autonomy and meaning - “People use their religion to bring justice to their workplaces.” - Faith creating boundaries around work - Gender dynamics in workplaces - Story of hiding motherhood in academia - Fragmentation and identity performance - “There are ways in which our faith traditions can put needed boundaries around our work.” - Church gender expectations - Billy Graham rule implications - Work skills serving congregations - Living in pluralistic society - Principled pluralism explained - “I am being fully who I am and I am oriented toward the other.” - Embrace, dignity, and learning from difference #FaithAndWork #ElaineEcklund #PrincipledPluralism #ReligionAndWorkplace #Vocation #GenderAndWork #HumanFlourishing Production Notes - This podcast featured Elaine Ecklund - Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa - Hosted by Evan Rosa - Production Assistance by Noah Senthil - A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about - Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
Work shapes identity, community, and meaning—but how should faith show up in professional life? Sociologist Elaine Ecklund discusses religion in the workplace, drawing on research conducted with co-author Denise Daniels.
“I think our faith compels us to hope for and enact flourishing for everyone.”
In this episode with Evan Rosa, Ecklund reflects on vocation, gender, authenticity, and principled pluralism in modern workplaces. Together they discuss workplace identity, gender discrimination, calling across occupations, boundaries around work, religion’s public role, and pluralism in professional life.
Episode Highlights
“I think our faith compels us to hope for and enact flourishing for everyone.”
“People use their religion to bring justice to their workplaces.”
“They don’t want to pretend they’re someone different.”
“There are ways in which our faith traditions can put needed boundaries around our work.”
“I am being fully who I am and I am oriented toward the other.”
About Elaine Ecklund
Elaine Howard Ecklund is a sociologist of religion and professor at Rice University, where she directs the Boniuk Institute for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance. Her research focuses on religion in public life, science and faith, and workplace culture. She is the author or co-author of numerous books, including Religion in a Changing Workplace and Working for Better: A New Approach to Faith at Work (with Denise Daniels). Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and featured in major media outlets.
Helpful Links And Resources
Working for Better: A New Approach to Faith at Work https://www.ivpress.com/working-for-better
Religion in a Changing Workplace https://academic.oup.com/book/58194
Boniuk Institute for Religious Tolerance https://boniuk.rice.edu/
Elaine Ecklund website https://elaineecklund.com
Show Notes
#FaithAndWork #ElaineEcklund #PrincipledPluralism #ReligionAndWorkplace #Vocation #GenderAndWork #HumanFlourishing
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: From the Yale Center For Faith and Culture, this is for the life of the world. A podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Elaine Ecklund: When people say they want to bring their whole selves to work, they want to bring this. Selves that seem most relevant and important to the jobs and the relationships that they have through those jobs. And they don't wanna pretend they're someone different at home than they do in their workplace.
Evan Rosa: Sociologist Elaine Eklund has spent more than two decades studying religion and public life.
Elaine Ecklund: It's a way that we spend most of our waking hours. I mean, many people work. More than they sleep. For us in this particular set of projects, work was defined as you know, what we do for our livelihood
Evan Rosa: and our most recent book explores how faith shapes work and how work shapes faith in the context of an individual life working for better.
A new approach to Faith at Work was co-written with Denise Daniels, and one particular story from her research captures the tension between the workplace as a site of meaning and purpose. Or a place where people feel pressure to hide who they're,
Elaine Ecklund: so what's coming to mind is a story of someone we interviewed who is a scientist as someone who wanted to hide the fact that she's a parent of a young child.
'cause she was interviewing at a very male dominated science department and thought that perhaps she would be discriminated against. She was actually breastfeeding at the time. She had a little baby and you know, needed a place to pump. And so worked with like a woman in the department to like get all this figured out and the right spacing between her meetings, you know, while still like doing her best in the interview and all of that.
And just was so fraught about this and then started to feel like, what the hell, I don't really care actually anymore because I'm that I wanna be part of this. I mean, I should like go through enormous gymnast. Sticks and do I wanna be part of an environment that like, makes me feel like I want to hide the fact that I'm a mother.
She goes to give her talk, she opens up her computer, she forgets that she has like pictures of her kids, like all over her screen, her computer and she's like, I guess I let the, you know, the cat outta the bag that I have a baby, right? And a toddler and you know, and everyone was like, lovely about that.
And she ended up getting the job. So it's a good end of the story now, hers. Assumption for a good reason she wasn't crazy is these kinds of things happen. But you know, when we were interviewing her, it was the sense that she had to hide a piece of who she was being a mother that actually could be very generative to her work and was very much a piece of her identity and who she was.
And if she had to pretend to be something different, but also she didn't really wanna do it because it was closing off a piece of herself,
Evan Rosa: this story ends well. But think about the many other stories that don't 'cause the question underneath. It all remains. What happens when work asks us to perform a version of ourselves that isn't whole, that isn't complete.
That isn't the primary or most relevant way that we understand ourselves,
Elaine Ecklund: that kind of difference. That I would point out I are you being asked to pretend you're someone that you're not in your workplace. If you do that long term, that kind of cognitive dis. Our respondents say will actually end up hurting your work and you know, hurting who you are as a person and decreased human flourishing overall
Evan Rosa: for Elaine work isn't just economic activity, it's one of the primary places where people search for meaning, creativity, and making a contribution to this world.
Elaine Ecklund: You know, the idea that work by its very definition and saw through the lens of a capitalist enterprise could be dehumanizing and. Something we want to get people away from or it could provide a value and be the site of great spiritual meaning and exploration and spiritual entrepreneurship and the good kinds of things that we think of through several different paradigms.
Evan Rosa: In the theological context, work has long been understood as more than productivity or income. Rather, work can be participation in God's creative and sustaining activity in the world. Miroslav Volf explores that idea in his work and the spirit reflecting on vocation, the Divinity of labor, and the presence of the spirit in our ordinary work lives.
He writes, quote, the New Testament presents the spirit as the giver of charisms gifts given for service. These. Are not limited to ecclesial activity, but extend to the whole of life, including human work. Work in this sense becomes one of the primary places where faith takes visible form in public life.
But modern workplaces are also pluralistic spaces, religiously, socially, culturally, morally. And that raises another question. How do people live truthfully with deep convictions while working alongside others who believe differently?
Elaine Ecklund: People should be authentic. Pluralism is principled when it recognizes that I have convictions.
They might be religious convictions or other kinds of convictions that I'm very committed to. It's not that I'm not open to change under certain conditions, but I'm not. Pretending I'm not lying about what I think in order to make you like me. The better way to think about it is I'm being fully who I am and I am oriented towards the other with a state of like or even love in other kinds of circumstances.
Because I recognize the other as completely made in the image of God. Just as I am
Evan Rosa: in this episode, Elaine Eklund joins me to reflect on vocation, authenticity, gender, faith, and professional life, and the possibility of a principled pluralism in the workplace. Thanks for listening.
Elena, it's such a pleasure to see you again and have you on for the life of the world.
Elaine Ecklund: Yeah, thanks, Evan. It's really great to be here. It's really a privilege.
Evan Rosa: You have worked on the sociology of belief for some time. First, in the context of. Scientists and their particular religious beliefs, and we would refer listeners to that previous work, but perhaps a little bit more expansive and perhaps all the more challenging for that reason.
Religion in the workplace and both topics are juicy. I can see the way that, that both can, uh, be lightning rods of a kind and really mm-hmm. Hit people, people at a level of, of personal experience and specifically the work that you've done in working for better. And then your other book on the subject, religion In a Changing Workplace, it's taking up questions of how most people spend maybe most of their waking life.
And I wanted to start by asking you a little bit about. Why the workplace?
Elaine Ecklund: Yeah. So I can tell you the answer to that question, Evan, in kind of a scholarly way and in a personal way. So as a scholar, I've spent, it's really humbling to say it's been this long, but about 20 years at this point, studying what scientists think about religion and what religious people think about science.
And I've totally loved that work. I've especially loved all the interviews I've done with scientists really around the world at this point. But I got kind of curious about how science compares to other kinds of workplaces. So are the same dynamics related to faith at work also true of people who are in the law or people in the service industry.
And so I just wanted to expand that broader work at the personal level. I had the privilege of being part of a leadership cohort through the HEB foundation where we talked about spiritual leadership for three years. It was really fought. And really transformational. And Denise Daniels, who's my co-author on both of these books, so I wanna acknowledge her, who's a professor of business now at Wheaton College.
Very different kind of place, but also wonderful place than Rice University where I work. We were walking buddies at these retreats. We got to talk about like the tensions we face between being parents and having very time filling jobs that feel very missional to us. Just, we really grew to like each other.
But Denise at the time was working in Seattle and we're like, you know, we're never gonna see each other after this end. So like, what do adult. Academics do to continue a friendship. They're like, let's do research together. So, so it's also like out of our personal relationship that this project was birthed, which was really fun.
And on the religion and Change of workplace book, Christopher Scheel is also on that book, and he's a long-term sociology collaborator. Just a superb scholar of. Places and religion. So it was really fun to, to work with him too on that book. And the Working for Better Book is geared towards a specifically Christian audience, although I hope other the folks read it too, but it's a much more practical book with like discussion questions that you can, you know, look at together.
Sure. Through book and stuff like that.
Evan Rosa: In any kind of social science scenario. To do that kind of measurement and quantitative work that you've done, you have to bring in certain definitions, and I wanted to talk a little bit about what some of your like preliminaries were, some of the givens around the definition of work.
Work is something, it's, you know, when you feel it or see it, note when you do it, and yet. The definition of what work is has changed over different periods of history. It might be changing again soon with the dawn of ai. And so the understanding of work, what did you have in mind?
Elaine Ecklund: It's a way that we spend most of our waking hours.
I mean, many people work more than they sleep. For us, in this particular set of projects, work was defined as, you know, what we do for our livelihoods. So it was defined as work for pay, and we took people into our study across the US who either were working for pay. Or looking for work. We were not in this study as interested in folks who say work but not for pay.
If I had it all to do over again, I might have included those folks as well. I think we need to be very careful in how we define work in honoring certain kinds of people and implicitly dishonoring others and people who, you know, work at the. Parenting or who are very involved in volunteer work or caregiving work in other ways, um, are certainly doing work.
And I think especially if we look at things through a Christian frame, there is a way to really honor that kind of labor as being very, very important as well. But in this particular study, we were concerned about people who work for pay.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, that's one of the things that I wanted to start with because the broadened understanding of work, which is just, I don't know, keeping the earth, keeping and tilling the earth or something.
Elaine Ecklund: That's right. I was gonna say that. I was gonna say, I was like, I don't wanna be too specifically Christian, but there is a kind of genesis understanding.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. And you can feel it. It's certainly there and an appreciation for vocation and stewardship and a kind of creation mandate that has all sorts of theological valence to it is certainly there, but.
One thing I'm interested in, and this is not just with respect to preliminaries, but you know, the whole of the task, you can imagine how bringing faith and spirituality, bringing morality, bringing politics to the broader sense of work is going to capture a much different kind of cultural spirit mm-hmm.
That you would capture in the data. And once you. Introduce the concept of working capitalist society, the economic side of that factor.
Elaine Ecklund: That's like my discipline, right? So I'm a sociologist, you know, and the bread and butter of our early theory and sociology is Marx, Weber, Durheim, and Du Bois, really? And that is something that those early thinkers talked about a lot.
You know, the idea that. Work by its very definition and saw through the lens of a capitalist enterprise could be dehumanizing and something we want to get people away from, or it could provide a value and be the site of great spiritual meaning and exploration and spiritual entrepreneurship. And there's good kinds of things that we think of through several different paradigms.
And so. The nice thing about being a sociologist is that we do have these definitions and we have these priors when we start a research study, but we're really interested in telling people's stories well in their own terms, in the aggregate. So as a social scientist, I wanna make sure that I. Get to the truth of what people think about a phenomenon in as much as I can with the tools I have at my disposal.
And then I think we need other kinds of frameworks to make sense of the good. And if I might be so bold, the evil, really pieces of work as well. And we haven't asked me this, maybe you're gonna ask me later, but I can just say a little bit right now. You know, that's one of the reasons I decided to do this academic book with Oxford University Press.
Called religion and changing workplace geared more towards an academic audience, wrestling with these issues as well as especially business professors and other social scientists. And then to write a book that was much more geared towards a specifically Christian audience, I think because. As a practicing Christian myself, I wanted a space where I could do some theological reflection in a way that helped serve a form of public scholarship that helped serve some of the communities I'm part of.
And so the second book, working For Better, A New Approach to Faith at Work is also very much research space. And we use our data, we use some different data than we use in that first book, but it also, you know, ends, as I said, with discussion questions for small groups at every chapter. And some real theological reflection as well.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. What I have in mind, uh, about like this distinction between work for pay, and for lack of a better term, and I would ask you to maybe help me understand this mm-hmm. But I was gonna say, work for work, work for improvement, work for its own sake. And, and, and here we can jump into the suggestion of bringing one's whole self to work.
Mm-hmm. It seems like it's that broader definition of work. That allows one to kind of get into the mentality of bringing one's whole self when we don't simply work for money alone. But I realize that. That's the difference also between the definition of work as you've introduced it into the research, as well as just general perceptions of work that people are responding to in your data as well.
What do you make of that?
Elaine Ecklund: You're really raising some just deep and important issues. So one thread is, you know, should we bring our whole selves to work? Is that a good or are there ways in which we ought to protect certain parts of ourselves that we don't bring to work? We certainly bring different parts of our whole selves to work than we do say to our families or our hobbies, or our civic groups, or our churches, or our mosque.
I think that's good. I think there are things that are probably not appropriate to bring into most modern workplaces, but I think when people say they want to bring their whole selves to work, they want to bring the selves that seem most relevant and important to the jobs and the relationships that they have through those jobs.
And they don't wanna pretend they're someone different at home or in their mosque than they do in their workplace. I think that's what people want is. Be true to themselves, the themselves that they want to bring to the work. So that's one kind of thing. A second kind of thing is that some of us really have a kind of privilege, you know, the feeling like your work, the work itself, the task of the work is a spiritual calling is in some ways a preserve of the privileged.
So we have this ability to choose the kinds of jobs that are very relationally aligned or that. Are a part of our highest end goals and that folks who are involved in more working class jobs don't have that same kind of privilege. That said, we did find through our studies that spiritual calling was realized.
Across a very wide variety of occupational sectors and I was actually really surprised by that. It's more the preserve of the privilege, right? That so that folks who have more autonomy in their work in particular, and especially more autonomy to pick the kind of work they do, get to feel more called to that work as well.
But often folks who find themselves in working what we think of as a traditionally working class jobs, make spiritual meaning and feel a sense of calling to that work as well. And I just wanna. Say that's really important to point out. And then thirdly, there are ways in which our faith traditions can put needed boundaries around our work.
Mm-hmm. I disagree with Marx in this, right. So I teach Marx, I teach classical theories. One of the things I teach it. Right. You know, and. I love, I love I, maybe I shouldn't say this for the public, but I love me some good Marx. I mean, I love, there's certain things about Marx's work that I think is extremely important, but I do think he didn't quite get religion right.
Yeah. And we've done now some good empirical work that shows that people use their religion to bring justice to their workplaces. They use their religion to put really helpful boundaries around their work. Pieces of their selves that they don't actually share with their work. And some of that's very healthy, that there's a healthy boundary making that faith communities can provide for workers.
Yeah.
Evan Rosa: With respect to the whole selves as not wanting to leave behind a certain role, or not wanting to pretend, wanting to be true to oneself. I'd love to spend a, a few moments on that because I think one, it's, it's deeply felt at the moment. So much of life can lean toward performance in so many relationships and in the workplace.
The communities that are often built up, sometimes it can feel like there is an expectation for you to be a certain way in order for you to even keep your job or to be promoted. And when we begin to work in those ways, it creates a kind of bifurcation, a fragmentation of the self and the sort of dissonance that works against the kind of psychological integration.
Spiritual integration that we might think amounts to thriving, flourishing in a whole way, a holistic way. So I was wondering if you could comment on some of the ways that you noticed that particular issue of feeling fragmented in roles. And how the workplace can, can contribute to that or can be set up in a way to the healing of that sort of fragmentation.
Elaine Ecklund: I love that. So what's coming to mind is a story of someone we interviewed who is a scientist. I've actually had the same thing happen to me in my academic work with friends who I didn't interview, which is friends, but. Someone who wanted to hide the fact that she's a parent of a young child. 'cause she was interviewing at a very male dominated science department and thought that perhaps she would be discriminated against.
She was actually breastfeeding at the time. She had a little baby and you know, needed a place to pump. And so worked with like a woman in the department to like get all this figured out and the right spacing between our meetings, you know, while still like doing her best in the interview and all of that.
And just was so fraught about this and then starting to feel like, what the hell? I don't really care actually anymore because I that I wanna be part of this. I mean, I just like go through enormous gymnastics and do I wanna be part of an environment that like makes me feel like I want to hide the fact that I'm a mother.
She goes to give her a talk. She opens up her computer, she forgets that she has like pictures of her kids, like all over her screen on her computer. And she's like, I guess I let the, you know, the cat outta the bag that I have a baby, right? And a toddler and, you know, and, and everyone was like, lovely about that.
And she ended up getting the job. So it's a good end of the story. Now, her assumption for a good reason she wasn't crazy is these kinds of things happen. And I've written some about this in my previous work about how scientific environments really fail families, but. You know, when we were interviewing her, it was the sense that she had to hide a piece of who she was being a mother that actually could be very generative to her work, and it was very much a piece of her identity and who she was, and if she had to pretend to be something different.
In her workplace, she didn't know if it was even possible, right? It's not even tenable long term. But also she didn't really wanna do it because it was closing off a piece of herself. Now, you know, you wouldn't bring a baby into an operating room, but if you're part of a hospital environment where you're a surgeon and you have to pretend you don't have a baby, that's a very different thing, right?
So there are certain kinds of things we don't do in the workplace, or not usual, although certainly I brought my baby to work before for different reasons, but. It was that kind of difference that I would point out. I are you being asked to pretend you're someone that you're not in your workplace. If you do that long term, that kind of cognitive dissonance, our respond and say, well actually end up hurting your work and you know, hurting who you are as a person and decrease human flourishing overall.
Well, at the same time, we understand that we have different roles and workplaces than we do in other kinds of environments.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, your response. And it's a really fitting example and I think it's important to acknowledge the gendered nature of what's going on there as well. So I wanna ask you both as a woman and as a mother, and as someone in the academic professional environment, there is certainly a difference that we are still encountering all the time with respect to gender in the workplace and the heightened.
A mother to, to try to hide that aspect of who she is because it's thought to be somehow less productive, that it's somehow threatening to the overall integrity of the work. I think that's preposterous, and yet it's still somehow. Finds its effects in the workplace, and this would be a fitting moment to ask you about that too.
The role of Of gender in your research on work and religion.
Elaine Ecklund: Oh, I wish Denise were here. She would like laugh because we started out this study wanting to study just women's workplace lives. Oh really? And our funder said, you know, do a bigger study, study, both men and women. But that was really our, that was really our passion in the beginning, was to focus mainly on women's work lives.
And so in our Working for Better book, we have a chapter set. The way the book is set up just for listeners is. We have five movements throughout the book where we move from an older way of thinking about things to a newer way of thinking about things. And we move in one of the chapter sets from thinking about men and women as very separate, and men as having particular kinds of roles to thinking about men and women working together.
You know, it's with Flourishing for All, and that was a really fun. Chapter set to write for us in the Working for Better Book. A couple of things come to mind and some of this we actually write about in the book. We have both felt like. We have experienced in some ways more gender discrimination in the churches we've been part of, than in the workplaces we've been part of.
And yet there's always been amazing men and women in our church environments overall, that kept us coming back. People who supported our work. I mean, I. Attend a church. Now, my husband is a scientist, he's a physicist, and we together have run a lecture series in our church on faith, that science forever.
And our pastoral team is extraordinarily encouraging our both of us in our work. And that's, I just wanna point that out as a great antidote. Yet I, you know, I have been totally typed into roles in almost hilarious ways at time through churches. And you learn how to live with that. And then I think you take that over.
Um, into your work environments, like the things that you think of as usual. And we found this in our research that certain kinds of Christian women were less likely to recognize gender discrimination, and when they did recognize it, didn't think of it as this big a deal. And so in part Denise and I thought that people are being socialized to think that gender discrimination is like normal and in even some cases supported spiritually in ways that then in their work environments, you know, has them not recognizing it for what it is.
Yeah.
Evan Rosa: I want to stick with this for a moment because I think this is one aspect of a broader phenomenon about religion and work that I noticed that I'm just, as part of my experience and thoughts about it, that what religion did to influence the modern workplace mm-hmm. The first place. Um, it's fascinating how the contemporary workplace is currently seeking to work against some of the more traditional.
Perspectives, gender roles in particular that we've now adopted, whether it's Title IX or other forms of, you know, just action against workplace discrimination. We have been working against the religious influences, particular kinds of religious influences, and this is not to say anything about the. Their theological grounding or scriptural grounding or sort of moral, ethical, it's just like seems to be factual that we're just graduating from a particular kind of work tradition and it's so fascinating then to see how.
I mean, as you just said, you know, women who are from more conservative Christian backgrounds seem to be less sensitive to discrimination in the workplace and finding a space for religious views in the workplace, which might also then bring back certain traditional perspectives on gender roles. And you can quickly see how this becomes quite a puzzle.
Elaine Ecklund: Absolutely, absolutely. It's very circular and. We saw several kinds of things happening, so people's religious beliefs and practices clash with. Other kinds of deeply held beliefs and practices, right? Often about gender equality, um, and racial equality and sexual equality. And so there are these, and that's a big reason that many leaders say, let's just leave religion out completely.
That it's just too much of a problem, and we try to argue very forcefully in both of our books, that is not the answer, that suppressing religion doesn't end up really helping anyone. Actually we need to get some of these things out in the open for people to be healthy in their work environments. And to suppress religion is to deny.
Its sometimes very positive impact on workers' lives, individual workers' lives, but also on social systems. Um, and I can talk about that in a minute as well, but the kinds of things that we've learned in churches in terms of how men and women relate to one another. Have often been maladaptive for modern workplaces and led us, I'm gonna say maladaptive is kind of the soft way of saying it, and the more forward way of saying it is, I think even from a Christian perspective, led to us instantiating what I believe are very sinful practices and workplaces, you know, where.
You know, leaders who are men do not give women the same opportunities because they hold them responsible for potential sexual impropriety. So there's, we talked extensively in the book about, you know, the so-called Billy Graham rule. Yeah. That these men cannot be alone with women. Well, think about how that.
Decreases the amount of help women can get from men who are very often in leadership in workplaces. And so just the
Evan Rosa: concept of network that that prevents or the kinds of work connections that do rely on close, intimate working relationships where there's important inside information at times, appropriately inside information that should be shared more.
Equally, and if there's an atmosphere of fear and kind of impropriety mm-hmm. And desire to sort of be above reproach, it's really just a kind of performance to it all, and it makes everyone worse.
Elaine Ecklund: That's right. That's right. And some of the things, Denise and I, Denise has done a lot more consulting than I have, and she's in a department business now.
And, but we're both starting to do some more consulting on this and just kind of helping, uh, organizations think through, especially faith-based organizations that. Want to have a certain kind of approach, a full and whole approach to how they enact faith at work, but and fall into especially some of these difficulties with gender and not really knowing how to keep these things in tension.
What their faith is telling them with what. They need to do they think, I guess I would say they think these two things are intention. I don't think that they really are. I think our faith compels us to hope for and enact flourishing for everyone, you know, really both men and women.
Evan Rosa: That's important. I wanna briefly just say, I think.
The, you said maladaptive, the softer version of discussing discrimination against women in the workplace. You went to sinful. I think it's just downright, just unjust. It's just a form of injustice that is, is unacceptable and needs to be worked against and is one of the many ways that there are so often an appeal to religion, to support practices of injustice.
And so you can understand why you would want some kind of clean way to. Solve the problem, the secular work state. Right. Just remove religion entirely. Mm-hmm. And I think we can get, start getting to soon why that would be a foolish thing to entirely eliminate religious perspectives and religious identities or roles or commitments.
But I just wanna appreciate the fact that it means embracing a kind of tension and living intention. Sometimes with your religious tradition mm-hmm. Or living intention sometimes with your job and the organization that you work for, or maybe living intention with your coworkers. People don't like that.
Elaine Ecklund: Yeah, and it's, I mean, I've faced this myself as a leader. I don't lead a Fortune 500 company, but I do, you know, lead an academic institute and have LED centers and departments and other kinds of things for the universities I've been part of. And it's easy as a woman leader, I think sometimes to get to, um, friendly with women colleagues and in ways.
That, you know, make women feel uncomfortable or put special pressures on women who report to me to enact, you know, relationally something that may not be quite right. And so, you know, I've really thought through like what is my commitment to both men and women that I mentor to give them the same kinds of opportunities.
And what does that look like and what are my expectations? And so I've thought a lot about this as a scholar and who's also an academic leader because I think Christian leaders need to think through some of these things for themselves and have safe places where they can think through these things.
So I thought when we started studying faith communities. And their connection to how people understand gender roles in workplaces. I thought the conservative communities would be uniformly the problem and the progressive Christian communities would be the blessing. And I, you know, I don't think I was right about that.
We found through our data that both progressive and conservative traditions within Christianity. Have problems with gender roles and I was really surprised by that. So women pastors, for example, are expected to minister to both men and women in progressive spaces and you know, men in the same spaces, you know, have like a wife who does things as like essentially a free, a staff of the church and.
To women while they focus on men. And these were in progressive congregations. And I remember we interviewed a whole set of pastors and other types of religious leaders about how they think about faith in the workplace through their religious organizations. And when we interviewed the progressive women pastors, we found really different things than I thought we would.
They felt very discriminated against in their religious organizations. Their organizations often did things like. Had women's ministry meetings at 10:00 AM you know, assuming that no one, actually, no one works for pay or only works inside the home, I should say. I mean, certainly you'll be available at that time.
Whereas the men's meetings were, you know, always after what typical work hours would be or on the weekends.
Evan Rosa: That's so interesting. Wow.
Elaine Ecklund: And in, in just consistently, and Denise and I have had this happen to both of us, just consistently, women invited to do childcare. And baking. Which is funny in our case because my husband's actually a very good baker.
And I'm a horrible baker. And you know, they just for practical reasons, they should ask him. I mean, he bakes like a scientist. And one thing about baking is you, that's the good point, right? You know, you can't, like I brought. Whatever I have off tap, I'm gonna put that in, is not really the way to go with baking.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, and so it kind of funny to me, I went to this, this church that, uh, when I was looking for a church in my city, and I went up to the pastor and I happened to be visiting by myself and I said, oh, you know, like, what kinds of ministries do you have that I, someone like me who get involved?
And I explain that as a, you know. Teaching and all this stuff just to give that my interest. And he says, well, you know, the women are often very involved in the baking ministry and often women bring cookies, scrap this surface. And I said, well, I'm, you know, not, what about other kinds of things you know that you might have?
And he says, well, other women bring muffins and. Freeze. We're like, I could read cookies or muffins. You know? That's true. This was like,
Evan Rosa: you can't script better comedy than that. That
Elaine Ecklund: is, yeah. You just cannot get out of it. You cannot get out of these roles and why have I stayed involved? She asks herself, because I've also been part of incredibly generous faith communities.
I mean, I've just love the church that I'm part of now. It has been so encouraging to me to have our pastor visit our workplace and, you know, meet with us and meet colleagues and come to events and so that's, there just are some really great examples in our data and in our personal lives about faith leaders doing amazing things to help people integrate their faith and their work in super thoughtful ways.
Evan Rosa: Certainly one of the things that emerges in the conversation, you gestured toward it in these last few moments is not just the role of religion in the workplace, but the role of work in the church place.
Elaine Ecklund: Yeah, that's right. That's right.
Evan Rosa: And allowing one's professional calling to inform one's. Now in this case, you know, we're talking about the difference between, you know, like volunteer time or you know, or work beyond pay.
But it's fascinating how basically all of the gifts, all of the graces that can emerge from the skill, expertise, natural talent of women who have cultivated careers. And have just the, the, all the potential. If they haven't just cultivated it yet, then the church is missing that, the community is missing that, and so much the worse, and I think you can see this in gender discrimination in so many different places.
Right? If only if. A woman would be put in the White House at some point, what would that be like? How could that improve things? So I just think there's just something about looking at it orthogonally, then you had it, which is like to see it the other way around.
Elaine Ecklund: Yeah. What can people bring from their work into the church?
And I think that's a really important question to be asking in these times, especially since. We all need to be people who are religious and people who are not need to be thinking increasingly about living in a pluralistic society. So religiously pluralistic, politically pluralistic. Wish it were more politically alistic.
So and so There's, you know, all of those things are coming up and. Churches really need to be, and I'll say churches because I'm speaking out of my own tradition now. You know the pastors that I interview for this study and other studies are constantly scared that the church is declining in America, but yet churches are cutting off some of their greatest teachers and.
Some of the folks who can most help them respond in culturally appropriate ways by, you know, not letting women lawyers be lawyers also in their churches, right. In positive, thoughtful ways. You know, having teachers also teach in their church. So there's ways in which we can really contribute to congregations and I think help thoughtfully adjust and even become organizational leaders in these pluralistic and fraught and deeply fraught.
So, and that's what I love, you know, when there's a kind of humility on the part of faith leaders to just say. Like I am gonna make space for someone who's outside my profession to help me address these kinds of things. And in our data, there's lots of examples in the book about pastors doing that and really stepping up to the plate, I think, and saying, I'm going to.
Empower people in my congregation to really make a difference in my congregation and in the broader world. And just some great examples of people in finance helping the church think through giving in a totally different way. And the listeners may feel differently about this than I do, but churches, starting businesses and childcare facilities and coffee shops and you know, there's ways in which people in congregation are doing some, like bringing those work skills.
Over into the church in, in, I think really thoughtful and generative ways.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. I'm gonna hang out looking at it in the inversion perspective here about the role of work in church. If there is this issue, again, of bringing one's whole self to work, meaning that you would bring your religious and spiritual sensibilities, your faith.
It's just so interesting to think about the ways that church as a societal construct also requires. When it's not going well, a place where people have to pretend and where professional calling is sometimes unwelcome on the grounds of one's gender or on the grounds of one's race or orientation. It just again, speaks to the broader concerns around one's whole self and one's.
Sense of oneself across the different sectors of life, and particularly life in public because we're constantly presenting ourselves in a particular way and are worried about the mode of reception.
Elaine Ecklund: Yeah. And I wanna say like, you know, have you been a parent to the listeners? Because there's ways in which, you know, if we expect ourselves to perform in church, wow, we really expect our kids to perform and to make us look good in church environments.
And we have a very particular notion about what that. Means, and so I just wanna acknowledge that and say, and this is very much coming from a Christian theological place. That's not how it should be. Right? So we ought to be able to show up as our whole selves, including our whole work selves, even more authentically and even more whole in church environments, right?
Because there is a kind of. Role dependency in our jobs, right? We're fulfilling a particular kind of role that's appropriate, and we're not fulfilling all our roles at once when we're at work. Whereas in our church environments, we should be able to have a broader notion of role coherence as well. So I ought to be able to be a full parent, a full woman, a full spouse, you know, and a full worker.
And in terms of this conversation about work, Evan, I think there ought to be ways in which we can bring our work more authentically to our churches, but also put more authentic boundaries around our work. I mean, maybe if I am in the finance world, I don't wanna actually do the church finances because I want to.
For some other piece of my identity. Uh, maybe I do wanna teach small children when I'm in the congregation because that's just something that I love also that I get to express. I don't always have to be known by my work identity. In the best sense, our churches ought to put some boundaries around identity authenticity, right?
That we know that we're. Created in the image of God. And so our whole identity doesn't come from our work. It's not, we're expressing our faith identity in our work, but our identity is not dependent on how we're viewed at work. And there's a kind of freedom there that ought to be found in church communities.
Evan Rosa: I want, I want to go toward pluralism. Living. Principled pluralism is, um,
Elaine Ecklund: yeah, that's my jam. That's what I'm doing now. It's been such a journey the last few years, you know, being head of this Institute for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance, the institute, and yeah, you know, we're really trying to address religious violence and conflict and replace it with a sense of healthy moralism, societally and locally, and so.
That's been kind of hard to think about, but I've thought about that a lot the last several years.
Evan Rosa: For those who are either unfamiliar with the concept of a principled pluralism or you know, have concerns about it, how would you introduce it and bolster it as something we need today?
Elaine Ecklund: So what we mean by principled is that.
People should be authentic. So it's pluralism is principled in that when it recognizes that I have convictions, they might be religious convictions or other kinds of convictions that I'm very committed to. It's not that I'm not open to change under certain conditions, but I'm not pretending. That's the principle part.
I'm not lying about what I think. In order to make you like me, I am. The better way to think about it is I'm being fully who I am and I'm liking you. I am oriented towards the other with a state of like or even love in other kinds of circumstances because I recognize the other as completely made in the image of God just as I am.
So the principle part is that I am honest about what my convictions are. I don't pretend that they're less or different than they are, but I'm oriented towards the other with a state of recognition of the other is also created in the image of God, and that has certain kinds of implications. So pluralism.
Just is. There are differences, right? There are differences, and so you need to put in front of that word pluralism a word like principled, which we have in the Working for Vater book. And in my institute work, I often talk about healthy pluralism by what? One aspect of which is principled pluralism. And I want to learn from the other because if I as a Christian say, believe that another person is creating the image of God, oh my gosh, what could I learn from that person?
And that is such a different attitude than either saying, let's pretend we don't have differences, which is one way we sometimes air. So that's like the conciliatory from a. State that's not transparent or that is a lie. If you want to say it more authentically or to overly emphasize our difference in a way that is hierarchical to say, I am made in the image of God.
Because I'm a Christian and you are not made in image of God because you're not a Christian and you're not yet a Christian. And so that's a very different type of orientation which emphasizes difference and hierarchical difference, right? And so I think those two extremes, like conciliatory from a statement of lack of truth or difference from a point of view of hierarchy, are both incorrect.
I think as Christians. So this, the second book working for Better is from that Christian standpoint. As a Christian, we have a lot to give in creating a healthy pluralism because we have such robust knowledge of all humanity is being created in the image of God.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, absolutely. And furthermore, you know, I'd be remiss if I didn't also point out some of the reliance theologically on MES law's work.
Elaine Ecklund: We do. I know, right? Like I should have led with that.
Evan Rosa: The application of his concept of embrace into pluralism in the workplace, I think is really fascinating. I'm gonna read from page 180 5. We like the idea of incorporating radical embrace in the concept of principled pluralism, since it allows us as Christians to hold firm to our own theological convictions and principles, while also recognizing and honoring the moral value of each person in a pluralistic setting.
Because each one of us. From our Christian standpoint is created in the image of God and sometimes the way I describe the work of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture is that it is grounded in the theological Christian core of Miroslav theological commitments as a Christian, and born from that is our broader, pluralistic work in life worth living.
It's because of the Christian theological commitments that pluralism. Is made possible. And that's seems to be one of the most salient things I can identify theologically, at least, about how religion can in fact benefit the workplace.
Elaine Ecklund: We ought to be, as Christians chief in our expertise of knowing how to embrace the other.
And I would say sadly, that when you survey broader society about who the most accepting people are, it's usually not the Christians. And I don't mean accepting in the sense of agreeing with what everyone does. I don't agree with lots of things that people who are also Christians do and believe and think and all of that, but more in the sense of Miroslav wolf's ideas of exclusivity and embrace more in that sense of.
Being an open space for others to be fully human and uniquely human, and learning from that and that kind of humility of spirit, I think is very important. Like I approach people who are Muslims or people who are non-religious. I've had the privilege of working with both types of students and junior scholars and those from many other religious traditions.
I approach them, I think with a sense of, you know, what can I learn here? Yeah, that's very freeing.
Evan Rosa: Yes. Can I be surprised by this other? It's to make sure that the image of God in just all humanity. Even if that particular language is a little ruffle, some feathers because of the theism in it. Just the simple human Divinity, but the overwhelming human Divinity of the other seems to be enough to support that, that it should ground a kind of willingness to be surprised by this.
Mm-hmm. Wonderful. And surprising and amazing other person who shares the same image and shares the same Divinity.
I'm so grateful for your time and bringing some of the findings of your research to our listeners, and I really enjoyed this. So much Elene.
Elaine Ecklund: Yeah. Evan, thank you so much. You know, thanks to the Yale Center For Faith and Culture for having me. And uh, gosh, I learned a lot from this conversation. It'll gimme some things to keep thinking about.
So thank you
Evan Rosa: for the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Elaine Eklund, production Assistance by Noah Senthil. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online faith.yale.edu or lifeworthliving.yale.Edu.
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