The Odd Couple. - Church on Sunday, Work on Monday: The Challenge of Fusing Christian Values with Business Life - Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet - Faith, Morals and Money: What the World's Religions Tell Us About Ethics in the Marketplace - book review

Church on Sunday, Work on Monday
The Challenge of Fusing Christian Values with
Business Life
Laura Nash, Scotty McLennan
Jossey-Bass, $23.95, 316 pp.

Good Work
When Excellence and
Ethics Meet
Howard Gardner,
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, William Damon
Basic Books, $26, 288 pp.

Faith, Morals and Money
What the World's Religions Tell
Us About Ethics in the Marketplace
Edward G. Zinbarg
Continuum, $22.95, 182 pp.

Business and religion have always made an ugly couple. From the Busy Folks' Bible Class at George Babbitt's local church to J. F. Powers's Billy Cosgrove, we imagine that businesspeople inevitably get religion all wrong. Somehow, they pollute it with eagerness for success, cheery optimism, and a propensity for dishonesty when the going gets tough. Their religious goal, if they have one, is to be in the bishop's foursome at next year's diocesan golf outing. It's no wonder that churches generally want (except for fundraising, of course) to keep their distance.

In the Catholic Church we've had several generations to live with Vatican II's reminder that what we do with our working lives has ultimate significance. But there aren't many signs that church programs, preaching, or parishes have found effective ways to get that message across. Yes, we have Domino's Pizza founder Tom Monaghan's Legatus, where Catholic CEOs get together to celebrate church teaching (a tradition "second to none," brags its Web site). But in general, church ministry is ministry to people who need help desperately--not to people who work.

Church on Sunday, Work on Monday tries to explain why churches have done such a poor job relating to churchgoers as working people. Laura Nash, a Harvard Business School researcher, and Scotty McLennan, dean for religious life at Stanford (and yes, once the prototype for Doonesbury's Reverend Scott Sloan), are a surprisingly good combination to tackle this lacuna. Unlike most business books, their work is well written and succinct--great reading for both people inside the church as ministers and working people who want a basic introduction to the issues.

Why the great divorce between faith and work? Most business people, Church on Sunday says, are basically optimistic: in theory and even in practice, they tend to like change, building, competition, and fixing problems. Meanwhile, churches of almost every stripe are built to keep change at bay, even when it's the only way forward. This clash between the go-getters and the keepers of the flame emerges inside businesses too, but there the torch passes along to a new generation sooner or later--or the business goes under. That torch-passing doesn't often happen in churches.

The businesspeople interviewed in Church on Sunday don't pull any punches pointing out how little interest their churches take in what they do for a living. When they hear preaching about business--if they hear it at all--it's to expose commerce as a nasty symptom and perhaps a root cause of materialistic malaise. (Just last month, I heard a blanket condemnation from the pulpit of all advertising as exploitation, and all media as manipulative. All?) The result: people who feel their church doesn't know very much about, and mostly doesn't respect, what they're doing most of their waking hours.

The solution, of course, may not lie inside the churches at all. A growing industry of nondenominational but vaguely spiritual books, workshops, and groups is already talking about fairness, leadership, and vocational choice. Much of this sort of talk ends up as compromised and Babbitt-like as you might imagine (the dreadful Jesus, C.E.O. is just one example). But the best of it does give people some sort of structure for "principle-centered living," as the Mormon management thinker Stephen Covey calls it. To be sure, his turgid but endlessly best-selling The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is more a gospel of personal empowerment than the whole gospel. But Covey's success comes from acknowledging that most people work in a complex, nondenominational world--and that the average business person does want, in some way, both to do good and to do well. If churches want to reach business people, they could do worse than start from those assumptions.

They could also give some attention to Good Work. Here the question raised by its three psychologist authors is: Every profession at its best can produce "good work"--work that is expert and advances the common good, and that somehow isn't motivated entirely by money or greed. How does that happen?

The book, like Church on Sunday, is based on interviews with practitioners, but here the focus is on two fields within which there is a constant tension between money and professional responsibility: genetic science and journalism. The conversations describe the pressures you'd expect to hear about: reporters ordered to pursue dopey stories rather than real news; scientists competing fiercely for grant support and professional prominence. Many are good stories yet they are discussed and analyzed at far too great a length. Furthermore, with only two professions under discussion, the book seems much longer than it needs to be.

So how do we get more "good work"? Good Work reminds us of the power of people banding together inside each profession to define what, at its best, it is. Such associations can easily become forums for self-congratulation or self-selection. But they can also provide a nonprofit-motivated setting to debate what's right, as well as moral and practical support for members under pressure to bend their standards. Most important, joining together can give people in the profession a credo to come back to, even if subconsciously, when difficult issues arise.

"All practitioners should be able to state the core traditional mission of their own fields," say the authors, and it makes you wish you worked in a profession that had one. Journalism and the sciences may have done a better job of articulating their missions and standards than middle managers, salespeople, or butchers. But simply because businesspeople haven't formed a bond with their peers to set those standards doesn't mean it can't happen. Perhaps the age of guilds will return. It's almost medieval enough a notion for the churches to get interested.

One staple in the attempt to apply faith to work is the business-ethics casebook, with emblematic moral dilemmas showing the competing priorities businesspeople face. Edward Zinbarg's Faith, Morals and Money is in this tradition. Zinbarg, a former insurance executive who pursued graduate studies in religion after retirement, certainly can't be accused of being parochial in his approach, since in the first part of his book he attempts nothing less than a synthesis of the moral traditions of all the major faiths of both East and West. Catholic social teaching gets two pages, and other traditions don't fare much better--but the goal doesn't seem to be completeness. Zinbarg is out to assure people that in most situations, all religious traditions would come to similar conclusions about the moral imperatives of business.

While he makes some entertaining points, particularly about his Jewish heritage, I don't think he proves his case. And as always with the evidence that gets presented in ethics books, anyone coming to business from the outside will find it to be a pretty foul swamp. Price gouging, discrimination, child labor--they're all here, but not in a particularly usable form. So Faith, Morals and Money doesn't succeed as an enjoyable ethics casebook (if there is such a thing), or as a key-to-all-religions for business people. When it comes to a business book, I think I'll take generic religion over any of these offerings.

In fact, there are few outstanding resources available--in a parish, or in a professional setting--to help people evaluate their vocational choices and the decisions and investments they make in light of their faith. And so we're left wondering why, in a church with such a strong tradition of economic justice, so few work-related ministries and faith-based associations have emerged. Perhaps it's because working Catholics are getting all the support they need from the secular resources that exist. Or, just maybe, they're waiting for "the church" to do the work for them. Sooner or later, they'll learn one of business's ultimate lessons: The Lord helps those who help themselves.

Thomas Baker is a media consultant in Princeton Junction, New Jersey.

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