Embracing religion in the workplace

The Religious Freedom & Business Foundation helps some of the world’s biggest companies become faith-friendly

Brian Grim, president of the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation

Brian Grim’s mission is to promote religious freedom for everyone in the world’s workplaces. In the 11 years since he founded the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation (RFBF), he has helped major corporations recognize the positive value of accommodating people of faith.

While many Christians have objected to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs for allegedly promoting progressive ideologies, Grim deploys the concept in a very different way—to urge workplaces to act inclusively toward religion. The RFBF annually releases a corporate index that recognizes the top “faith-friendly” companies and functions as a benchmarking tool for progress in creating faith-friendly workplaces. Well-known names on the 2024 index’s honor roll include American Airlines, Dell, Salesforce, Intel, American Express, and Google.

Grim sees himself as promoting the “positive side of religious freedom” in that he teaches how to accommodate and respect people’s faith rather than fighting persecution. The RFBF also publishes a guide to religion in the workplace, conducts research, holds conferences, and provides consulting to businesses interested in becoming more faith-friendly.

One of Grim’s recent visits was to Maharashtra Institute of Technology’s World Peace University in Pune, India, which is piloting a curriculum on human rights and business skills that includes lessons on religious freedom. He spoke last month at a global event for Dell employees on how embracing faith in the workplace can advance compassion and peace.

A more detailed Q&A with Grim follows below. Among his main points:

• One can make a strong business case for supporting religion in the workplace, because doing so enhances retention, recruitment, ethical behavior, and customer satisfaction. Faith-friendly workplaces affirm the core identity of people of faith.

• Since discrimination based on religion is prohibited in much of the world along with discrimination by race, ethnicity or gender, DEI initiatives can provide an opportunity to advance respect for religion in the workplace.

• It’s not against the Christian faith to aid people of other faiths, and we can learn a lot from people whose faith commitments we may not share.

Q&A with Brian Grim

How have you been able to get companies to pay attention to religion?

Religion is already in companies. You have pretty much the same percentage of people of faith in any company as in the surrounding society. Whether it’s Christians having a Bible study, or Muslims gathering together on Friday, Jews seeking to eat kosher food, or Hindus wanting their holidays on the calendar, all these voices are already within companies, needing accommodation. My work gives voice and visibility to these people, helping their company take their journey toward being faith- and belief-friendly.

The thing that makes a faith initiative work in a company is when they see how it relates to their bottom line. Helping people feel they belong boosts employee retention and recruitment. If you’re in the job market and your faith is important to you, knowing that a company will respect your faith is attractive.

People of faith bring unique perspectives to a company. They also tend to be ethical employees, because they live as if they have another set of eyes watching them.

Sensitivity to faith traditions is good for business. If you’re working in India and you don’t know anything about Hinduism, it’s a disadvantage.

An Intel executive in Costa Rica got reassigned to Malaysia, which is predominantly Muslim. He didn’t know anything about Islam, so he reached out to Intel’s global head of Christian employee resource groups (ERGs), who connected him to the Muslim ERG leader. This Muslim tutored him in basic understanding of Islam, which resulted in him achieving business success in Malaysia. If Intel hadn’t let faith into the company, where would this executive have gone to get a good, business-informed answer to his questions?

As someone who urges businesses to respect religion as a matter of respect for and inclusion of diverse views, how have you reacted to the controversy over DEI policies?

DEI has taken on a negative connotation in many conservative circles, but it actually opened the door for Christians and all faiths to have an official presence in businesses.

The roots of DEI lie in laws that protect people from discrimination based on gender, race, age, or religion. Many companies set up their DEI programs to make sure they were not running afoul of the law. The primary focus initially was on race and gender. As the LGBT movement gained traction, at first corporations were not interested because it was too hot a topic, but now many have embraced it.

Amidst all these efforts to make the workplace welcoming for people, the characteristic not getting much attention was religion. It’s not that companies are anti-religion, but religion was too sensitive for them. They know it can become complicated and interpersonally difficult. People feel that if they don’t understand it well, they can make a misstep.

But religion is what many people think of as their core identity. I know a woman at an insurance company who kept getting celebrated for her promotions because she was breaking the “glass ceiling” as the first woman in her position, but she said the celebrations rang hollow for her, because her faith, not her gender, defined her approach to life and was not getting recognized.

The U.S. State Department has had ERGs for Christians, Muslim, and Jewish employees for years. In fact, the Christian group helped the other two get set up. When the [Trump administration] dictate came out that DEI was canceled, that also eliminated the Christian group inside the State Department. For critics, DEI is a four-letter word with three letters, but there are aspects of it that open the door for religious freedom and give people an official channel to voice concerns within the organization. Now that is gone at the State Department.

As a Christian, how do you engage with other faiths that you don’t agree with, even though you respect their followers?

Jesus’ greatest commandment was to love God and love our neighbor. When asked who our neighbor is, he told the story of the good Samaritan—a story in which a foreigner with a different religion was the hero while the victim’s co-religionists passed by on the other side.

That story gives me my marching orders to help Christians understand the potential to be good Samaritans in the workplace. It doesn’t contradict our faith to help people of other faiths.

I was discussing faith with a Sikh woman over dinner a few years ago and she said, “We Sikhs don’t just believe in miracles—we rely on miracles!” Her comment reinvigorated how I think about my own reliance on God. We can learn a lot of people we don’t agree with, because God gives good ideas to them too.