Apparently religion doesn't mean ethics
by Miki Saxon
After I wrote my post yesterday I got to thinking that there’s a major disconnect going on. Here’s why:
- As mentioned yesterday, the 2007 National Business Ethics Survey® found that “Over the past year, more than half (56 percent) of employees surveyed had personally observed violations of company ethics standards, policy, or the law. Many saw multiple violations. More than two of five employees (42 percent) who witnessed misconduct did not report it through any company channels…;”
- An ABC poll in July of this year found that “Eighty-three percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians. Most of the rest, 13 percent, have no religion. That leaves just 4 percent as adherents of all non-Christian religions combined Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and a smattering of individual mentions.” and
- A trio of Gallup surveys shows that “more than three-quarters of Americans believe the Bible is literally the word of God or inspired by the word of God.” (Note: I’m not happy about the source on this one.)
That means that the same people who identify themselves as Christians/religious and the ones who take the Bible literally are the same people who are either violating the ethical standards or not reporting the violators.
You can see my quandary, unless you believe, as I can’t, that all the shenanigans and lack of reporting are being done exclusively by the 13 percent who claim no religion.
Quandaries give me headaches, so all suggestions, ideas, comments, etc. will be greatly appreciated.
December 11th, 2007 at 7:14 am
There’s no quandary Miki – you’re seeing it exactly as it is…
Pitiful isn’t it? Of course, just because they believe the Bible is the word of God doesn’t mean they understand or practice any of it or can throw all of God’s word in the garbage when its convenient for them to do so.
December 11th, 2007 at 9:03 am
Merely being cynical about people of faith is taking the easy way out.
A common feature of our culture is for people to compartmentalize different parts of their lives, experiences, beliefs and actions.
Not a great feature, especially for those whose spiritual, cultural or ethnic heritages have so much wisdom that could inform other areas of life, like work, home and relationships.
Instead of condemning people for the inconsistencies among their various compartments, a conversation like this one might enrich everyone involved, and, who knows, change our workplace ethics too!
Thanks for the post and initiating the conversation!
December 11th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
Mark, Pitiful, yes—if that’s really all that’s going on. Also amazingly hypocritical.
December 11th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
Karl, I’m cynical about politics, NOT people and I’m not condemning anyone. I also am well aware of the role that fear plays in choosing to blow or not blow the whistle.
And while I’m no paragon, nor am I religious, the ethics governing my actions and interactions are the same across all parts of my life. I don’t understand why it would be different, nor do my friends and business colleagues.
December 11th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
I guess that makes our challenge as consultants how to best equip the hypocrites among us to choose a more integrated, consistent and healthy approach to work and life! It’s good to know you’re out there in the messy mix helping to make a difference.
December 11th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
Ah, Karl, you give me far too much credit. I tend to get hired by execs who are generally on the same wavelength as I am.
The one time I was hired by a CEO who, it turned out, had no commitment to what I teach/preach I resigned—and refunded $10K. It nearly killed me and I couldn’t afford it, but the choice was between that and not sleeping and I’ve always chosen to do that which allows me to sleep well. That said, I have enormous respect for those of you willing to fight the good fight:)
December 12th, 2007 at 2:02 am
You make quite a dangerous assumption here based on 2 very different surveys. There are way too many factors involved to assume that they correlate.
Just a few factors that you’re ignoring:
• The Business Ethics study, being based around business behavior, was most likely surveyed mostly in heavily populated metropopulated areas, since these are the areas that businesses tend to be based.
• It is possible that less christians work in the types of businesses that were surveyed. Did the survey include churches or non-profit organization? We don’t know.
• ABC’s study was more likely to be nation-wide without pre-requisites (such as working at a chosen business)
• ABC’s style of question “What if anything is your religion?” is open-ended enough that those with a religious upbringing who no longer practice their religion, may still list it as they do not have any other religion.
• The first listed “issue” of misconduct as noted in the survey is “conflicts of interest”… is it possible that someone with religious beliefs may be more likely to have an undefined “conflict of interest”?
• More in-depth geographical surveys of religion show that metropolitan areas tend to rank higher percentages of non-religious whereas areas of more sparse populations tend to have higher prcantages of religious.
These are but a few factors that need to be taken into account before making these overblown assumptions.
Are we to say that all of this “business misconduct” is more prevalent among caucasian males simply because there are more of them than there are some other race? No of course not, that’s absurd.
But that is exactly the kind of comparison being made here.
Now. With all of this said… I am a christian and want to be clear – christians are as much to blame as everyone else. We are just human after all, and we fall into the same sins of the world as everyone else.
Though I think your assumption is far off base, I also do concede that with the prevalence of christianity in the U.S. it is very likely that religious people are involved in business ethic issues just as such as the non-religious.
I don’t want to get the conversation too religious but please allow this small bit for an understanding of christian belief. Unlike some other religions, christians do not believe that their good deeds are the key to salvation (i.e. the key to get in heaven), but rather the mercy of God and through the sacrifice of Jesus (which paid the price for all mankind’s sin). Fortunately, this allows anyone to be christian – granting them the ability to get to heaven, no matter their past, etc. Unfortunately, this allows anyone to be christian – granting them the ability to be just as unethical as they please.
Basically all this to say that, yes, christians do bad stuff just as atheists do. Of course there are going to be so-called hypocrit christians… anyone can be christian, no good-deed count required.
December 12th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
Like manners, ethical behavior can be taught, but only to those for whom ethics has meaning. Ethical behavior is not some abstract or ethnocentric construct that is open to interpretation depending on the practitioner or situation. However, in these United States, we do have a fairly common construct of what is right and what is wrong, as well as what defines fair treatment and what defines “evil” or wrong treatment of others. As a National community we generally agree on a code of conduct loosely taken from the “do to others as you would have them do unto you” as well as a vague familiarity with the Ten Commandments.
That having been said, companies do not always behave ethically, or according to their “mission statements.”
The example below is a case in point. However, the larger question is: “what do leaders of people, teams, companies, departments, families, social groups, sports teams, etc, do when confronted with such bad behavior, and what can we teach our children, students, co-workers, direct reports, etc. based on these uncomfortable experiences?
Religion is a funny thing. It is so valuable in helping the child understand community and personal responsibility… it can be said that it “civilizes” people and should provide tools to help them live in societies, and resolve their conflicts in peace. So much for that. So I’m certain that every one of us personally knows someone in one religious group or another who is living in a paradox: their personal interpretations of how to live their lives as a good person may be in conflict with the “machine” or the “organization” of their chosen or born-into religion. What to do? Live according to a personal code and be confident that it is enough. Avoid being judged by peer pressure, political expedience, organizational self-preservation or promotion, and above all, get back to the school-yard principle of treating others as you would have them treat you… and do this visibly, so that your team, your direct reports and everyone in your life will recognize you as a practitioner of these standards. You can break the cycle, and it’s not being a marshmallow to lead by positive example as opposed to seeking retribution or to punish someone who is doing you or your customers ill.
Here’s what happened to me:
The heating ducts underneath our 50 year old home were failing. We were insured by a National insurance company, coincidentally a subsidiary of a public company. The insurance company balked at the price of the repair, especially being that they were headquartered in TN, and we are in CA, and the wage rates and repair estimates blew them away. They stonewalled us and even insulted us with a small settlement offer in cash (1/8 of the estimate) to go away. Most people would have gone away, and I daresay that most grandmothers (apologies to empowered grandmothers) would have gone away and taken the small settlement (after six weeks of calls and estimates), and frankly taken it, even though it was unfair and unethical.
I got as far as I could with the call center, then looked up the company. There on the home page of the company was a photo of their lobby… with the dove and the Christian symbols all over the place. Their “mission” and philosophy of customer service had “service to Jesus Christ” all over the place… Good for them. Say what you believe in and practice it. Except what about their practices with us? I called their CEO, and left a message that finally ended up sounding something like this: “I realize your call center people are probably just being over-cautious, and trying a bit to enthusiastically to protect shareholder value… but…. the treatment I’ve been receiving (and I explained our case) is just not very Christ-like. For those of you who don’t know, those are code-words that “believers” (Evangelicals) use to describe their code of behavior.
No response.
I called in one more time: “I realize you are busy, but it is cold here in the California Winter, not as cold as yours, but cold nonetheless. I have a four-year old daughter. I am concerned about her health in a cold drafty house. I have taken four dozen photos of the faulty ducts underneath the house. I have posted them in a private folder on the Kodak photo site. If I do not hear from you in 48 hours I will be forced to contact your parent company’s CEO and explain your lack of compassion, lack of ethics and potentially your lack of good-faith coverage of one of your policies. I will certainly send him the link to the photos, and the settlement offer your call center made. I may also submit the file I’ve assembled to the California Commissioner of Insurance, who happens to be an old friend, as well as to the FTC just for good measure. And I understand you are one of the leaders of the XXX Church in your local community. I read about it in the local paper, where you and your company led a feed-the-hungry effort last Thanksgiving. I think the pastor there would be interested in your behavior.
The following morning I got a call from the CEO’s assistant. She urged me to buy as many electric space heaters as I needed and to send her the bill, as well as the electric bill. Workers were sent to our home and the work was done.
I received a follow-up call to make sure the work was done to my complete satisfaction.
Again, what was the final influencing factor that pushed a leader to walk his talk (In respect to ethical behavior)? Was it the threat of exposure to his parent company? To the regulators? The photos? Perhaps.
Probably more than likely it was fear of being outed as an unethical person to his local congregation….
What I’m saying in repeating this shaggy dog story is that people who have lost sight of their behavior and its impact on others often need a wake-up call, and if need be, the threat of exposure of their actual behavior… the point is that their peer group community, not I, would be meting out the punishment, if only by shaming them publicly.
Leadership is all about discovering what drives people, what creates internal urgency to act or change actions.
In this case I went to the CEO’s logical spiritual core, and also to his sense of pride in his community position (arguably the questionable motivation of pride)….
Did he change his company’s policy at the call center? Perhaps, but likely not this time.
My observation is that we need to take the gentle path that simply exposes those who are “off track” to a mirror. Some need the public mirror of shame, others need the private mirror of introspection, other still need the mirror of a spouse.
Think about this when you notice people with bad behavior in your company. Are you enabling it with your conscious ignorance? Do you make it a point to talk about ethical behavior? Do you live it “out loud” and proudly? In most cases, “the fish stinks from the head.” If your company has this issue, look first at yourself, and then seek to create lots of self-examining exercises and put up lots of “mirrors” in your company.
Thanks for bringing this up.
And it’s not about Christians or Jews or Muslims or anyone… it’s about the core role of a religious order or philosophy to remind people to be good to one another because its the right thing to do, not because there is some gain or advantage, or avoidance of punishment.
Sadly the human race is not as evolved as we’d like to think. Let’s all do our part to advance our communities an inch or so in our lifetimes.
Matty
December 12th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
Jesse, First of all, I made no assumptions. I merely pointed the survey/polls out said I found it a quandary.
As to the metropolitan vs rural, if you read today’s post you’ll see that I did a totally Unscientific check by googling “embezzlement and “Little League” and “embezzlement and church.” Take a look at the results yourself.
Your explanation of Christian belief doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, considering all the actions I’ve read will send one to Hell, but I assume that you know far more than I.
I will say that a moral philosophy that says immoral actions are excused if one believes in certain things doesn’t seem very moral to me. Personally, I prefer a higher level of personal responsibility and accountability.
December 12th, 2007 at 6:05 pm
Matty, I found your personal experience fascinating. It reminded me of all the stories I’ve read about businesses, large and small, who ignored customer complaints until they were either threatened with the media or the media actually contacted them. At that point they fell all over themselves fixing the problem.
And although I agree with your final comment, it seems that more and more people tend to do the right thing first for themselves, second for those they consider “people like me” and third depends on their mood at the time.
December 12th, 2007 at 6:36 pm
Miki, I suppose you are right in your description of why/what drives people to do the right thing.
I’m just a bit more sensitive to the community because my now-six year old is beginning to experience the difference between the way we’ve been teaching her to behave and what the rest of the world often seems to be doing, and thus, the example the rest of her experience is setting for her.
So her cognitive dissonance is a perfect example of this paradox that so many people live.
Indeed we can learn much from a six year old.
And I daresay we can begin to listen to the messages we are sending to six year olds…. and perhaps live a bit more if it ourselves.
:)
Matty
December 12th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
Matty, you don’t have to be a six year old to experience the dissonance, I do every day and I’m sure I’m not alone!
December 14th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
[…] made a very potent argument regarding the ethical differences between metropolitan and rural areas commented on by Jesse. He […]
December 17th, 2007 at 11:13 am
[…] Apparently religion doesn’t mean ethics – Leadership Turn Reflecting on the 2007 National Business Ethics Survey, Miki Saxon concludes, “[T]he same people who identify themselves as Christians/religious and the ones who take the Bible literally are the same people who are either violating the ethical standards or not reporting the violators.” […]
January 11th, 2008 at 7:42 am
I’m not sure how your conclusion follows. Here are what the polling results show:
56% of employees in a particular survey in a particular sphere of society have observed ethics violations.
42% of those didn’t report it. So 23.5% of employees observed but didn’t report it, and 76.5% either reported it or never observed it.
83% of Americans call themselves Christians. Most but not all of these say something along the lines of believing that the Bible is either literally true or inspired in some sense (which can vary a lot, since being inspired is compatible with saying a lot of false things in the minds of many people). We have no idea at all how seriously these people take the Bible. My suspicion is that only a small minority read the Bible daily and take it seriously enough to see it as a major source of guidance. Polling that I’ve seen that gets more specific on what it means to be inspired doesn’t turn up anywhere near the number of people that this poll did.
So an overwhelming number of Americans have at least some extremely vague sense of inspiration about the Bible. Since this is a little more than three-quarters of Americans, and a little less than a quarter have observed but not reported ethics violations, it’s actually possible that there’s no overlap, but chances are pretty good that there’s some overlap. We have know idea how much. It certainly doesn’t show that there’s any overlap.
But assuming there’s some overlap, how does it follow that “these are the same people”, as this post claims? I see nothing in any of the data that shows that the people not reporting ethics violations are the same people who claim this very vague notion of inspiration about the Bible. And even if the huge chunk of people who have such a contentless view about the Bible overlap significantly with the non-reporters, what does it tell us about those who have a more serious view about the authority of the Bible? Pretty much nothing, since the poll doesn’t tell us what these people’s view of scripture really is. So I’m not sure why this information is supposed to tell us anything.
January 11th, 2008 at 10:56 am
Jeremy, I can’t tell if what you’re saying is that the people who claim to be religious aren’t actually affected by the moral philosophy of (supposed?) faith or that the ethical lapses are mostly attributable to the percentage who don’t believe or just disagreeing with my thoughts.
I don’t believe that using the ethical and moral principles that underlie all religions requires in-depth knowledge of a particular scripture. I also think that those principles are situational, based on the socially accepted beliefs of the society and culture which change over time.
January 11th, 2008 at 11:43 am
I’m not saying anything positively at all, because I don’t think we can conclude much from this. What I’m saying is that we don’t have any idea what percentage of the two-thirds really have a strong view of biblical authority, read it regularly, and apply it to their lives. Merely thinking it’s inspired may just amount to thinking there are some nice stories in it and that God is behind it in some way. That’s a far cry from what most evangelicals believe, and I suspect the number of people holding to an inerrant Bible that should affect our daily lives in a very strong way is much smaller. My point is not that there’s some conclusion different from yours that we should draw. It’s that there’s not enough information here to draw any significant conclusion about the matters you’re drawing conclusions about.
January 11th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Oops. There are quite a number of evangelicals who don’t make it as moral or ethical. Think
Rev. Ted Haggard
Rev. Maurice L. Jackson
Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart. Obviously there are tons of non evangelicals who also qualify. But I think that there’s plenty of proof that deep knowledge of the bible doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s followed. Granted, the examples I listed were very high profile, and I know many people who do live by their beliefs, but I just don’t think that there is consistent proof that people who know their religious texts in depth are necessarily guided by them. I think expediency and self-interest are often the trump card.
January 11th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Right, you’ll always find people (especially in high-profile situations with more temptations) who don’t hold up to their own convictions. In fact, that’s what Christianity teaches, that all are sinners and that it’s no solution just to try to be a better person.
I do think it’s worth distinguishing between (1) people who do things against their beliefs in moments of weakness but who most of the time live according to them and (2) people who consistently violate their outward convictions and don’t change their ways when confronted but try to excuse them. The second kind of case is a hypocrite. The first is merely being human.
I’m not going to suggest that merely being religious or having official beliefs of Christianity will make someone a better person. Certainly just knowing what the Bible says isn’t. There are lots of non-believing, secular scholars of the Bible who know it very well. But I don’t think there’s any support for saying that the people who don’t report ethical violations are the same ones who are most sincerely Christian, which is how your post sounded to me.