Religion in the Workplace

Personally I don’t think religion is something that should be discussed in the work place unless you work in a church or for some religious organization. It’s no different than going to school, if you don’t go to a religious school it is inappropriate for people to speak to you as though you are a religious person. Not everyone believes in God or Jesus or Buddha or another “god” out there. For me, religion & politics are personal, and shouldn’t be discussed with people that you don’t know well, people who won’t be offended by your beliefs or won’t judge you for having them are people you should discuss these things with. Most often a discussion about religion or politics only leads to a heated argument because everyone has a different view on everything. I think it is fine to make your belief known, I have friends & co-workers who attend regular church services & I could care less if they do, it makes them happy & they enjoy it, I personally prefer to spend my Sunday morning watching 90210 & eating waffles, but that’s my religious choice (yes 90210 is a religion to some of us).

Here’s my complaint about religion in the work place. So, we had some team building in the office & a guest speaker came in, a very knowledgeable man we’ll call Bob, excellent speaker with great points. I learned a fair amount from him being in my office, got some enlightenment into the minds of my coworkers, and got free lunch so all around good times. Obviously when people give presentations they give examples & quite often his examples referred to God, or church, or religion as a whole and I couldn’t believe it. I don’t work for a religion-based company; I work for a very large global corporation so things really need to be kept generic & basic. There were other examples he could have been using for the items he was using God as an example for, no problem but he chose to use God. He would say things like “what if God….blah blah blah” or “if you were in church…blah blah blah” and it really got on my last nerve. I’m not religious, I believe what I believe & that is that & I really don’t appreciate people making reference to God & religion as if everyone participates in a religion or church like they do. Near the end it was getting to the point that I really wanted to say something like “if I wanted to hear about God I’d go to church, and I don’t go to church…comprende?” I also had one other complaint about Bob, which I guess goes hand in hand here in a way. He asks a question “who here is married” and then another “who has a boyfriend” and that was it…no “who has a girlfriend”, just because it was all women in there he assumed that everyone was straight. I’m not outing anyone here, for all I know everyone was straight but by asking that question in that way he was excluding an entire culture of people. Why not just ask “who has a significant other” because that includes everyone. Now that I think of it, there was one guy present, so does that mean that Bob assumed that one guy was gay?

In conclusion I have to say that I used to work for a Jewish company (Jewish was even part of the company name) and even though I was prepared for it never in any of our meetings or anything else was religion ever mentioned other than the discussion of Holidays off. It’s all just inappropriate & inconsiderate, period!