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31 October 2004  

If you want a scary read for Halloween, this article from the NYT Magazine on religion in business ought to fill the bill. Scares the heck out of me, anyway. The author seems more concerned with the legal implications of combining "public" businesses with private religion. I don't care about that. Let the religious nuts have their own businesses and refuse to hire heathens if they want to. What worries me is the philosophical and cultural implications of the phenomenon. I mean, this story describes business people who are proud to accost people walking into their mattress store, or using their drive-through banking counter, and offer to pray for them. These are not people for whom religion is a social, Sunday-only thing. They take it seriously enough to build their whole working life around it. And they are confident about it.

To make it worse, most of these people aren't from traditional religious denominations. Religion is bad enough when it calls for accepting a creed on faith and obeying an arbitrary, but well-defined, set of commandments. But when a person's religion is "based not on a denomination's core doctrine so much as on inner voices and convictions" and "[a]n individual reliance on the voice of God," we have all-out whatever-I-say-goes subjectivism. And to repeat, these people are confident about it, which means it's far more likely to gain influence and spread throughout the culture.

If, like I was, you are a little skeptical at how significant religion is as growing a cultural force, take your extra daylight-savings hour and read this sobering article.

12:52 PM |