Author Archives: RFBF

Fostering an Inclusive Workplace for All Faiths and Worldviews

PayPal is a purpose-driven company striving to be guided by a set of beliefs that they identify as the foundation for how they conduct business every day. Through their One Team Behaviors, PayPal aspires to hold the highest ethical standards, to empower an open and diverse corporate culture, and strive to treat everyone who is touched by their business with dignity and respect. Their employees challenge the status quo, ask questions, and find solutions. They seek to break down barriers to financial empowerment.

As part of this corporate culture, on July 7 PayPal launched “Believe,” an employee resource group for their Interfaith Diversity & Inclusion Community.

According to PayPal,

“We believe all employees have the right to bring their whole self to work. Faith and worldviews are core to who we are – our values and beliefs – and to how we conduct business. The mission of Believe is to foster an inclusive work culture and to promote holistic wellbeing by providing a forum to openly exercise and celebrate all faiths and worldviews while working. Believe exists to create awareness and understanding of faith, hope, love, empathy, respect for one another and service toward our customers, communities and co-workers.”

Believe’s core objectives are to:
• Embrace – Create a safe environment where our faith and worldviews are intrinsically valued and supported.
• Transcend – Increase understanding, awareness and cultural sensitivity to our diverse faiths and worldviews.
• Celebrate – Share our traditions and holidays in a fun and engaging way.
• Be Open to All – Welcome people of all faiths and worldviews, including all interested in experiencing or learning, so employees can bring their whole self to work.

Becky Pomerleau, a founding member of Believe, captured the spirit of Believe on its launch: “Beyond grateful and blessed to work for a company that values #faithinclusion and #faithdiversity. I believe #PayPal is well resourced and well positioned to solve the problems facing our world today, including religious and belief intolerance and social justice. My hope is that through Believe, our employees can freely bring their source of peace, hope, love, empathy and resilience to work, rather feeling the need to check it at the door.”

China Can Increase Global Trust and Economic Growth by Embracing Greater Religious Freedom

— Brian J. Grim (葛百彦), Ph.D.

Relations between the People’s Republic of China and the United States are deteriorating, with China’s military seeking a bigger budget amid what they see as a growing threat of a conflict with the US. Most of the areas of contention are well known. They range from decades long trade imbalances and intellectual property rights disputes to militarization of the South China Sea and US military support for Taiwan, which China regards as a breakaway province. One area that receives less attention but is at the heart of the differences between the world’s two largest economies is religion. In particular, religious freedom.

This came into sharp relief yesterday as China has announced penalties to be imposed on the US envoy for Religious Freedom along with other US legislators and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), a bi-partisan panel that advises Congress and the administration on human rights matters in China. The move comes in response to legislation that prompted the US Treasury to sanction officials in China for mass internment, forced labor, coerced sterilizations, and forced renunciations of faith in China’s western region of Xinjiang among Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other ethnic minorities.

The United Nations estimates more than one million members of Muslim minority groups have been incarcerated in what China terms de-radicalization and retraining centers.

The US Treasury action follows legislation (H.R. 6210) ensuring that goods made with forced labor in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China do not enter the United States market, and for other purposes.

Religious repression not only is a precursor of greater conflict, as shown in my coauthored book The Price of Freedom Denied (Cambridge Univ. Press), but also a damper on economic growth and sustainability.

For example, in our research — which has been translated into Chinese by Fudan University — we find that religion spurred on by religious freedom annually contributes nearly $1.2 trillion of socio-economic value to the US economy. That is equivalent to being the world’s 15th largest national economy, putting it ahead of about 180 other countries. It’s more than the annual revenues of the world’s top 10 tech companies, including Apple, Amazon and Google. And it’s also more than 50% larger than that of the annual global revenues of America’s 6 largest oil and gas companies. So, you might say, that represents a lot of spiritually inspired fuel being pumped into the US economy. All of this is made possible because of religious freedom in the US.

By contrast, the Communist Party of China (CPC), the country’s ruling political party, not only prohibits its members from religious affiliation and practice, it has extreme controls put in place nationwide to control all religious expression. The aim is to produce a harmonious society recognizing the CPC ultimate source of the country’s vision, direction and success. Religion is under tight control because, by its very nature, calls for heavenly loyalties that are outside of the CPC’s control.

Of course, the CPC does not view heaven beyond its purview. They seek to determine who the next reincarnation of the Panchen Lama and Dalai Lama will be. They determine who can be in the apostolic line of succession, which the Roman Catholic Church views as the uninterrupted transmission of spiritual authority from the Apostles through successive popes and bishops. They not only remove crosses from churches and minarets from mosques, but raze to the ground churches, mosques and temples deemed to be unauthorized. And, for security’s sake, they have incarcerated up to one million people in the far western Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, primarily for exhibiting too much devotion to Islam.

Scientific research also shows that the ultimate outcome of high government restrictions on religious freedom is violence. Currently, religion-related violence in China is mostly in the form of the government controls and repression just mentioned. But in the volatile climate China finds itself in today, the data suggest that repression feeds resentment that will ultimately end in destabilizing violence.

All of that is bad for business. Data show that high restrictions on freedom of religion or belief damage or even destroy the World Economic Forum’s pillars of global competitiveness. For example, innovative strength is more than twice as high in countries where governments respect freedom of religion or belief.

One indicator of innovative strength is whether a country’s top entrepreneurs and successful business people stay in a country or leave it. Recent research shows which countries are losing or gaining millionaires through migration, with Australia gaining the most and China losing the most. The chart below shows how this compares with the level of government restrictions on religion and belief in a country.

The data show that China, the country with the highest government restrictions on religion – as measured by the Pew Research Center – is also losing the highest number of millionaires seeking freer, more secure opportunities elsewhere. And Australia, a country with low government restrictions on religion, is benefiting the most from this migration of talent and resources.

China’s ongoing crackdown on religion adds another weight dragging down what has been remarkable economic growth spurred on by the religious openness following the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s-1970s. In China, during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, religion was outlawed and many people were persecuted for their beliefs. In the 1980s – 2000s there was an openness that resulted in the spread of religion, such that China is now home to the world’s second-largest religious population after India, according to demographic estimates.

It is important to get past the notion that China is an unreligious country just because the CPC is atheist by constitution. In fact, Pew Research data show that China in 2020 has about 2.5 times more religiously affiliated people (669.3 million) than does the United States (272.7 million). China is home to the world’s largest Buddhist population, largest folk religionist population, largest Taoist population, 7th largest Christian population, and 17th largest Muslim population (ranking between Yemen and Saudi Arabia in size) making China one of the world’s most religiously diverse nations—something which is also associated with economic growth.

In particular, the growth of Christianity and the growth of China’s economy may be related, according to a study in the China Economic Review. In the study, Qunyong Wang from the Institute of Statistics and Econometrics, Nankai University, Tianjin, and Xinyu Lin from Renmin University of China, Beijing, find that Christianity boosts China’s economic growth. Specifically, they find that robust growth occurs in areas of China where Christian congregations and institutions are prevalent. Moreover, many of China’s top universities and hospitals used to be missionary institutions.

If China were to deregulate religion, it would win the undying loyalty of hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens, increase trust in the CPC, reduce tensions with the US, and set free a new wave of innovation and prosperity.  The bottom line is that religious freedom is both good for business and a safeguard of peace and stability — China’s and the world’s.

A protester holds a sign at a rally to defund the police outside of the Capitol in Salt Lake City on Monday, June 15, 2020. Kristin Murphy, Deseret News

Steve Hitz

Steve Hitz is a co-founder of Launching Leaders Worldwide, a nonprofit organization that provides young adults with tools for personal leadership and faith. He is also the founder and former CEO of U.S. Reports (now Afirm), which provides services for the commercial insurance industry in the United States and Canada. He is also a 2018 recipient of the Global Business & Interfaith Peace Award.

This article was originally published in Deseret News on June 28, 2020.

In a world that has been anxious over COVID-19, the economy, and now cries for equality and social justice, where can we find hope for a more a more positive culture of diversity, equality, and health? What can we do to alleviate the suffering, judgment, and unrest that is currently plaguing our world?

We are living in what has emerged as the “Cancel Culture.” I actually have friends who have lost friends simply because of a differing point of view. You may have experienced similar. Have we really come to this? Wouldn’t it be better to have a “Context Culture” where we follow some basic rules of decorum and keep our friends?

In hopes for a Context Culture I have assembled five points that may be helpful.  I don’t have all the answers, so my hope is that you will take the good in this and move the ball forward. Some of my points are already being been discussed in the public square (virtually of course), but I wish to add to the conversation to bring about more healing to our souls and the country. Read full article …

• 1. Move forward, but don’t forget the past.

• 2. ALLOW diversity of thought.

• 3. Listen with intent to know the heart of those we engage with.

• 4. Don’t sit silently by while the world changes.

• 5. We are not always right.

Congressman Tom Lantos (1928–2008)

Katrina Lantos Swett

Dr. Katrina Lantos Swett is President of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice, which was established to carry on Congressman Tom Lantos’ legacy. She is also the former chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom from 2012 to 2013, and then in 2014 to 2015, and a juror for the biannual Global Business & Interfaith Peace Awards.

“An American by choice” was the phrase my father, the late Congressman Tom Lantos, often used to describe himself. A Hungarian-born Jew who became the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in the U.S. Congress, he focused his nearly three decades of service on the cause of human rights and justice. He believed that his adopted homeland possessed powerful moral stature, which we should use to fight for a more just, democratic and inclusive world.

Though my father loved and believed deeply in America, he was neither blind nor indifferent to its many flaws and failures — above all, its original sin of slavery and the centuries of persecution, discrimination and institutionalized racism that have followed. He spoke of American history as a long and painful journey to close what he termed “the hypocrisy gap”. By this, he meant the enormous and shameful chasm between the ennobling principles of equality and dignity enunciated in our founding documents and the bitterly disappointing reality of racism and other failures in America’s culture and systems.

Terrible and revelatory events have now shaken our nation and, perhaps, awoken us from our complacency and apathy towards the existing hypocrisy gap in America. We stand at a critical juncture, which will determine whether the chasm widens or whether we take meaningful steps to close it. I find myself thinking deeply about how my father would respond to this moment. Here is what I believe:

He would be heartbroken and outraged by the tragic deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and too many others like them at the hands of law enforcement. He would be appalled by and decry the ways in which our system has continued to perpetuate racism across many aspects of society, from policing, to education, to housing and the justice system.

He would thunder against any effort — from any quarter — to vilify, stifle or silence the largely peaceful protests that have spread across the country. Having lived under the brutality of both fascism and communism, he would not hesitate to raise his voice against injustice and in support of our precious right to speak out against it.

Moreover, I believe my father would be dismayed to see the way in which our nation’s failures undermine America’s ability to speak with moral authority about egregious and systemic abuses in closed and autocratic societies around the world. He would remind us that the fight for human rights must begin at home, and he would caution that the failure to live up to our ideals not only causes deep harm to our fellow Americans, particularly Black Americans and other communities of color, but also damages our credibility as a human rights leader fighting for other oppressed peoples of the world. As a former assistant secretary for democracy, human rights and labor has put it, recent events in America are the “biggest gift we could possibly have given to Putin or Xi Jinping and to every other dictator around the world who delights in arguing that America’s government is no different than theirs.”

I believe my father would reject efforts to draw a false moral equivalence between our flawed, but ultimately fixable nation, and countries where rule of law and basic rights simply do not exist. Yet, he would also disagree with those who do not recognize that our problems are not isolated or mere aberrations. He would quote Adlai Stevenson, who once said, “Solutions begin by telling the truth.” He would declare unequivocally that the time has come for America to face the truth: As a nation with a great capacity for self-renewal and improvement, we have narrowed the hypocrisy gap over our history; but we have much work left to do in order to live up to the ideals upon which this nation was built and the values of human rights and justice that we promote throughout the world.

REGISTER TODAY

Join us for the 2020 Empower Women Media Film Festival and Awards cosponsored with the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation.

• — August 1, 2020
• — 1:00-2:30 PM (New York Time)
• — Registration Required

The short films are artful and compelling explorations of the impact of freedom of religion and belief (FoRB) in the workplace and community. Whether inspired by real-life events or fictional stories, animated, or experimental, the films thoughtfully affirm that FoRB is good for business and thriving communities.

View Festival Brochure

(Limit: 100 participants)

On 5 continents, in 5 minutes, 5 ways business leaders advance religious freedom, interfaith understanding & peace

One of the joys we have at the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation is to recognize business leaders who are making a positive impact on our world. Below, we introduce you to the work of five previous recipients of the Global Business & Interfaith Peace Award. Let their work spark you to engage in this vital work.

See all awardees from 2016 and 2018. The 2020 awards will be given later this year.

Africa: The Sunshine Approach to Business

Middle East: A Foundation for All — Jobs

US: Advocating for the Persecuted

Australia: Positive Peace Index – Peace is Good for Business

China: Faith in Action to Help the Visually Impaired

Topic: Growing Faith-Oriented ERGs at Home and Abroad

• ⇒ What:  Community Call for Faith and Belief Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)
• ⇒ Featuring:  Leaders from Salesforce’s Faithforce, Jitschak Rosenbloom (Global Growth Chair) and Michael Roberts (Cofounder and Global Vice President), will be sharing how they scaled Faithforce to 17 Salesforce hubs with local leadership across 5 continents as well as sharing what they learned during this process.
• ⇒ When:  Tuesday, July 7, 2020
• ⇒ Time:  11:30am EDT; 10:30am CDT; 08:30am PDT
• ⇒ Host:  Religious Freedom & Business Foundation (RFBF)
• ⇒ Moderator:  Kent Johnson
• ⇒ Registration (FREE) Required:  Register Now
• ⇒ Join Faith & Belief ERG LinkedIn Group:  Join Now
• ⇒ Questions?  Email RFBF

Note: Will not be recorded and is off the record (Chatham House Rule). For security, registration and password are required.

Faith-Oriented Employee Resource Groups are becoming a regular part of corporate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Members of the Faithforce leadership team at Salesforce will share how Faithforce has grown in the US and worldwide on the July 7 call.

This is the fourth in a series of monthly interfaith ERG community calls. Previous calls featured insights from Intel, American Express, and American Airlines. The next call will be Tuesday, August 4, with DELL’s Interfaith Employee Resource Group hosting the call.

Faithforce

One of the newest and the fastest growing Equality Groups at Salesforce is Faithforce. Founded in 2017, Faithforce has over 2000 members in 12 regional hubs across 5 continents and is growing fast.

Faithforce is the interfaith employee resource group at Salesforce focused on celebrating, supporting and fostering understanding of our global faith and spiritual diversity through inclusive and educational events and initiatives.

Faithforce champions faith diversity & inclusion, interfaith & intersectional collaboration and allyship across the company. The goal of Faithforce is to cultivate a culture of empathy, respect and belonging at Salesforce for people from all faiths, backgrounds, traditions and worldviews. All are welcome.

Also view Sue Warnke’s comments at the Religious Diversity & Inclusion in the Workplace Symposium, Worldwide Headquarters of Texas Instruments, May 6, 2019, cosponsored by TI and the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation.

Please join our LINKEDIN GROUP to share your thoughts and to stay in touch.

Learn about RFBF’s Corporate Religious Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (REDI) Index:

The Center for Religious Studies of the Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK-ISR) in Italy has produced a response paper on religion and artificial intelligence (AI) for the European Commission’s public consultation on AI.

Religious Freedom & Business Foundation president, Brian Grim, participated in the process. You can read an excerpt below and the full report here.

Religious or Belief Communities as Competent Interlocutors on Digital Innovation

The perspective and experience of religious or belief communities with regard to innovation should be taken into account in the framing of European policies on AI. Religious or belief communities are often portrayed as incapable or unwilling to innovate, and therefore to contribute to social innovation and to innovation in science and technology. Contrary to this stereotypical representation, the work at our Center shows that there are various examples of innovations, technological and otherwise, that have been adopted, shaped and developed by religious or belief communities, including social media, digital games, virtual reality technologies and smart community applications. We also acknowledge the impact of scientists and entrepreneurs whose work on digital transformation and AI is guided by religion or belief.

A more nuanced and context-sensitive approach to diverse religions or beliefs in society, as well as the acknowledgment of religious or belief communities as actual and potential participants in, and contributors to, innovation processes would clear the way for rightsizing (neither under- nor overemphasizing) attention to different religious or belief perspectives, experiences and concerns into AI policy debates.

We acknowledge that many of the issues that may arise from the use of AI technologies in relation to religion and belief – regarding both an ecosystem of excellence and an ecosystem of trust – are not in principle different from issues arising in other social or cultural contexts. At the same time, it is precisely because religion and belief are woven into the social fabric, and constantly interacting with its secular aspects, that we believe that investigating the implications of AI from the perspective of religious or belief communities may help understand the role and impact of AI across the wider society.

The Center for Religious Studies of the Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK-ISR) in Italy is engaged in an ongoing study of the relationship between religion and innovation. As they consider this connection, they see it from three perspectives.

INNOVATION IN RELIGION: How is innovation being understood, experienced and practiced within religious traditions and communities of faith or belief?

RELIGION IN INNOVATION: How do religious traditions and communities of faith or belief contribute to innovation in the areas of culture and society, science and technology, politics and the law?

RELIGION OF INNOVATION: Has the vocabulary of innovation itself become a rhetorical vehicle for quasi-religious discourses? Has innovation itself turned into a belief system and become a sort of religion?

They make the following eleven recommendations for (a) researchers working on religion and/or innovation in the social sciences and humanities, economics or finance, as well as for (b) a wider range of societal actors, from communities of faith or belief and their leaders to governments and policy makers, from computer scientists to healthcare professionals, and from entrepreneurs and finance managers to journalists.

The recommendations provide sound principles of research in religion and innovation as well as guidelines for action that can benefit societal actors in their attempts to strengthen the interaction between religion and innovation.

Of particular note is recommendation #3, “Value diversity and freedom of religion or belief.”

Do not think of religion as a simple, homogeneous and easily describable phenomenon, but rather think of it as a diachronically and synchronically diversified phenomenon that resists essentialist definitions. Making an effort to think of and approach religious diversity as a resource rather than (just) as a problem may improve the effectiveness and inclusiveness of innovation processes in society, culture, science, and technology. In order for this to be possible, value and protect freedom of religion or belief for all.

See more at the Center for Religious Studies of the Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK-ISR).

A new analysis by Pew Research Center finds that people who interact more with members of other religious groups also tend to have more favorable opinions toward other groups. It is also related to more positive attitudes about diversity.

The study also finds that across 11 emerging economies surveyed all around the world, there is a great deal of variation in terms of how often people interact with people of differing faiths (see chart). Key findings:

— Those who interact with people of other religious groups have more positive opinions of them

— Regularity of interaction with people of other religions varies widely

— People who interact more with those of other religious groups also tend to have more favorable opinions

A Business Doing Something About It

Mark Woerde, Founder of Havas Lemz and LetsHeal.org, believes he can make the world a better place through advertising. In 2018, his team advanced interfaith understanding and peace in a global campaign featuring the world’s most prominent religious leaders – from Pope Francis to Ayatollahs, Chief Rabbis and Hindu Swamis – making a joint appeal to “Make Friends Across Religions.”

The concept Mark and his team initiated and realized was: “The World’s Most Prominent Religious Leaders Make Historical Joint Appeal to Everyone: Make Friends Across Religions.” The message could also be seen via many news outlets around the world. The conservative estimate of the unique number of actual people who have seen the statement is 200 million and growing.

For their work, they received a Gold Medal at the 2018 Global Business & Interfaith Peace Awards in Seoul, Korea. The awards are given biannually in tandem with the Paralympic Games by the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation in cooperation with the Business for Peace platform of the UN Global Compact.

The #MakeFriends video is below.