Christians, Jews and Muslims experience workplace discrimination differently

Two-thirds of Muslims, half of Jews and more than a third of evangelical Protestant Christians experience workplace discrimination, albeit in different ways, according to a new study.

What the researchers say: “When we conducted interviews, we were able to get much deeper into how people are experiencing religious discrimination,” said the study’s lead author. “We found that it’s not just about hiring, firing and promotion, which are the things that people usually think about.”

While Muslims, Jews and Christians each said they experienced negative or harmful comments, stereotyping and social exclusion, Muslims and Jews felt targeted by anti-Islamic and antisemitic rhetoric tied to being seen as part of a larger group. Evangelical Christians, meanwhile, felt singled out when taking an individual stand based on their moral views.

“Sometimes they were called ‘Ms. Holy’ or ‘Holy Roller,’ and many evangelical Christians felt like they were perceived as being judgmental, narrow-minded and/or right wing,” the researchers said. Many of the Christians surveyed gave examples of feeling isolated at work. “This was due to their co-workers’ presumptions about the kinds of conversations or outside-of-work events they would want to participate in.”

All three groups — but especially Muslims and Jews — described feeling uncomfortable asking to observe religious holidays or wearing religious attire at work and mentioned negative experiences they’d had with supervisors and co-workers. Muslims and Jews were most likely to feel they needed to downplay or hide their religion in the workplace.

“Identity concealment is often used by people who are part of stigmatized groups,” said the study’s co-author “It’s a proactive way to ‘manage’ anticipated religious discrimination, but it can have negative impacts on one’s mental health.”

The researchers claimed that the findings challenge employers to reconsider how they think about religious discrimination. Figuring out how to balance different groups and perspectives while showing sensitivity to all involved is complicated.

“I think a good lesson for human resources divisions is that making people feel welcome and comfortable in the workplace takes more than specialized foods and places to pray,” said the lead researcher. “These day-to-day interactions among co-workers are incredibly important, but they’re harder to remedy without proper education. Workplace training must include exercises that specifically target all kinds of religious discrimination.”

So, what? That which initially unites a group of people is their differences from other groups. This is true of groups of school kids, clubs and associations, businesses and societies. Culture is based on these differences, at least to start with.

All mass societies and large organizations have within them many mutually competitive cultures. They develop their own language—the slang, the shortcuts, the technical jargon they use with each other—their own rituals and rules, their own assumptions and beliefs. The adherence to these indicates membership of the group and acceptance of them becomes the ticket of entry to the group, the price of belonging. They become the commonalities which bind the group together.

The more commonalities people feel that they have with each other the deeper the sense of trust and mutual support.

No organization, no society, no school, no club, and even no family, can accept diversity until there is sufficient commonality. The outsider will not be fully accepted until they have shown that they are prepared to belong on the group’s terms. The amount of commonality outweighs the differences which can then be ignored or catered for.

Once the group finds that it can accept diversity without their own beliefs, their rituals, their language being threatened, they will increasingly accept the principle of assimilating outsiders. They may even come to adopt some of the outsiders’ norms, beliefs and preferences.