If there’s something spiritual to the sandwich, then it cannot become a glare that blinds us. Indeed, spirituality—something arguably protected by the First Amendment—potentially makes the corporate workplace a sacred site and, therefore, off limits to outsider involvement and critique. If anything can be claimed as spiritual in a work environment, then everything might be permissible, from beneficial social service to human catastrophe. That might sound alarmist. But it stands to reason that we should ask why a company might want to be the arbiter of spirituality and, therefore, a producer of the sacred that should be respected and accepted, more so or at least on par with those entrusted by the public to keep business within the limits of the law, as voted on and written. Indeed, the fact that many corporate CEOs liken notions of “spirituality” and “faith” as the key to “leadership” at work should make us pause and ask: Who made you God? If we understand spirituality in the marketplace as somehow divested from the marketplace and the people and decisions that make it up, then I’d argue we are not really doing our jobs. At best, we are studying hagiography. At worst, we might be enabling the use of “spirituality” by corporations as a kind of regulatory antidote.
What, then, are other options? I think any understanding of material goods made and sold by any company, especially self-declared “spiritual” companies doing “spiritual” business, needs to be grounded in the human element. It just has to be, whether it’s a copy of I Ching or a falafel or a “Jesus is My Boyfriend” T-Shirt or an iPhone 4S or a 3D-HDTV or a $35,000 industrial sprocket or a $35 shovel. That is not saying that we cynically dismiss the spiritual as de facto corporate cover—as merely the smoke and mirrors of the marketing and P.R. department. But we do have to recalibrate. Physical goods and personal services—and the men and women who make and price and value and sell them—are not quite like analyzing the “spiritual” in prophetic ecstasy or tribal song or mural-gazing or a contemplative moment by a lake. Material production and spiritual or quasi-spiritual fetish can and do intersect, just as Marx, Weber, and others have said.
But they also do not do so in simple, direct, and always predictable ways. The spiritual is not just a product of the material. The material is not quite a product of the spiritual. The chicken sandwich, again, stands before us with multiple and complex spiritual meanings which must be dealt with because they are there—stubbornly there—instead of not being there in the face of corporatization. Cathy’s chicken sandwich didn’t need to float and glow. Plenty of products and services are made, sold, and bought without overt spiritual overtones. Why Cathy and his company injects spirituality into the process of making and selling chicken sandwiches stands as a dilemma not quite explained by raising awareness about Chick-fil-A’s supply chain. Moreover, calling the company on the carpet for its lack of awareness or interest in that supply chain seems too easy, especially if we don’t seek to understand how Chick-fil-A’s spiritual affectations might hinder or enhance the company’s ability to be aware of or interested in those who sacrifice for its sandwich.
This circles us back to the question I raised earlier. How do we navigate spirituality in the marketplace? Let’s expand that question further by considering how we might address the movement in contemporary corporate America to bring spirituality into the workplace, a movement that Chick-fil-A certainly fits into. Whether you call it a “God at Work,” “Faith in the Workplace,” or “Spirituality in the Workplace,” there is an impetus toward making work mean “something” more than a means to profit-maximization. Why? To what end? By which means? In what ways? It’s also important to ask who is backing such initiatives and why. If Walmart and Tyson Foods are behind you, what does that mean for how we understand God-faith-spirituality at work?
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