agonyaunt | Ask a Manager: Failed Religious Training At Work

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/07/religious-training-at-work-asking-for-naps-as-an-accommodation-and-more.html

1. Proselytizing religious training at work

I work at an education institution where over half of our student body follow a religion that is otherwise a minority in our region. Our students have been advocating for training for staff to combat and help recognize prejudice against this religion, and this finally happened a few weeks ago. However, I had major issues with the training, which was delivered by someone selected by a panel of students. The information they shared had a heavy tone of proselytizing (talking about why this religion is actually more moral/ethical than other belief systems, and thus people who follow it are likewise more moral/behave better than other people). They suggested that it’s discriminatory to be a secular workplace and to not allow devout students/staff to openly practice and talk about their beliefs.

Obviously, there are elements of this that are true: you can’t ban wearing religious garb or taking time off for religious holidays in the name of a secular workplace, but I found it very uncomfortable and inappropriate to suggest that wanting a workplace to be largely free of religion is discriminatory. I’m struggling with how to express my discomfort with this, as I get the sense a lot of my colleagues think it’s our duty, as staff who are not part of this religion, to take whatever training we’ve been given at face value, and given there are already difficult power dynamics in play when most of the staff don’t share the beliefs of these students. I also know that this training isn’t going to materially impact our actual policies, so maybe it isn’t worth saying anything at all. Is there any way to raise my discomfort, and is it worth trying?

If there were things in the training that were factually inaccurate about employers’ legal obligations, you should definitely raise that; your institution presumably doesn’t want trainings where objectively incorrect info is being given out.

But I can’t quite tell if that was the case. Whether or not it’s true that employers have to allow staff to openly practice and discuss their religious beliefs depends on the specifics of what “openly practice and discuss” means. Does that mean unwelcome proselytizing to colleagues (which is something that employers cannot allow)? Allowing a bible study group to operate while people are supposed to be working? (They can legally prohibit that.) Giving people time to pray if they’re supposed to pray at a certain time of day? (Must be allowed.) Or just openly talking about their beliefs and practices? (Must be allowed in most cases.) So it depends on exactly what was said at the training.

The proselytizing was inappropriate regardless, but whether to raise that probably depends on how flagrant it was (as well as, realistically, how much capital it will take to push back).

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I have an idea about how this may have happened.

the students went to a well known religious leader in their area and asked for help. The religious leader saw a chance for conversions and instead of explaining their religion set out to promote their religion. There are various approaches to religion which think both are the same thing when they are really, really not. (I was raised by parents and in a church with that ethos. I have stories.)

I have also run into people who felt (sometimes accurately!) that their religion was unfairly maligned by the majority and that saying how great people who follow their religion are counted as redressing the balance. "DID YOU KNOW that Muslim people are required to give money to charity? It is part of our religion! We all must do it!" said one cab driver. When I said, "why certainly, of course you must, it's one of the Five Pillars," he said, "You know this?" and relaxed immediately.

Someone else might have been trying to convert me, but he was just taking the opportunity to have a white presumed-Christian lady walk away thinking that Islam was not in fact the devil and that it might be fine to have Muslim neighbors, and I can't blame him for that. I can't tell from this letter whether this might have been the case in this training as well.

I'm more than a little baffled about this educational institution. Assuming we're in a US context and talking about higher ed that's not, like, a rabbinic seminary — Brandeis has about a student population of about 35% Jews; Columbia is somewhere in the 22-30% range, depending on how you count (the numbers come from Hillel, which likely overcounts; I have no idea of what's happened to the demographics in the past couple of years of clusterfuck, but it's historically been the Ivy with the most Jews). Yeshiva University is definitely majority Jewish. But Jews aren't supposed to proselytize, and most of us take that really seriously, although I can see someone going off the rails, given the terrifying rise of antisemitism. (Which would be a shonda fur die goyim.)

BYU is majority LDS but so is Utah as a whole; there are universities in the US with significant Muslim student populations (Rutgers, UC Berkeley, Wayne State, Howard), but I'd be surprised to hear any of them were majority Muslim.

I realize this is not the problem at hand, but my brain will not let go of this puzzle.

My guess is that this is a high school in a town with a recent large Muslim influx such that the Local High School now has, say, 60% muslim students with 95% non-muslim staff and admin. I think that would fit with the school not being a specicially religious school but/and the students being old enough to be asked to supply an instructor (which was an assignment just a bit beyond them).

I was assuming Muslim immigrant pop as minoanmiss did. If it were Jews or Mormons, not only do the numbers not work out, but there'd be Jews or Mormons among the teachers.

Brandeis is only 35% Jewish now? My dorm was something like 75% Jewish in 1988, and others were similar. Most of us didn't belong to Hillel, though.

According to their website!

I happen to know that Columbia's Hillel is/was notorious for overcounting; IDK how Brandeis gets their numbers.

I admit I’m reacting heavily based on assumptions not actually stated in the text, but if this is about Islam in a US context then I’m not at all unsympathetic to a religious trainer who fails to perfectly walk the line between respecting secularity and trying to use enough moral force to puncture the dense armor of presumed-Christian Islamophobia.

Here in Australia (where Islamophobia is also rampant) I once attended an Islamic outreach event at my university that definitely crossed some lines into proselytising, but my strong impression was that the speakers were coming from a place of desperation and very reasonable defensiveness rather than zealotry. It didn’t change my own Christianity but I learnt a lot and don’t regret going.

That’s not to say LW doesn’t have their legal rights, but I agree with the columnist that it’s not clear if those have actually been violated. And since Christian proselytisers are so shamefully good at finding ways to smuggle our faith into secular spaces, I’m inclined to think that granting minority faiths the same reasonable degree of leeway is a fairer approach than cracking down harder with secular workplace laws in an environment where one faith will probably always retain the social and institutional power to bully its way out of following the spirit of those laws.

This is also the situation I was picturing, and if we're right in our assumptions I agree with your take.

same.

I additionally interpreted LW as being potentially unable to hear the an explanation of zakat or something without interpreting it as proselytizing. "I found it very uncomfortable and inappropriate to suggest that wanting a workplace to be largely free of religion is discriminatory" sounds to me like it s got a high likelihood of being from a well meaning person who thinks having Sundays off but not Fridays, with all sporting events on Saturdays, is neutral; who expects universal celebration of some holiday on 25 December; who assumes a lot of christian normative secularism.

I'm glad I posted this one as this discussion has made me think twice about my response to this letter. Having been raised to proselytize I'm allergic to it now but I think I didn't give enough weight to the position of a minority religion. I see better now why some commenters challenged LW and that they weren't necessarily coming from a "religion good secularism bad" position. (Especially considering how in the US so much "secularism" is just cultural Christianity.)

Yeah, I think the lesson for the LW is to take this one on the chin, consider whether some of their reaction is defensiveness, and draw up a proper remit for next time. The institution abdicated responsibility for the session in giving it to the students to organise, seemingly without adequate indication of what they were looking for, unsurprisingly it will be imperfect, but it doesn't sound disastrous. This kind of presentation is really tricky for people to get the balance right, it is not made easier by not telling them what you want in the first place. The employer needs to think more about what they actually need and work with an appropriate adviser. If you expect just to be told, it is not surprising that you may not like all that you are told, even if you are correct, because you've not contributed anything yourself to the conversation.

Ask a Manager: Failed Religious Training At Work

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