Meet the man trying to bridge the ‘Sunday-Monday gap’

At 38, David Miller had made it professionally. He was working as a senior executive at a private equity firm in London, on his way to becoming a partner. His wife was leading a legal program and teaching law. “Our future was looking good; there was no reason to make a change,” Miller, a professor of ethics at Princeton University, told me recently.

The couple had begun attending a church called All Souls, Langham Place, a historic evangelical Anglican church in the heart of London, where Miller became captivated by the teachings of John Stott, a renowned British Anglican priest and theologian, and was at the time rector emeritus at the All Souls church. As Miller listened to Stott’s sermons, he began to discern a calling that was outside of investment banking and finance. This growing sense of berufung, a German word for calling, kept nudging him to leave the corporate world to study theology.

Miller, who now runs a Faith and Work Initiative at Princeton and advises companies on questions of ethics, faith and work, was eager to delve into one pressing question: What does my Sunday have to do with my Monday? The same question applies for the Jewish Shabbat and Muslim day of prayer, he told me. In other words, Miller wanted to understand “how to integrate the claims of your faith with the demands of your work.”

“That became and still is my life question,” he said.

It is a question that challenges most people of faith.

In recent years, faith has increasingly become more integrated into the public sphere. The Supreme Court has voted in favor of allowing religious minorities to wear religious attire at work and allowing accommodations for workers who want to take a certain day off for religious reasons. Salesforce runs a religious resource group called Faithforce, and many corporations like Intel and American Airlines have faith programs. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney has cited his faith to explain his decisions, including his votes during the impeachment trials of President Donald Trump, and Melinda Gates has spoken about how her Catholic faith influences her philanthropic efforts.

With the wider acceptance of entwining the personal and professional, Miller’s questions about work and faith are gaining new relevance. If you’re allowed, and even encouraged, to make your faith visible every day at work, what would that actually look like?

For Miller, who spent 16 years in the upper tiers of the corporate world, it’s in the secular environment of work where the expression of faith gains very practical application. Religious faith can shape the ethics of our decisions and interactions, the culture of work, and our interactions with coworkers.

“People often think of faith in terms of organized religion, going to church and receiving the sacraments — sort of ticking the checkbox as opposed to a way of being or a way of life that shapes and informs who we are, who we are meant to be,” he said.

What we do at work matters to God

When I spoke with Miller, 67, over Zoom last month, he had just returned from Dallas, where he gave a keynote speech at the Faith at Work Summit, a conference that helps participants “serve Jesus faithfully in the marketplace,” according to the event website. His speech was titled “Celebrating Who We Are.”

After that event, he gave a lecture to 600 bankers at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania on professional responsibility and “ethics in an unethical world.” After he mentioned in his speech that faith can be a source of moral courage and bolster a person’s ethical choices in the workplace, people came up to tell him how much they appreciated the framing of faith not just as a religious expression, but as a “practical resource,” a potential tool that a leader laden with stress and responsibility can tap into to guide his decisions at work.

The idea of integrating faith into the marketplace is not new. It was rooted in the Protestant expressions of faith, Miller wrote in his 2007 Oxford University Press book called “ God at Work ,” but in the 20th century gained traction among the broader Christian community.

Miller traces three waves of the movement. In the 1890s, it focused on the Social Gospel and applying Christian ethics to social problems, like poverty and justice. The second wave after World War II was characterized by the “ministry of the laity,” when business leaders and scholars began to weave ethical principles and guidelines into corporate policies and conduct. The movement saw significant growth in the mid-1980s — the third wave — when the baby-boomer generation began to enter into leadership positions in business and politics, trying to find meaning and purpose in their work. At the core of the movement was the belief that what we do at work matters to God, and work can be a means to live out one’s faith.

Figures like John Stott and Tim Keller have also advanced ideas about faith positively influencing professional life and ethical behavior in the marketplace. Miller argues that the faith and work movement is like the Civil Rights Movement in that it’s not a fad. “It’s here, and it’s not going away,” he told me.

Succeeding without selling your soul

In 1995, Miller sent a letter to his contacts around the world, announcing that he was leaving his job as a partner in a private equity firm to study theology. He felt slightly embarrassed, he writes in his book, but in response, he got nearly 150 faxes, letters and phone calls. Many of his colleagues opened up to him that despite financial success, many felt emptiness and distance from things they actually valued.

One friend told him: “I have more money than God, yet I am unfulfilled. My marriage is in shambles, I hardly know my kids ...” The man said he wanted to talk to his pastor, but feared being misunderstood.

Miller writes in his book that historically, businesspeople often felt unsupported at church, too. “Whether conscious or unintended, the pulpit all too frequently sends the signal that work in the church matters but work in the world does not,” he wrote. This view prevents seeing “redemptive, creative, productive, ministerial, and transformative possibilities in the world of business.”

Miller went on to study ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he says he “got bit by the world of ideas.” He stayed on for a doctorate program, where he continued to explore what it means to be an ethical professional and leader, and how to run business in a way that’s “God-pleasing” and that “recognizes the complicated nature of the world.”

While he had always envisioned a life in the corporate world, Miller’s shift to academia and theology wasn’t utterly surprising. Miller’s father was an “off-the-charts intelligent” research scientist and an atheist, while his mother, a Methodist, practiced “simple faith.” Although Miller considered himself a person of faith even when he was younger, faith did not initially play a central role in his life.

Before coming back to Princeton to head the Faith and Work Initiative, Miller taught for five years at Yale Divinity School and Yale School of Management, and was the executive director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Miller served at the ground zero site as a volunteer chaplain.

At Princeton, in addition to leading the Faith and Work initiative, Miller teaches a class that is nicknamed “Succeeding Without Selling Your Soul,” which focuses on how religion and spirituality can be resources for ethical behavior. Previously a small seminar, the offering was so popular that it generated a waitlist and eventually became a course. This summer, Miller is at work on the manuscript of his next book, an update to “God at Work” about the contemporary state of the movement.

Embracing the ‘whole person’ at work

Even 10 years ago, many human resource and general counsel offices have been skeptical, or outright hostile, about mixing religion and faith in the workplace, fearing disruptions and proselytizing. But that has started to shift as diversity, equity and inclusion programs have become more widespread, Miller told me. “Folks started to realize that faith is a constitutive part of one’s humanness,” he said. “That it’s at a minimum important to them and for many maybe the most important thing in their life.”

Today, some large companies have their own in-house groups dedicated to faith, known as employee resource groups or ERGs. The software company Salesforce, for instance, launched Faithforce in 2017, as part of a broader diversity and inclusion strategy to in the company.

In 2023, the group’s membership increased by 21% internationally, according to a blog post on the company website. The program also pairs two employees from different faiths to share knowledge and stories. “Someone may need to take a certain holiday off or they may be fasting and want to share that with their manager or colleagues,” said Michael Roberts, global president of Faithforce and a strategic solutions engineer at Salesforce, in an interview. “Holding space to have those conversations and not feel shame around them allows us to create a more inclusive workplace where individuals can thrive.”

Dell and Google have similar interfaith groups. The group called Faith and Work Movement based in the Silicon Valley helps publicly traded companies form groups and connect with one another around faith and work. These efforts have spread globally now.

To tend to employees’ spiritual and emotional needs, some companies bring in corporate and workplace chaplains whose job is to offer support to employees who may be going through a crisis like divorce, medical diagnosis or financial struggle, and who may not feel comfortable bringing these problems to their bosses or HR.

Tyson Foods has been running a corporate chaplaincy program since 2000 and now employs over 100 full-time and part-time chaplains in the facilities across the country. The program “provides compassionate pastoral care to team members and their families, regardless of their religious affiliation or beliefs.” John Tyson started the program so that employees would feel comfortable talking about faith at work, Kevin Scherer, director of the chaplaincy program at Tyson Foods, told me. Miller helped start this program, Scherer said, and worked with the leadership to shape the culture and core values of the company. One of of those being that Tyson is a “faith-friendly” company.

Tyson Food’s chaplains, who practice “inclusive chaplaincy,” are trained to keep their “faith orientation invisible” and wait for the worker to initiate a conversation about faith. “In chaplaincy we’re starting from where the other person is at,” Scherer told me.

Chaplains roam the floor in industrial facilities, furniture stores and car dealerships, chatting with employees and getting to know them, said Richard Langton, director of Workplace Chaplains , a nonprofit based in Michigan that has chaplains in over 30 business locations in the Midwest. “We’re physically present and we build relationships, so people can talk to us when they need to,” said Langton, who added that the organization is Christian, but chaplains work with employees of different faiths. “Our society and workplaces and our lives have become so disconnected, more fragmented, and I would say more difficult,” Langton said.

This care for the whole person and their emotional well-being ultimately benefits the company, too. “The effects of just one distressed employee impact the entire team and the company’s bottom line as a whole,” says the website of Corporate Chaplains of America , another nonprofit with chaplains in about 2,600 locations.

And the pressures can be especially ruthless in the corporate world, where faith can be a powerful asset, Miller told me. “It’s a place where we need people who are anchored in their faith, meaning that they’re ethical and they care about who their neighbor is, and it’s not just about me, myself and I, and maximizing what’s good for me,” he told me.

Faith and moral courage

Much of Miller’s work is helping companies navigate tough ethical situations. And while these situations may not have to deal with faith directly, Miller believes faith can be a powerful motivation for doing the right thing even when it’s unpopular. A 2017 Wall Street Journal article called Miller an “on-call ethicist the bank consults on weighty questions.” Miller worked with Citigroup to help the company deal with a slew of ethical problems before and after the mortgage crisis.

Another company came to Miller asking for his advice in working with influencers, a strategy which, after some international research, Miller cautioned against, explaining it would be hard to ensure “quality control” over influencers whose content, and behavior, may not accurately represent the company.

Some scenarios were more ethically troubling. Once, a company sought Miller’s advice on how to handle a senior employee accused of harassment who brought significant revenue to the company. (Miller recommended firing the employee: “If you wait, it’s going to cost you later.”) It’s not that these situations happen to “bad apples” in the company, Miller told The Wall Street Journal, but it’s also about “how easy it is for good employees to justify bad decisions when they face gray-zone questions.”

Faith also infuses a different sense of time in a culture that measures success in quarters. This approach has a longer “vector of time” which can be comforting in times of pressure.

“Faith can give you moral courage to nevertheless do something that other people wouldn’t do, to take those chances because you think it’s the noble and correct thing to do,” he said, adding that it may sometimes come down to a person acting on their gut instincts about what’s wrong or right.

Miller advises companies to focus on “preventative” ethics — which are different from “restorative” ethics that deal with the fallout of unethical decisions. This doesn’t mean hiring more lawyers or compliance officers, but creating a workplace culture that values and rewards ethical behavior. “To me it’s all about character and culture,” he told me. It’s less about hitting the numbers, he added, and more about how you get there.

Scherer of Tyson Foods told me Miller brings a unique combination of experiences as a former executive, his pastoral experience as a minister at the Presbyterian church, and his role as an Ivy League professor. “You don’t find that combination in very many people,” he told me. “On top of that, he’s very relational and well-spoken. And he genuinely cares about this work.”

When we spoke, Miller recalled a phrase he’s heard from a friend: “The secular is the arena for the sacred.” Miller’s approach offers up a more expansive vision of faith that’s not confined to churches, chapels, temples, mosques and other places of worship. Faith can be lived out in a relatable and even practical way. How to best do that remains the question at the heart of his work. “How does one bring sacredness, so to speak, into secular spaces? And I don’t mean it in a churchy way, but the values and the ethos which come with caring for the other and caring for society.”