The Argument for God from Organization Studies

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

E very so often, truth carves a wrinkle in popular culture. Not long ago, such a wrinkle appeared as the 9th U.S. Circuit Court upheld a civil suit to bar the pledge of allegiance in public schools because it contains the phrase “one nation under God.” Ironically, the suit’s objection was not to the idea of pledging allegiance to a human institution but to the idea that the institution exists under God. According to the complaint, the pledge of allegiance injures those who choose to not believe in God. This flap reminds us that today’s postmodernism declares even the surest facts to be cultural franchises. Every group has its treasury of truth. And when one group figures that there is no God, fairness requires that God be a cultural figment rather than a fact to be decided. Today, God has become a cultured preemption, something that cannot be reckoned except as it appears in this or that culture. It is a measure of today’s timid cultural relativism that hardly anyone anymore speaks of God in public. To be sure, political candidates for president are careful to affect a religious posture; but they do so deliberately and without conviction. A truly God-fearing candidate would have to shade his or her belief from media scrutiny, no doubt under cover of high-sounding talk of separation of church and state. God is supposed to have no actual place in politics. More timid than the politicians are the many intellectuals who call university departments of humanities and social sciences home. Many of these hothouse flowers draw a bold line to distinguish their ideas about humanity from ideas about God. God, they suppose, is either a personal conviction of no social moment or, worse, a device used by powerful institutions to manipulate the masses (e.g., Wilson, 2002). In the postmodern era, there are only politics. In this essay, I hope to bring God to mind and in so doing turn the table on that contemporary relativism that puts statements for and against God on the same moral and factual footing. I hope to recall an old idea that we should never have lost—namely, that God exists and He matters. To do this, I look for God in a place that might impress even politicians and university professors—the business corporation. Where