Several times throughout the Bible, God and various disciples implore the faithful to chill out one day of the week and worship the Creator. But only one restaurant chain has made the Fourth Commandment an operational sacrament.
Not only does Atlanta-based Chick-fil-A require all 1,300 of the chicken chain’s corporate and franchised outlets to close on Sunday, it proudly tells friends and critics alike that there are “biblical business principles” the company holds sacred, of which closing on Sunday is but one.
Honesty, fellowship, the Golden Rule, empathy and a “servant spirit” are other biblical ideals that that Chick-fil-A holds high, says Don Perry, the chain’s vice president of public relations and publicity.
Chick-fil-A crystallizes its spiritual leanings into one declaration at its website: “Our official statement of corporate purpose says that we exist to glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us and to have a positive influence on all who come in contact with Chick-fil-A.”
But in aspiring to the highest spiritual ideals and in absorbing employees of many faiths on their payrolls, Chick-fil-A and other restaurant companies have inspired legal challenges to the inclusion of religion in the work-place and the marketplace.
Title VII of the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act explicitly declares the scope of religious rights in both those areas and requires employers and business establishments to respect the faiths of workers and customers without discrimination or harassment.
However, as a secular society defined in part by the separation of church and state, America still holds plenty of uncharted territory with regard to religion in employment and commerce. Some legal issues having to do with religion do seem clear, however. For example, no lawsuit or Equal Employment Opportunity Commission hearing has yet been won by a Muslim employee who contested his boss’s unwillingness to grant time off for Ramadan. Nor have any Jews prevailed against employers who don’t allow time off for Rosh Hashanah.
Yet, as a predominantly Judeo-Christian nation, such religiously based holidays as Easter, Christmas and Yom Kippur have evolved into official holidays that are rich in marketing power for restaurateurs and retailers.
The industry’s record in dealing with workers and customers of different faiths has been nowhere near as tumultuous as its rifts with blacks and immigrants since the civil rights activism of the 1950s and 1960s. Still, religious frictions in business have sparked litigious conflicts, marketing miscues, franchising fights and, occasionally, humorous anecdotes.
Indeed, lawsuits and equal-employement hearings have been provoked by a Jehovah’s Witness who complained about an allegedly discriminatory firing from a server job because her religion forbids her to sing “Happy Birthday” to guests. And at least one Muslim franchisee candidate has challenged Chick-fil-A’s purported requirement that he participate in a Christian prayer session. Sikhs, too, have sought redress for perceived bias when they have refused an employer’s demand to shave or shed their elaborate head wraps—both of which followers of that faith hold to be constitutionally protected practices.
Yet most Americans believe that spirituality should be safeguarded in the workplace.
A Gallup Poll in 2004 found that 70 percent of 5,000 white-collar and blue-collar Americans had no objection to religion playing a role in the workplace. Of those people, 61 percent said they were Christian or Protestant, and 48 percent said they had discussed their faith on the job on the very day the pollsters contacted them.
Just this past May, a Gallup Poll found that 90 percent of 10,000 Americans believe in God or a higher spiritual being.
Despite whatever qualms Americans may have about Muslim fundamentalism because of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, most of the same majority of poll respondents who expressed tolerance for religion in the workplace said the real battleground in society is between people who believe in God and those who don’t.
In an industry that long has demonstrated a foursquare commitment to ethnic diversity in hiring, vendor selection and advertising messages, the incorporation of religion in employment and marketing has been less straightforward, much as those issues of faith remain grayer areas with regard to the economy and society in general.
According to spokesman Perry, Chick-fil-A abides by the law and rejects as ill-informed and inaccurate a Forbes magazine article this summer that asserted the company had settled at least 12 religious-discrimination lawsuits since 1988. Perry also refuted the article’s contention that workers are obligated to participate in regular prayer sessions.
“If you take any operation within our industry that is our size, and they have only experienced 12 recorded legal employee issues over a nearly 20-year period, I am sure they’d be very thankful for that, and so are we,” Perry says.
Perry affirms that religious principals have been the bedrock of Chick-fil-A’s success—essentially as formed and espoused by its founder and chairman, Truett Cathy, who has used his personal wealth to finance a dozen Christian foster homes around the world. Moreover, Perry says, Chick-fil-A apologizes to no one for the company’s core values.
“We understand that faith or religion in the workplace can be a sensitive topic,” he says, “and as [proprietors of] a family-owned business, the Cathy family has elected a business philosophy that simply allows them as owners to incorporate basic biblical principles into the workplace—such things as honesty, trust, a servant spirit, caring, giving, and treating others, customers and employees with dignity and respect.
“Other than the Cathy family’s 61-year-old chainwide closed-on-Sundays policy, there are no religious requirements for employment in our restaurants. But you will find forms of religious expression from the free will of the nearly 50,000 people currently in the Chick-fil-A system who come from all corners of our society.”
Chick-fil-A’s support for Christian values caught the spotlight in 2002 when a Muslim franchisee in training, Aziz Latif, filed a discrimination lawsuit against the company, alleging that he was fired because he refused to participate in a Christian prayer meeting.
Then, as now, the company refused to comment on the case other than to note that Latif’s faith had nothing to do with his termination. The suit was settled out of court.
Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, the now-defunct Chi-Chi’s chain and Razzoo’s Pizza, a 12-unit chain centered in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, all have been sued by the EEOC or employees in recent years over claims that workers were fired or guests were denied service because of their faith.
Of those cases, perhaps the strangest was one two years ago involving Red Robin, the 329-unit, Greenwood Village, Colo.-based casual-dining chain. In the end, Red Robin paid $150,000 to settle an EEOC complaint alleging that the company had discriminated against a tattooed server when it fired him for violating the chain’s dress code. The server, who practiced an obscure Egyptian religion called Kemet whose believers tattoo themselves with religious inscriptions on their wrists, was on the job six months before he allegedly was told that if he could not cover his tattoos he should seek employment elsewhere.
In the case of Razzoo’s, the EEOC took up the cause of a Jehovah’s Witness who claimed she was fired last year after she refused to sing “Happy Birthday” to a guest along with the rest of the waitstaff, in violation of her religion’s proscriptions against participating in celebrations.
But many restaurant employers say cooperation and not conflict characterize the interaction among work crews that include people of different faiths.
New York City operator Levana Kirschenbaum, a cookbook author, lecturer and co-owner of the kosher restaurant Levana’s, says people would be surprised to know that Muslims work in her multi-ethnic, multifaith cooking crew.
Jews and Muslims may be at each other’s throats elsewhere, but at Levana, as both guests and employees, Muslims are good employees and good patrons, Kirschenbaum says. People who follow Islam adore the restaurant as much as her Jewish customers do, Kirschenbaum says. Both constituencies admire Levana’s upscale trappings and draw peace of mind from knowing that pork is never served, animals are humanely slaughtered and foods are prepared safely in accord with religious rules, she says.
“We believe in God, but we don’t proselytize it,” Kirschenbaum says, noting that her menu doesn’t even use the word “kosher.”
Despite the sobering conflicts that religion can bring to restaurants, such encounters can also yield hope and harmony.
Mario Lee, president of the Old Country and Hometown buffet chains, recently recounted to an industy conference the story of a restaurant manager who was perplexed about handling a group of regular customers who were members of a nearby Baptist church choir and who were fond of using his dining room after church services to continue singing songs of praise and faith.
Recognizing that there were other guests in the dining room who may not want to hear gospel music or who could be nonbelievers or members of other faiths, Lee said the manager’s solution so far had been to welcome the choir members with open arms, but to ask them to keep the volume down.
“What else can we do?” Lee said. “We’re not going to ask them to leave.”
A manager at an IHOP in Harlem, the chain’s only restaurant in Manhattan, recalls a similar dilemma, but one that seemed to resolve itself. Because Harlem is home to some of the city’s oldest and most influential black Baptist and Methodist churches, renowned for their church choirs, members of different congregations often ran into one another in the restaurant’s dining room when it opened three years ago and kicked off impromptu sing-offs. For some customers, the contests were entertaining and a reason to patronize the IHOP on Sundays back then. But for others, including servers, the vocal showdowns were annoying, the manager says.
Over time, while management begged for silence, the choirs grew to respect the other guests and stopped.
“The last thing we wanted to do was ask them to leave,” the manager says.