Every piece of American currency declares, “In God We Trust.” The intersection of religion and commerce may seem to stop there. Yet Scotty McLennan argues that religious beliefs have a powerful, if often hidden or unacknowledged, influence at all levels of our economic lives.
“I’ve always felt that religion deeply affects the way business is done, not only in the United States but around the world,” says McLennan, a lecturer in political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In Global Business, Religion, and National Culture, he leads a world tour of how major faiths have shaped cultures and business practices, from America’s self-made men and Japan’s salarymen to Islamic banking and the Israeli tech sector. The elective, which he’s taught since 2014, is part of the MBA curriculum’s recently added Engaging with Differences requirement, designed to expose students to a wider range of perspectives in the classroom.
Despite the perception of business leaders putting material concerns before the spiritual, McLennan says his students are far from agnostic. “They’re representative of the world in terms of religion. Generally, most people are religious no matter where they come from, but they tend not to want to talk about that publicly.” Early in the course, he tells them, “‘You have a religious permission card in my class.’ And then it comes pouring out. People are willing to talk about what really matters to them.”
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“If this Protestant ethic is now the American business ethic, if this is how we run business in America, you all are here because of this.”
Author Name
Scotty McLennan
The course is the first time many students have examined the religious undercurrents running through their professional experiences. “It surprises them enormously,” McLennan says. “When we get to China and Confucianism, that is revelatory for a lot of students.” A section on Japan is often a “eureka moment” for non-Japanese students who have worked in the country. “When they understand Shinto and Buddhism and the historical role of religion in Japan, it all kind of comes together.”
Another eye-opener is a discussion of the Protestant work ethic, the concept introduced by German sociologist Max Weber in 1904 to describe Americans’ unique brand of industriousness and individualism, which he traced back to Calvinism. More than a century later, this ethos is evident (minus the dour predestinarianism) in a generation of hustling girlbosses and grinding sigmas as well as a form of founder-friendly Christianity that’s resonating with Silicon Valley elites.
Weber’s ideas were the starting point for a lively class discussion that looked at U.S. and Mexican business cultures through the lens of Protestant and Catholic values. “If time equals money in the Protestant ethic,” one student wondered, “why was Carlos Slim, a Mexican, the richest man in the world?” Others questioned the relevance of Weber’s thesis in a globalized world. Perhaps, McLennan suggested, you don’t have to be from the United States or even Christian to have absorbed the mindset Weber identified. “If this Protestant ethic is now the American business ethic, if this is how we run business in America, you all are here because of this,” he said. “This is what you’re here for.”
McLennan’s path to the GSB was anything but preordained. “I grew up in a business family,” he recalls. “I rebelled against all that as a child of the ’60s and as a social activist.” A Unitarian minister and lawyer, he spent 10 years running a legal ministry in a low-income neighborhood of Boston before “serendipitously” landing at Tufts and then Harvard Business School, where he taught ethics. After becoming Stanford’s dean for religious life in 2001, he was asked to teach at the GSB.
Though he’s been retired for more than a decade, McLennan still teaches a course on morality and literature and another on finding spiritual meaning at work. Like Global Business, they’re animated by a conviction that worldly pursuits are incomplete without a larger sense of purpose. “This is an important dynamic for GSB students on all these different levels,” McLennan says. “The personal level, developing their own spiritual life in relation to their work, and understanding how the world works.”
