Missionaries in a Mercenary World: Christianity and Corporate Culture

By Dr Brandon Vaidyanathan –

“In corporate industries, we’re all mercenaries,” laughed Ashwin Mathews. “We work for the money. Honest—honest truth! I don’t work for loyalty, right? I’m not loyal to the company. I work for the cash!”

I interviewed Ashwin (not his real name) in Bangalore in 2012, when I was conducting research for my PhD dissertation in sociology. By that point, I had already interviewed nearly a hundred corporate professionals, many of whom were deeply committed Catholics and lay leaders in their churches.

Ashwin, for instance, worked by day as a systems analyst for a global IT giant. But his evenings and weekends were devoted to the leadership team of a charismatic prayer group for professionals.

Also read:
The Professional as Mercenary

I was especially struck by Ashwin’s words because they perfectly articulated a pattern that I had been observing throughout my research. These professionals, Christian or not, largely saw themselves as mercenaries. Not the sort who fight and kill for money, of course. This, rather, is a new breed of economic mercenaries in unabashed pursuit of upward mobility. They’re in it for the cash; they couldn’t care less about the company. Here’s what they told me:

After all, the company’s not going to care about you. Loyalty is dead, and what matters above all is mobility and promotability. You can’t trust your colleagues; they’ll gladly throw you under the bus if it gets them promoted. You have to keep your cards close to your chest, and don’t get close to anyone. That will make it easier to jump to your next job in a couple of years. This is what it takes to survive and succeed in corporate life. After all, you have your career and family to look out for.

I heard such themes repeatedly throughout my research. This model of the Mercenary was the pervasive normative outlook (i.e., how most people believe they ought to conduct themselves) in workplaces of publicly traded multinational companies I studied in India and the Middle East. What struck me was the prevalence of this outlook among Christian professionals who happened to be leaders in their churches—leaders of prayer groups, parish councils, and so on. They become “mercenaries” on weekdays and “missionaries” on the weekends.

Theologians who think about faith and work often talk about work as a vocation or divine calling. Not a single one of these Catholic professionals I spoke to saw their corporate jobs as vocations. Indeed, those who wanted to pursue work as a vocation or calling ended up leaving corporate life altogether, either becoming entrepreneurs or working in non-profit or religious organizations.

Their stories led me to write a book titled Mercenaries and Missionaries: Global Capitalism and Global Christianity in Emerging Economies (anticipated release in 2019 from Cornell University Press). I want to share some of these stories and reflections in a series of posts on this site. In these posts, I would like to highlight key aspects of the cultural context in which many Catholic corporate professionals find themselves. I will share some of my research findings, based on 200 interviews and 12 months of participant observation in India and the Arabian Gulf, and draw on theoretical resources from the discipline of sociology to try expand the scope of our discussion on faith at work.

Some of the themes I hope to address include:

• what is it about these workplaces that generates and sustains this character?
• why do Christians claim to integrate faith at work while following the mercenary norm?
• is integration of faith at work simply about values, beliefs, and intentions?
• under what conditions can faith commitments disrupt and provide alternatives to the mercenary norm?
• how do corporate workplaces shape professionals’ contributions to their churches and societies?
• what might Catholic Social Teaching have to say about these challenges, and the vision of work that a Christian ought to aspire to?

My hope is that these posts can help generate a fruitful discussion on the relationship between faith and work.

I very much welcome feedback from readers, especially those of you working in the corporate sector. To what extent do the experiences of my interviewees resonate with your own? What challenges might be unique to Christians as a minority in the Indian context? What solutions have you developed to such problems? What should the role of the Church be in responding to such challenges?

I look forward to our conversation.

(This post has been adapted from an earlier version, posted at greenroomblog.org)

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Dr. Brandon Vaidyanathan is Associate Professor of Sociology at The Catholic University of America. He was born and raised in the Arabian Gulf. He holds an M.Sc. in Management from HEC Montreal and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Notre Dame. His research, published in several journals, examines the cultural dimensions of religious, commercial, medical, and scientific institutions. He also facilitates Design Thinking workshops to foster innovation and problem-solving in organizations.