Are you in need of advice? Write to [email protected] with “Aunt Acid” or “Businesslady” in the Subject line.
Dear Aunt Acid and Businesslady,
I’m writing to both of you as my question is both professional and deeply personal. One of my coworkers is my age, but she has a much more senior role. She is sort-of-not-really my boss but she is also clearly interested in finding a work friend. To this end, she asks me numerous personal questions that are not entirely appropriate for our relationship. While I have no problem not answering many of her personal questions, my real dilemma is when she asks me pointed questions regarding my faith. She recently found out, through my casually mentioning it, that I am devoutly Catholic, and has asked me several pointed questions about it.
On the one hand, I am aware that this is not at all appropriate for the workplace or our relationship. On the other hand, I do want to be a witness to my faith, as she has clearly had very little interaction with young people who happen to be religious and I want her to be aware that it is possible to be simultaneously devout, progressive, and professional. Today, she asked me about my stance on abortion. I demurred at first to answer her, but eventually just told her as concisely and considerately as possible. I am not sure that was the right thing to do though. What should I do going forward?
Sincerely,
Cubicle Catholic
Suffering succotash! Cubicle Catholic, are you my coworker Diane from 2004? I thought you liked talking with me about religion. It passed the time that we otherwise had to spend in service to misogynistic blowhards; it gave us something to think about besides the fact that we were working 10 hours a day and yet barely making enough to cover dry cleaning.
I’m so sorry I was impolitic and overenthusiastic in my questions. You didn’t seem uncomfortable — but then, neither did my friend P. at the beginning of Freshman Year when I chattered a bunch of personal questions at her, not remembering that everyone is a confessional blogger at heart, and she began avoiding me and later transferred schools altogether. It didn’t help that I had accidentally hooked up with her boyfriend while drunk on Mint Juleps, having misread him as a Jewish (because he was wearing an Israeli army t-shirt) and romantic (because he carried me up a hill). In my defense, I didn’t even know his last name, let alone whether he was in a relationship, and I had seen Ang Lee and Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility too many times.
I have strayed from the point, which is that your coworker-interrogator may well be, as I was, well-meaning, even fascinated by you, yet tone-deaf. She might be trying, as you surmise, in her awkward, too-talkative way, to bond. Perhaps she grew up in a family where discussions about religion and politics at the dinner table were considered normal rather than potentially hostile. Or perhaps I’m giving her too much credit because I’m over-identifying with her and she’s merely a person with scrubby boundaries and even scrubbier social skills.
In any event, you should feel free to do two things. First, figure out what you want to accomplish: a better working relationship? Fewer questions from her? Better questions? Do you want her to find a different office buddy, or would you be fine with her as a friend should she be willing to be trained? Identify your ideal. Then, ask for it.
If you are willing to be friends under somewhat modified circumstances, approach her at an opportune moment — happy hour; while browsing the candy racks at the drug store during lunch; sometime calm — and let her know, in your kindest voice, what you need. For example: “Hey, BTW, I like hanging out and I’m even cool talking about my faith, but talking about my personal life and controversial issues like abortion during the workday makes me a little queasy. Can we save the intense conversations for the weekends?”
If not, the next time she asks you something you think is out of bounds, you can give a polite smile and quelling answer like, “I don’t really feel like getting into it right now,” and then change the subject or go make a Cup of Noodles. Be bland but firm and all but the most monstrously nosy people — like Cyrano or Pinocchio-level nosy — will get the hint.
Regardless, for what it’s worth, it doesn’t seem like you’ve done anything wrong. It might be that you’re not a great personality match for a deep office friendship with this person, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Still, under questioning, you have proven true to yourself, and you have educated somebody. Not bad for a day’s work.
What say you, Businesslady?
–Aunt Acid
I basically agree with Aunt Acid’s advice overall, but want to double down on the “avoid discussing religion and associated hot-button issues at the office” part of it. Even if you and your coworker achieve a harmonious rapport for talking about your respective faiths and how they intersect with contemporary culture and politics, your other colleagues might not appreciate being privy to your opinions. While I believe that you’re open-minded and respectful about other peoples’ belief systems, someone might get an erroneous impression like “Cubicle Catholic thinks I’m going to hell” based on something they overhear, and that could significantly impact your working relationship. This is especially true if you’re a manager or otherwise work closely with other people, since the appearance of bias (even if unfounded) could cause problems for you and your employer if there’s an unfortunate alignment between your actions and a publicly stated belief.
Now, to be clear, I wholeheartedly encourage your impulse to hash these things out with your coworker—I think our society would be better if people didn’t shy away from discussions of difficult and/or complex issues. But the rules governing workplace conversations are different from those out in the real world, and religion should be handled with extreme delicacy if it’s brought up at all. Being too candid runs the risk of alienating coworkers, who might not feel comfortable addressing the source of their discomfort directly, and could have potentially serious repercussions in a worst-case scenario.
Still, there are plenty of places beyond the office where you can discuss this stuff freely (if you want to), and if your coworker doesn’t respect your demurrals of “not at work,” then that’s a sign that she’s probably not the best confidante anyway.
–Businesslady
Abortion takes things to a whole new level of Not Safe For Work.
Abortion is Not Safe For Organized Forensics.
C’mon now, if you’re going to give such good advice, what are we going to discuss in the comments? *Huffs off to Dear Prudence.*
(Just kidding, this was great and I much prefer good advice columnists to bonkers ones like Prudie.)
lol, you know that Mallory Ortberg is Prudence now right?
she wasn’t when this column was published at The Toast, though!
No religion or politics at work! It’s a mine field.
There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people at work: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin.
Yeah, because most people don’t understand that sincerity is the key to a good pumpkin patch. They just think they can plonk down a few pumpkin seeds, grow the pumpkins, and boom – Great Pumpkin visit.
Off topic, but let’s talk about Ang Lee and Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility. Elinor 4evaaaaaa.
Team Elinor reporting in!
YES. I love so much that scene where Marianne is like “but why aren’t you emoting more?” and Elinor is like “bitch, I have known about this for MONTHS and had the girl responsible GLOATING AT ME and couldn’t tell anyone and some of us DO NOT PLAY BACKUP FOR EVANESCENCE IN OUR SPARE TIME, okay?”
Saw it mentioned and thought: Well, my Saturday night just planned itself.
I am Team Marianne partly because I am secretly Marianne (according to a Buzzfeed quiz I took one time) and also because I love Kate Winslet with a love that is deep and abiding. But Elinor is also really great and so is Emma Thompson and that Sense & Sensibility is probably my favorite movie of all time. I can’t imagine ever getting tired of watching it.
Emma Thompson’s commentary is a diamond.
Team Margaret! Replace men with treehouses, a good atlas, and a successful piracy career.
Yeeeeeeeeeeeessssssssssssssss!
“like Cyrano or Pinocchio-level nosy”
I love you, Aunt Acid.
If someone in a supervisory role is asking you “pointed” questions about anything not directly work-related, and especially if it’s one of those things that they wouldn’t be allowed to ask about during hiring, be cautious. If you’re getting the impression that your religious views weird her out or that she looks down on them, or if you feel like she is making too much of a big deal out of it– that’s not an appropriate attitude for a senior employee to hold towards a subordinate, and it could even become discriminatory. I think there are plenty of non-confrontational ways to tell her that. “My mother always said religion wasn’t polite conversation,” “I can recommend some reading to you but I don’t want to get into it at work,” etc.
I work religion-adjacent, so discussing beliefs was just presumed to be on the table all of the time (even within an international corporate conglomerate). I often encountered a point of view that my devoutness was never the right kind of devoutness–that my “deeply held religious beliefs” were merely “opinions” whereas those of my conservative colleagues were treated as “values.” I never minded talking about god with [most] of my colleagues, because it gave them a different window into how different people access divinity. But confronting the daily-life stuff (abortion, gay marriage, life outside of wedlock), WOWZA. Shit was terribly uncomfortable. I have to double down with Businesslady here, because I certainly got the passive-aggressive message that I was going to hell.
I feel you so hard on this. I work in a religiously-affiliated university and my liberal views (which come out of the faith tradition I grew up in but no longer really practice) are understood as opinions too in some situations – so I only talk about them in situations when I know others agree (with good work friends).
This is so hard for some people to really understand. Yes, my belief in gay rights is based in my faith. Yes my religious beliefs inform my pro-choice position on abortion too. It’s almost as if being opposed to something is a value but being in favor of something isn’t.
Definitely run into this before (from both sides – plenty of urban liberal types seem to be an endless fount of opinions about What’s Wrong With Those Dumb Hicks) and I’m sort of torn between this theory and just that people really are more likely to respect your opinions if you’re an asshole about them.
I hope not, but that wouldn’t surprise me.
That can be turned against them, maybe – every “pro” position can be framed as “anti-criminalization” or “anti-prohibition” of that same thing. If there are thousands of libertarians who devoutly believe that no taxing government should intervene between them and the money that God has decided they should have, clearly that sort of sentiment counts as religious. I wouldn’t know, but perhaps it would make it harder for them to pull that “just opinions” trick if the belief is stated as opposition to its opposite (so to speak).
And actually, my own comment made me realize that this is a thing that happens to liberals/progressives a lot – anything we’re in favor of is the “pro” position, and anything conservatives are in favor of is the “con”. As if every progressive value is about actively interfering in some way when, really, a lot of them are actually about non-interference and ending preexisting government action against a thing.
It’s strange but I think it used to be the opposite not too long ago, when the con positions were rephrased as pro-whatever to make them sound more palatable. Has there been a shift recently? I don’t know.
Oddly enough, this even came from the most secular (and liberal) supervisors who lacked context for faith-based progressive values. They saw my beliefs as stemming from a political, and therefore negligible, place to put aside in the workplace. Whereas my conservative Christian (and Conservative Jewish) colleagues were tapped into Ethics that needed to be accommodated on every little thing. Wow…obvs I still have feels about this.
That could work. It just sounds so exhausting.
Also, my former coworker Jennie, if you ever read this, I’m sorry for all those invasive questions about Judaism in 2002-4.
Ah, this reminds me of the time I found out a coworker was a Syro-Malabar Catholic, and I screamed, with excitement, because come on, how often does that happen? Fortunately he was pretty chill about it.
I am endorsing the general foundation principle that politics and religion are topics that anyone should feel comfortable to disengage from in the workplace, and if you are the person in charge of setting or enforcing the tone of your work environment, it really is part of the job to make sure that this is happening.
I think it’s also a thing, though, that some offices let it all hang out more than others, and there are different levels of how much individuals want to share, and that in some offices, it is probably okay if folks willingly want to participate in a little Intro to Comparative Religions 101 around the water cooler. I work in education, and institutionally one of our core values is that people have the option to “share their story” as it were, about their own identity/identities/intersectionalities, There is also the identity of “I’m just here for the paycheck, I have zero interest in talking to you rubes.”
BUT, even in that environment, it works best if people can keep it to “marginally interesting things about the factual existence of my religion.” As a Catholic, I am cool with letting people know about the Feast of St. Blaise if they are interested, but HELLO WHOA WTF on my personal opinion about abortion. I wouldn’t even feel comfortable talking about if I personally think getting one’s throat blessed on St. Blaise day is a medically-sound approach to preventive health care.
Team Margaret! Replace men with treehouses, a good atlas, and a successful piracy career.
So Cubicle Catholic doesn’t have a problem not-answering personal questions, but is in turmoil about this particular issue. Is the woman’s invasiveness at stake here or CC’s own comfort about their actual positions when exposed to scrutiny in the act of being a “witness”?
As a former (extreme) Catholic my own two cents: if one’s religion is dominant part of the culture and bears a major influence on public policy and on women’s lives specifically, one should be able to handle discussions about those features if they voluntarily engage in conversations about their religion with outsiders ¯_(ツ)_/¯
(preface: I believe that faith is in itself god. That most humans, across cultures, have a yearning for something larger than themselves to help explain the world and guide their lives – all of that hope, that faith, that belief, is god, whatever trappings it’s dressed up in. I can relate to those feelings, even though I’m not religious.) One of my coworkers left me a note in my drawer that said, “Dear General Burnsthighs, I just wanted to tell you that I love you and God loves you, too.” I sat with the note for awhile, and finally decided to throw it away and not mention it. I know it was coming from what she felt was a genuine place, even though I’m not Christian and she knows it so it was a lil patronizing. I was more annoyed by her telling she loved me than God did. I HATE it when people who don’t actually know me tell me they love me. No, you don’t. You can’t love someone if you don’t know who they are and the things you don’t know about me would fill one big ass book, which you would NOT enjoy reading, given your preference for Nicolas Sparks novels and distaste for teh gays.
Emma Thompson's commentary is a diamond.
I personally don’t have a problem discussing The Church with anyone who has questions, even at work – I guess I consider the topic more one of current events than something so deeply personal that it’s inappropriate to discuss (but then, I’m a Catholic who really loves explaining some of the weirdness to people who are interested and I don’t have a problem with openly criticizing the institution for being behind the times and doing actively criminal things).
I personally don't have a problem discussing The Church with anyone who has questions, even at work – I guess I consider the topic more one of current events than something so deeply personal that it's inappropriate to discuss (but then, I'm a Catholic who really loves explaining some of the weirdness to people who are interested and I don't have a problem with openly criticizing the institution for being behind the times and doing actively criminal things).
I generally support the bland disengagement approach, but I also – I have a couple of coworkers who are like “well, it says xyz in the bible, so that’s good enough for me” as if biblical literalism were a totally mainstream thing to say. And maybe in their communities it is – but I’ve basically decided that that means I can put forward my own opinions on trans rights, or that the Israeli government is basically an apartheid state.
I aim to do this in a calm but “yep these are totally reasonable opinions and I’m not going to apologize for upsetting your apple cart” kind of way, even though I’m sure dude is thinking NONBINARY WHAT.
What a psyche boggling prompt that I acknowledge everlastingly happen wrapped up. It gives the data that I was really examining for the history week other than I am genuinely satisfied along this dispatcher. Demand another accomplice this. Remember you.
What a psyche boggling prompt that I acknowledge everlastingly happen wrapped up. It gives the data that I was really examining for the history week other than I am genuinely satisfied along this dispatcher. Demand another accomplice this. Remember you.
she wasn't when this column was published at The Toast, though!