Work–faith integration in the neoliberal age: Women professionals’ alignment of evangelical identity with professional identity in South Korea

Abstract

Prior studies on work–faith integration have only explained professionals’ negotiation of religious and professional identities within one occupational setting, overlooking how the negotiation diverges in the soaring force of neoliberal regime that intersects with gendered workplace culture. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Korean evangelical women professionals, the article demonstrates how women, proportionately more religious than men, arrive in the alignment of two identities at the workplace. The research finds two patterns of alignments: (1) individual moralising, which is achieved through displaying the narratives of calling and participating in expressive activities, and (2) selective compartmentalising, which is obtained through the practices of setting flexible boundaries and turning evangelical language off. Bringing a neoliberal and gendered perspective to the categorisation of workplaces, this study argues that women are likely to display higher degrees of faith and more evangelical language within less neoliberal-oriented, feminised workplaces than in neoliberal-oriented, masculine ones.

Introduction

Professionalisation of work understood through rationalisation, value neutrality, and objectivity has long been regarded as taking an opposite position to religion (Ecklund and Long, 2011; Kleinman, 1981; Ramarajan and Reid, 2013). Despite the dichotomous assumption that religion and work create tensions, several studies on journalists and engineers suggested that religious and professional identities create a reciprocal relationship, through individuals’ negotiation of two identities (Day, 2005; Park et al., 2014; Steffy, 2013). However, earlier studies on religion and work, which mainly focus on congregational workplace and individual factors, have overlooked how the negotiation diverges in the broader social context, specifically in the soaring force of the neoliberal economy. Furthermore, they neglected how women, who are generally more religious than men, arrive in the negotiation of two identities. How do women professionals align their religious and professional identities in workplaces where the professional culture is highly gendered and influenced by the neoliberal regime? How does the locally rooted competitiveness and efficiency-focused culture of workplaces and gendered organisational norms affect women’s identity alignments? This study is an attempt to investigate empirical questions intersecting religion, work, and gender.

South Korea offers an adequate opportunity for theoretically scrutinising the gendered negotiation of religious and secular identities. Boasting approximately 23% of the Christian population, including Protestants and Catholics, among the total population in 2021 (Gallup, 2021), Evangelicalism has interacted with the professional world. Over the century, evangelical Protestantism has led Korea’s rapid industrialisation through individuals’ meaning making of work and material success and has buffered neoliberal pressure through their search for comfort and healing (Kim and Park, 2003; Lee Easley, 2014; Park and Yoo, 2014). Korean Protestantism grew explosively during the period of industrialisation, urbanisation, and modernisation (1960–1995). The number of adherents increased continuously from 0.9 million (3% of the population) in 1966 to 3.2 million (10.2% of the population) in 1970, 5.34 million (14.3%) in 1980, and 8.7 million (19.7%) in 1995 (Chung, 2014: 328). The number of Protestants has grown up to 9.68 million (19.7%) of the population in 2021 (Gallup, 2021). The growth of Korean Protestantism occurred simultaneously with Korea’s economic boom since the 1970s, owing to the export-led economic structure emphasising heavy industries, such as steel, chemicals, automobiles, and shipbuilding.

Another aspect that distinguishes South Korea as an interesting case is that overwork routines, efficiency, and performance-focused work culture under the restructuring of neoliberal global economy intersect with gendered organisational norms. Many large conglomerates and companies have been notorious a masculine work culture, which is advantageous for men who can overwork and participate in heavy-drinking sessions (Gee and Yang, 2016), may be changing, but this work culture may still permeate. This masculine work environment may be a visible pressing social concern given the increasing number of women professionals in South Korea. The rapid growth of women’s participation in the labour market has been a distinctive feature in recent years. According to the Korean Population Census, women’s employment rate was 42.8% in 1980, peaking in 1997 at 49.8%. The employment rate was stagnant during the early 2000s, reaching over 50% in 2005 (Kim et al., 2006). Women’s employment rate in 2021 is approximately 53.3% (Korean Women’s Development Institute, 2022). Despite the increasing rate of women’s participation in the labour market, continued masculine work culture, coupled with a neoliberal work regime, makes it difficult to predict whether or not women professionals, if they preserve evangelical faith, align their evangelical identity with their professional one or abandon it. Moreover, if they keep an evangelical identity, predicting how they navigate the arrangement of these two identities in a competitive and gendered work environment is difficult.

Assuming that evangelical women’s entry into the labour market, particularly those who conceive religion as a core identity, does not necessarily result in the eradication of evangelical identity, my focus is on how they arrange, express, and negotiate evangelical beliefs and practices in relation to professional values and expectations. I also focus on how they achieve the assortment of two identities depending on workplace types. In this study, I account for two strategies, that is, ‘individual moralising’ and ‘selective compartmentalising’. Through these, evangelical Korean women professionals express evangelical faith and values in a way that does not prevent their gaining of professional identity in the workplace. I found that ‘individual moralising’ is likely to occur in the occupational context where the logic of neoliberalism does not prevail in the routine of work and this workplace is likely to have more women colleagues and offer public services. By contrast, another pattern, ‘selective compartmentalising’, tends to appear in an occupational environment where performance-based competitive office culture dominates with the neoliberal regime. From this result, this study suggests that evangelical women’s alignment of their two identities differs according to their neoliberal and gendered workplace culture.

Identity alignment in the workplace

Identity alignment of professional and religious identity

The prevailing theory of secularisation has negated the influence of religion on public life and in the workplace. As they are carriers of secularism and rationalisation (Berger, 1979), separating private and public spheres and religion and profession has become culturally normalised. Thus, the presentation of private values or religious commitments in a public setting is something that is viewed as unprofessional (Schmalzbauer, 1999). However, along with the increasing evidence of religion’s resilient and persistent power in the modern and postmodern eras (Warner, 1996; Wuthnow, 1988), recent scholars have offered more complex and nuanced views of how it survives in the workplace (Park et al., 2014; Steffy, 2013; Tracey, 2012). The rise of religious conservatism and the evangelical movement in the United States, and the growth of Pentecostalism across Africa, Latin America, and Asia, suggests that religion still has important effects on many aspects of life, including in the workplace (Berger, 2001; Tracey, 2012).

Pointing out that as yet research has paid relatively little attention to the nexus of religion and work, scholars have attempted to empirically examine and theorise the potential relationship between the two worlds (Park et al., 2014; Steffy, 2013; Tracey, 2012). Literature on the nexus of religion and work has found that personal religious belief influences stress management, career development, risk aversion (Duffy, 2006; Hilary and Hui, 2009) altruistic decision-making, lower workplace deviation, intrinsic and extrinsic workplace orientation is the findings of Steffy, 2013, and meanings and directions in work (Tracey, 2012).For instance, Park et al. (2014) found that religious capital, the mastery of beliefs found in congregations regarding the role of faith at work, can promote entrepreneurial behaviour in the workplace and affect commitment and job satisfaction. That is, those who actively participate in congregations that emphasise the application of their religious worldview in their workplace exhibit greater affective commitment, greater job satisfaction, and more entrepreneurial behaviour.

Furthermore, scholars examining the micro-mechanism of work–faith integration have investigated ways in which individuals integrate religion into secular work environments to guide their job commitment, work ethics, satisfaction, and performance (Chusmir and Koberg, 1988; Walker, 2013). Based on the epistemological position that one identity does not necessarily erase another identity, research on work–faith integration focused on ways of aligning the religious and professional identities (Hall et al., 2012; Lynn et al., 2011; Miller and Ewest, 2015). One way in which professionals engage is to interpret the purpose of professional work with moral meaning and the spiritual resources offered by religion, resisting the professional languages of objectivity, value neutrality, and self-interests. Spiritual discipline and workplace mentors affect work–faith integration (Lynn et al., 2011), religious commitment, organisational commitment, and job satisfaction (Kent et al., 2016). Dik and Duffy (2009: 427) defined that religious languages, such as a calling, guide ‘a particular life role in a manner deriving a sense of purpose or meaningfulness’.Some people may not use the language of a divine calling but feel called to do socially valuable things. This way of perception can be more frequent in certain occupations, such as religious vocations, teaching, and non-governmental organisation (NGO) employees (Wrzesniewski et al., 1997).

A second pathway is to selectively segregate and differentiate religious values so that professionals can compartmentalise religious and secular worlds in different social circumstances (Kreiner et al., 2006; Schmalzbauer, 1999). American journalists segregate religious faith from talking about journalistic work. This exclusion of religious perspectives from their work is related to the view that religious concerns are parochial and partisan (Schmalzbauer, 1999). Several cultural schemata are employed to separate religious and professional worlds, setting the boundaries between the two worlds (Kreiner et al., 2006). Furthermore, professionals flip the ‘on/off switch’ of being a professional, depending on the social context, trying to perform their professional roles selectively in one social domain, and vice versa (Kreiner et al., 2006).

In addition to this discussion on the alignment of religious and work identities, a recent study shows that religion also integrates neoliberal forces (Wrenn, 2019). However, the question of how individuals with religious identities respond to these forces has not been carefully examined, and the matter of how gendered workplace culture, within the neoliberal regime, plays a role in individuals’ identity alignment is not yet well documented. In the following section, I introduce the literature on neoliberal and gendered workplace culture in Korea to explain the salient importance of a neoliberal economic regime and gendered culture that shapes women’s identity alignments.

Gendered neoliberal workplace culture

Given that little attention has been paid to the impact of neoliberalism on work–faith integration, examining neoliberal workplace culture may offer opportunities to observe how religion survives in a fast-changing neoliberal economy. That is, performance and efficiency-centred logic, often coupled with masculine practices, may create a unique corporate and organisational culture shaping women’s identity alignment. Scholars have argued that the neoliberal-oriented culture promotes discourses and values of productive work ethic, competitive individualism, self-responsibility, entrepreneurship, self-control, and self-reliance (Kapelinsky and Shoshana, 2019). Workers have internalised the imperative to perform entrepreneurial subjects and objectified labouring bodies, along with intensified precarity, austerity, intense competition for jobs, and anxieties (Moore and Robinson, 2016).

Such neoliberal characteristics of workplaces may have gendered effects, not only distinguishing women’s lives from men’s but also influencing various types of women’s identities, strategies, and practices. Questioning the assumption that workplace hierarchies are gender-neutral, Joan Acker (1990) argued that organisational hierarchies are gendered, as the most powerful organisational positions are almost occupied by men, except for the occasional biological female who acts as a social man. The gendered organisations characterise how women are differently assigned for positions, activities, and roles within organisations.

The gendered nature of neoliberal ideologies is evident in Korean society. The neoliberal reforms initiated by the democratic governments have made an enormous effect on the quantity and characteristics of jobs in the labour market and workplace culture. This effect abruptly reduces jobs and drastically increases income insecurity and the volatility of opportunity in general (Shin, 2013: 336). Under the guidance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), president-elect Kim Dae-Jung formed the Tripartite Committee to overcome the financial crisis right after his victory in the presidential election in December 1997. In addition, he adopted extensive neoliberal economic reforms by deregulating the labour market and privatising the public sector (Shin, 2013: 336). This change has incurred not only the massive lay-offs but also the sharp increase of non-regular workers, including temporary, subcontract, and dispatched workers (Shin, 2013), resulting in the birth of precarious labour conditions (Gray, 2008; Lee, 2015).

The implementation of neoliberal logic into the workplace results in the increasing emphasis on competition among workers. Thus, they fall into ruthless competition, legitimising the workplace culture that praises the competitiveness of employees. Based on the notion of meritocracy that individuals are solely responsible for their own performances, individuals accept the passive psychological status. That is, each of them will lag and be fired from the workplace unless they participate in and strongly affirm the competitive work ethic. South Korea has witnessed the neoliberal conjuncture as ‘developmental neoliberalism’, in which neoliberalism is pursued as a developmental project and as the object of people’s desire in a collective sense (Cho, 2012). Under the neoliberal culture, individual employees are expected to transform themselves into tireless, selfless workers who are devoted to the productivity and competitiveness of individuals and organisations.

In Korea, the highly segmented labour market has made a significant effect on women workers since the secondary labour market places women in low-paid jobs (Kim, 2017). Furthermore, the gendered Korean workplace culture, favouring a male-centred, androcentric way and privileging heterosexual men who are free from the duties of housework and child caring (Bae et al., 2019), may be strengthened under the neoliberal regime, which valorises performances and efficiency, allowing a low degree of autonomy and freedom. A masculine work culture, which is advantageous for men who can overwork and participate in heavy-drinking sessions (Gee and Yang, 2016), may be changing, but this work culture permeates with increasing levels of performance, efficiency-oriented evaluations.

Along with women’s increasing levels of education and entry into the labour market, women have increasingly entered into traditionally male-dominated industries in Korea. However, the majority of women have reported unequal treatment, stereotypes, and prejudice towards women workers (Gee and Yang, 2016). Hence, women downplay their gender identity, including motherhood, and act like men to be recognised as a professional in the highly masculine workplace culture. This tendency may not be declined but pronounced within the neoliberal workplace where being highly competitive, performative, efficient, and professional with a minimised expression of emotions is generally valorised for the operation of organisations. More neoliberal-oriented workplaces are likely to make women professionals minimise gender and other identities, acting like social men.

That is whether the neoliberal hegemony is incrementally elevated in workplaces matter greatly in explaining how women adapt to workplaces and how they use cultural strategies for work–faith identity alignment. In such a background of gendered neoliberal workplace culture, a critical puzzle is to observe how women professionals align remaining identities and how the alignment of various identities appears depending on workplace types. These identities are evangelical identities and professional identities. After collecting interview data with evangelical Protestant women, an unexpected theme, which differs by the degrees of neoliberal orientation of workplaces, has emerged. That is whether the neoliberal hegemony is incrementally elevated in workplaces matter greatly in explaining how women adapt to workplaces and how they use cultural strategies for work–faith identity alignment. From the grounded theory-oriented, bottom-up approach, I found two types of workplaces: (1) neoliberal-oriented and (2) less neoliberal-oriented workplaces. In this study, a neoliberal-oriented workplace is defined as preserving a culture that legitimately requires competition and pressure regarding performance assessment and a greater number of male co-workers (e.g. private companies). In comparison, a less neoliberal-oriented workplace is defined as possessing a work culture with less competition and pressure around performance (e.g. public-school teachers).

Bringing a neoliberal and gendered perspective to the literature on work–faith integration, this study argues that women professionals use different types of alignment strategies. The findings of this research imply that religious forces may survive, harmonise, and synchronise better within occupational environments that are favourable to female employees with less neoliberal work regime but a severe neoliberal work regime may jeopardise the operation of religious forces in the public sphere. Eventually, by considering how the performance-based and productivity-oriented neoliberal culture intersects with gendered organisational norms in Korea, this study makes a novel contribution to earlier literature discussing the relationship between religion and work.

Data and methods

This study mainly draws on in-depth interviews with 20 women aged between their late twenties and late thirties. For over 7 months (June 2015 to December 2015), I interviewed current and former members of a Seoul-based megachurch (World Vision Church (WVC)). WVC represents the largest religious tradition, Christianity, in South Korea, making up approximately 28% of the population (Gallup Korea, 2015). Established in 1986, WVC is a mainstream evangelical Protestant megachurch in Korea, with chapters in many other nations. WVC was selected for the study because the church has established its reputation as a well-known megachurch that gains the attention of university students and young professionals. Interview data helped me to understand the interview subjects’ life journeys, including religious upbringing, educational trajectories, and transitional processes in the workplace, in a holistic way. A rich description of their life episodes and stories showed a complex operation of religious and professional identities that shapes their everyday lives. To recruit interviewees, I used snowball sampling, recruiting people who were current or former members of the WVC.

For the recruitment, I relied on some of my formal and informal networks, so reaching out to members who were willing to participate in interviews was relatively easy. My identity and role as a former member of the church facilitated the smooth flow of the interviews. That is, participants could freely deliver honest accounts of their biographical trajectories and work-related experiences. In the data analysis stage, I tried to carry out balanced analyses of their personal stories and investigate how their life stories could be understood within the larger socio-economic and cultural structure of Korea, distancing myself from the insider perspective. Although my position as a former member of the church has made me build a better rapport with my interviewees, I tried to account their stories and thoughts with a sociological perspective.

Considering that some interview participants did not live in Seoul at the time of the interview, I used online communication tools, such as Skype or KakaoTalk (a Korean chatting application), for interviewing three people living in the United States. Apart from the people who were not available for face-to-face interviews, I conducted in-depth interviews with the majority of the participants in church, café, or home. With the agreement of the interviewees, interviews were audio-taped and transcribed. My interview covered a series of questions including their education, studying abroad, employment, and religious experiences along with their views on minorities in South Korea. However, for this study, I specifically used responses about their religious journeys, personal religious practices, group activities, such as small group meetings, bible studies, and their career transition, challenges, and struggles at the workplace. Much of the data used in this study draws on questions regarding their transition to work, challenges regarding work–religious conflict and communication issues, and coping strategies in the course of their career development. Each interview was conducted for 1–3 hours, and a background information sheet was used to collect basic demographic information (e.g. age, nationality, occupation, and education).

For this study, I specifically used interviews with 20 people, who were born from 1981 to 1990, falling into the category of Millennials in South Korea. All of the participants hold a bachelor’s or higher degree, with 13 people having a bachelor’s degree and 7 with a master’s degree. At the time of the interview, my participants had various jobs: 12 office workers, 4 teachers, 2 journalists/producers, 1 consultant, and 1 small business owner. In terms of class background, all of my participants, except one person who identified ‘don’t know’, reported that they belong to the middle class. For the data analysis, I tried to have an inductive strategy, using grounded theory which seeks to generate a set of concepts and linkage of concepts (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). I first read the interview transcripts and conducted open coding to understand repeatedly emerging two themes. Then, I turned into axis coding to discover the social and organisational contexts that shape women’s different ways of negotiation at workplaces.

Sacralising the meaning of work in less neoliberal-oriented workplaces

Some stories by evangelical women show that religion offers cultural meanings, which they feel destined to use their professions as pathways to become better and mature religious members. These adults’ understandings attest that religion offers meanings in their delayed job search process, guiding their attitudes to their own tasks and helping them rethink the degree to which they express religious faith in a formal office environment. This type of strategy appears more frequently among women working in less neoliberal-oriented companies or workplaces with less emphasis on performance and productivity. This strategy was obtained through the two mechanisms below.

Displaying the narratives of calling in and outside the workplace

Some of my participants began to seriously think about their faith and employment in the drawn-out job search period. What clearly stood out among young women was that their delayed job-seeking process did not lessen their religious faith, but some adults interpreted their life trajectories from a religious perspective. Feeling lost in the prolonged period of landing a job, some young women searched for the meaning of ‘delayed job search period’, not only for the meaning of ‘job itself’. Hayoon, now working as a full-time journalist in a foreign-affiliated media corporate, went through about several years of job-seeking periods until she achieved her dream. One thing that made her endure the drawn-out transition was a calling to be persistent and keep trying to achieve her dream of making a just society.

Nahyun is another case that epitomises how religious identity operates as a way for lay people to sacralise their delayed transition period. Nahyun, born and raised in a Christian family and an active member of WVC, is currently working as a specialised music teacher at a high school. After spending several years as an unemployed student after university graduation, she thought seriously about the meaning of her life and prayed hard to have a sense of guidance and endure the endless stress and emotional exhaustion. Nahyun said,

I studied for a long time to become a teacher. Spending many years doing this, I had thought about why God sent me to school, meditated about it (…)

Like Nahyun, participants who practised moralising frequently used the language of ‘calling and relationship with God’ to define their reasons for applying for certain jobs, enduring the delayed job search periods, and the meaning of repetitive tasks at work. Testimonies by my interviewees showed that the delayed period eventually strengthened their determination to be a better religious adherent and their attachment to God, promising that they would make an extra effort to be ‘desirable religious adherents’, even after employment. Hayoon and Nahyun told me that the majority of the employees at her workplace are women, which makes them less hesitant to express their non-work, religious identity. (*Note for editor: this paragraph was indented in a print view, and I think it should not be indented!)

Kyumin, who is a professional designer with several female colleagues, also said that her belief system is firmly grounded in Christian morality. In addition, she has not strayed from her faith since starting her career, although she has witnessed many such cases. Since her undergraduate time, she has been an active member of WVC, enjoying transcribing the entire Bible several times and participating in outreach activities to many foreign countries, such as Russia. Like the other female designers in her team, she felt that the work environment was women friendly, where she could preserve her religiosity without much conflict. Another woman, Boyoon, said,

[God] just opened everything and I feel thankful (…) I did not have many concerns, but he showed me a direction (…) I also met good Christian colleagues who shared similar visions.

She is now working as a music therapist, saying that overall, her work experience occurred in female-dominated places where 90% of her colleagues were women. Like Boyoon, these women frequently use expressions showing how they put themselves before the gaze of God, such as ‘God opened a door’ and ‘God sent me (…)’. Their stories constantly present God in their sense-making of employment and the aftermath of professional development. Despite their difficult job search periods or challenging employment, women workers continue their narratives of enduring the process through an intimate relationship with God. Narratives of calling by Korean evangelical women showed that not only religious leaders but also lay members utilise the narratives of calling, ‘being called by God’, to make sense of the job. The language of calling is widespread discourse among Christian leaders and young evangelical people in Korea, and my informants’ use of calling demonstrates how they assemble evangelical and professional identities without much tension in a less neoliberal-oriented workplace.

Participating in expressive activities to bridge the faith to work

Some women revealed more explicit activities in which their evangelical identity helped them to find moral reasons behind tasks and work. Having attended WVC for 10 years, Nahyun is a devoted member. Being delayed in getting a job and studying for 2 years for passing the exam, she stated that ‘God opened a door for an entry into a job’, and she had a feeling of obligation to appreciate the opportunity and was determined to express her blissful feelings and faith. While she was preparing for her exam, she thought about setting up prayer meetings with one or two students if she could in the future. After finally passing the exam, she promised that she would do something meaningful for the expansion of the Kingdom of God:

In my third year at school, there were also several Christians among the first, second, and third-year students, and I was quite close to them. So, I started the prayer meetings and they went really well. Approximately twenty or twenty-five students came and attended the prayer meetings, during lunchtime once a week. We prayed together, encouraged each other, shared messages, and worshiped for two and a half years (…) We have to make an extra effort to gather students, inspire moral responsibility and vision, and encourage them to be leaders (…)

Taking evangelical identity as a core one, Nahyun used moral language but also implicitly translated the goals of prayer meetings into a universal language, such as ‘encouraging students to be a leader’, ‘inspiring moral responsibility and vision’, and ‘a way to be a good teacher’. Similar to Schmalzbauer’s (1999) multivocal bridging vocabularies, her expressions showed a broad overlap between evangelical and professional identities. Her use of language reveals shared values between evangelical and professional identities of being a good teacher. For Nahyun, evangelical identity imbues the job with moral guidance, which is something more than seeking monetary interests or job security but rather giving a vision to students. She told me that the competitive Korean society is not an easy soil to plant that kind of culture. Nahyun said,

the prayer meeting that I made is (…) I do not think I made it. God responded and achieved what I have prayed for a long time (…) Our prayer meeting was ‘Do Dream [Du-d-lim]’, which has two meanings, dreaming and knocking (…) One student came up with the name. I was so touched by her idea.

Again, Nahyun’s school has many female teachers where she could freely express her non-work identities. (*Note for editor: Please combine this sentence and the next paragraph (Jeongsoo’s account -) in one paragraph!)

Jeongsoo’s account also offered an adequate case in which occupations were sacralised and sanctified by positioning herself in God’s gaze, with a strong desire to express herself in a workplace. Jeongsoo used to be an active member of WVC, a leader of small group meetings, and a trainee with Youth With A Mission in Kansas, USA, and now, she is a professional worker at a foreign-affiliated consulting company. Owing to her commitment to active civic involvement, she volunteered as a Korean language teacher for migrant workers during her undergraduate study. With a sizable number of fellow Christian colleagues, her life at work is amicable and satisfactory, but she feels a need to express her religious identity more. Jeongsoo stated,

More than half of my team at my work is Christian and it provides an atmosphere where I can freely talk about Sunday service and church without any constraints. Of course, there are people who do not believe. I do not try to evangelise every day (…) for some reason, I feel guilty (…)

Jeongsoo is unique given that she recognises her commitment and responsibility to spread the biblical message to others. Korean Christianity emphasises a spirit-filled, devotionalistic, and salvation-focused evangelical tradition. This characteristic of Korean Christianity encourages members to actively participate in missionary activities and the spreading of the gospel. Growing up in this environment, evangelical identity has continuously been her master identity since her undergraduate years. Jeongsoo knows how Christians are perceived by other people, which made her determined again to live a good life. Said Jeongsoo, ‘People watch us (…) [Jesus] believers’. With many female colleagues, her description of identifying past and present religious stories in and outside work seemed to be not threatened, continuously showing an interest in expressing it at her workplace.

Another similar case is Hayoon who was a former staff member of a Christian-affiliated NGO. Although she does not speak to or evangelise people on the street, she talks about her evangelical faith and belief with the people surrounding her, particularly colleagues and friends who used to be members of but no longer attend a church. She had some critical thoughts about the vision of her workplace and expressed some pity. As a voluntary self-help organisation, her NGO sends material and financial resources to children suffering from poverty in South-East Asia. Although the NGO was Christian-affiliated with many women workers, her organisation avoids mentioning ‘God’ or ‘official Christian affiliation’ when naming their voluntary actions because of concerns about the discontinuation of financial support from some donors.

In such ways, participants’ accounts present ways in which religiosity informs professional identity, offering directions and purposes behind job search period and work in a secular environment. Furthermore, they participate in expressing evangelical identity verbally and non-verbally. These women constantly linked their work stories to their Christian upbringing, positioning themselves in an intimate relationship with God and socialising with a network of similar-minded friends. Some of these women’s quests for moral meaning in secular professions, including their delayed transitions, reveal how religion resists modern professionalism in certain contexts. Moreover, their description of work only minimally includes the stress associated with overwork, communication problems, and severe pressure among peers. However, they mostly informed me of organisational contexts where their colleagues are women with reasonable workloads. These workplaces include public schools, foreign-affiliated firms, and NGOs among others, which guarantee relative job security and less competitive culture and shield employees from the neoliberal competition and pressure.

Compartmentalising religion and work in neoliberal-oriented workplaces

Another group of participants has perceived that religion is something that they have to discard nor constantly address in their positions. Rather, these individuals view that they need to have balanced management of the two separate spheres of church and workplace, respecting the rules and practices of each field. They manage the two identities quite harmoniously without much conflict because religion is primarily a separate thing from being a desirable professional in neoliberal-oriented workplaces and something that can be compartmentalised. Evangelical women professionals maintain this view principally to understand workplace culture and practices in the Korean context through two cultural actions below.

Setting the flexible boundaries of religious and non-religious world

The journey to working out how to compartmentalise these two identities is never easy and involves many challenging moments. Social gatherings and the collective culture crystallise at times, causing more evangelical and professional identity conflict for some adults and making them recognise their dual positions in workplaces. A frequently cited example is the case of heavy-drinking sessions (Hoesik) in a collective culture. That is, participating in communal dinners and drinking sessions is a marker of being a grown-up and socially desirable employee in Korean society. Kyungjoo, who works in a big corporate in Korea, discussed how much she suffered from the collective drinking culture at work:

The culture of drinking, especially in Korea, is unique, and it’s not drinking lightly but very heavily. Also, you have to play very badly, if you don’t drink until you vomit, it means you didn’t drink properly, and through that, people become closer to each other, but I didn’t think all this is at all desirable.

At the beginning of her career at a big corporate with several male supervisors and colleagues, Kyungjoo’s memory of forced drinking sessions was not positive. She elaborated further examples of being stressed by continuous humiliation from male workers about not being integrated into the culture, which made her reflect on how to balance secular work and evangelical culture. This collective routine, hoesik, is one of the masculine organisational cultures where many women professionals are not fond of:

One older guy harassed me a lot just because I go to church, you know there are some bad pastors, and he said, ‘Do you even know about this? Church is going this far’, and he also said that the thing he thinks about Christians is that they have hypocritical personalities, and all this attack came to me just because I didn’t drink. This kind of case happened a lot.. I was attacked a lot.

Her case shows that the gendered workplace culture, which consists of masculine norms with non-religious male colleagues, creates tensions between her evangelical and professional identities. Despite the tensions with male colleagues, rather than completely abandoning her faith, she ended up understanding how to manage the situation temporarily by having more flexible views: ‘Later on, I began to understand them [and my male colleagues], and I also began to realise how hard it is to keep one’s conviction in Korean culture, and [I understand that] avoiding drinking can be weird’. Being a good drinker can mean an employee who can flexibly plunge into and conform to the secular office culture, downplaying independence and individualism but complying with an organisational hierarchy respected in Korea. She finally understood why other male workers voluntarily play the role of an aggressive drinker, and then, she started to drink a little, with food.

Minjeong also stated that she did not like drinking sessions where some senior members forcefully invited her and made her drink, but eventually, she learned how to maintain some distance from people without too much conflict: ‘They have their own [lifestyles] and at that time I thought that I could not change or needed to do so (…) It was not difficult’. Minjeong used to have ‘blind obedience to her religion’, in her own words, but now, she has a more balanced way of life by separating her socialised self and her religious self. One woman also said,

I do not strictly follow the rule that I should not drink at all … there is an adult play culture for them (…) my colleagues all know that I am Christian who goes to church diligently, and dislikes drinking. So, I drink moderately at dinner with colleagues. I say that I do not drink, and then my other colleagues ask me, ‘because you go to church?’ and then they simply understand.

Viewing drinking as an ‘adult play culture’ rather than an ‘evil act’, she seems to move beyond a stark distinction of the secular-office world and sacred religious world. She did not view the secular world as a contaminated place consisting of evil actions, but temporarily understand other people’s actions with flexible thinking. Rather than drawing a clear boundary between sacred religious places and secular workplaces, she sets a behavioural boundary for herself to ‘drink moderately’ at the workplace, where it does not restrict either her evangelical or her professional identity. Moreover, Yoonjoo who used to work in a large company said that she had to drink at communal drinking sessions somehow in competitive and masculine work culture. However, she ended up learning how to have a loose standard for her to assimilate into a professional world in a way not to abandon her evangelical identity. The examples of Kyungjoo, Minjeong, and Yoonjoo all show that their actions began to change when they worked as professionals in a competitive work environment with a greater number of males.

Turning evangelical language off and showing good behaviours at work

The strategy of some women is to turn evangelical language off and show good behaviours in a secular work environment. Evangelical women address the change in their thoughts while growing up as professional workers outside church and university and need to properly show their evangelical identity through everyday actions in a public space. They used to believe that there is only one truth and still insist on this opinion. However, they now know how to temporarily switch off their customary words and phrases commonly used in church but respect other views. One woman was nominally known for her Christian identity but found ways to respect other colleagues’ choices and also gain respect from them. She said,

When I was young, I had a dichotomous thought through which it was quite easy to make sense of the world. It was either A or B. It was relatively convenient to choose. Yet now (…) it is so hard to choose. It can be either C, D, or even F … I talked too much before because I had such a definite, obvious value system. I had a faith I believed in, my religious faith. But now I feel that I am less talkative (…)? I cannot judge. My thoughts cannot be only standard.

Her remarks about her personal change of talking less about her religion show some ways in which young evangelical Protestants respond to pluralistic values and truths. Although having grown up with a belief in one truth, she tries to express evangelical language less, mingles with other people nicely, and shows kindness in day-to-day life. To my question whether people nag on her because of their evangelical status, she answered that she tried to be fair and strict in terms of work but still to be nice and kind to her colleagues and other people.

This way of compartmentalising evangelical and professional identities appeared in a way to express evangelical faith and principles less and rather display it in a behavioural way in their workplace. Some women attempted to redefine the core value of evangelical Protestantism and carefully choose situations in which they want to express belief. Like Nahyun, who tries to be a friendly, virtuous person at work, working at a bank with many male colleagues, Yeonjeong also advocated that evangelical identity is nothing if you are not a good person outside the church. Yeonjeong said that ‘What I feel is important now is to develop a better personality and I think how I interact with others and am a good person at the workplace is more important’.Yeonjeong stated that incremental conflicts appear when religious employees recklessly submit to corporate success models and follow unjust practices (e.g. deception), which is evidence of secularised Christianity in Korea. In her eyes, an important thing is to show a kind and generous personality rather than to express verbally a nominal status of Christians.

As Yeonjeong emphasised the significance of personality, Christian faith in wealth and prosperity, following unjust practices and drinking culture, can yield severe challenges to harmonising and aligning religiosity and professionalism at work. The reason is that other colleagues may have a suspicious view of their integrity in general. Yeonjeong said that

Christianity in Korea is too much blamed and ignored by other non-believers, so displaying my religious affiliation became something I was ashamed of (…) So, when you say that you are a Christian, people might think that you are one of the selfish people who seek their own interests, distinguish from the competitive work environment, and tell you to go to church together someday.

As Minjeong and Nahyun went through their processes of rethinking and redefining Christian identity, staying away from ‘blind obedience’ to pastors or church authority, Yeonjeong also seriously thought about what it means to be a good, successful Christian in the workplace, particularly when she works with male colleagues in competition, emphasising neoliberal work culture.

An important characteristic of people who fell into this pattern of selective compartmentalising is their organisational and occupational situations. That is, employees are relatively pressured to follow the organisation’s goals in a regimented collective office culture, which is aligned with masculine characteristics, along with competitive work routine and collective drinking and eating cultures, such as big conglomerates and banks. Some of these women’s efforts to adapt to and engage in the workplace present how evangelical identity is being culturally managed, negotiated, and arranged in response to the neoliberal and gendered work culture emphasising performance and competitiveness.

Conclusion

The findings of this study show that women employ two strategies for the alignment of their identities in neoliberal-oriented and less neoliberal-oriented workplaces. First, ‘sacralising the meaning of work’ is a way of seeing religiosity as a critical part of becoming a better and more mature person through a job and is achieved through the narrative of calling and expressive activities. By achieving religious selfhood through religious expression and self-reflection and meanings in their everyday lives, their work turns into a means to becoming a better evangelical member. Such strategies appeared more frequently in female-friendly organisational contexts, where many employees are women with a less masculine work ethic and moderate, reasonable workloads.

Second, ‘compartmentalising work and religion’ is a perspective where religion is viewed as an identity that can be temporarily separated or properly expressed at a workplace. Moreover, in this perspective, religion is obtained through the ideas of setting flexible boundaries and by turning evangelical language off and showing good behaviours at the workplace. Selective compartmentalising was more frequent in organisational contexts where male and female employees work at a balanced rate. Moreover, employees feel relatively pressured to follow the organisation goals in a regimented collective and masculine office culture along with a competitive work routine and workload.

Although individuals likely narrate one theme more dominantly than others, notably, these categories are not mutually exclusive. My analysis shows the dominant patterns that distinguish the major characteristics of individual strategies but do not make an absolute prediction by classifying individuals exclusively into one category. The findings of this study are based on relatively small numbers of samples. Thus, more research should look into the complex interactions among neoliberalism, labour market, and gender to have a more comprehensive understanding of the situations and the confidence of the findings. The two strategies that women used in the study may offer conceptual and theoretical insights to other researchers and benefit researchers who are interested in the scholarly dialogues on religion, gender, and neoliberalism.

The implications of this study speak broadly to the literature on religion and work and the work–faith integration literature (Lynn et al., 2011; Miller et al., 2019; Park et al., 2014; Walker, 2013). Although a recent study shows that religious traditions integrate neoliberal forces (Wrenn, 2019), there has been little research on how individuals respond to neoliberal restructuring, and on how their experiences may differ according to gender. By focusing on women professionals’ identity alignment, the findings of the present research suggest that the performance-based and productivity-oriented neoliberal culture has some masculine characteristics. Workplaces where neoliberal culture dominates may offer a challenging environment for women professionals to openly share their non-professional identities, including religious identity. Despite such challenges, the findings of this research also suggest that women professionals still strive to unite their professional and non-professional religious identities, implying that religion does not simply fade away, but survives. Furthermore, the research also suggests that religion may harmonise and synchronise better within less neoliberal-oriented environments, which are more favourable to female employees.