Fábio Ferreira Nascimento is a Brazilian attorney and PhD candidate in law at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
A few years ago, if someone had suggested that multinational corporations would become important laboratories for religious freedom, many scholars of law and religion would have been skeptical.
After all, corporations are not churches. They are not courts. They are not the democratic or civil society institutions we usually associate with protecting freedom of religion or belief (FoRB). And yet that is precisely where some of the most interesting FoRB-related developments are taking place today.
In the article “Mediating Religious Intolerance in Corporate Workplaces,”[1] published in the International Journal for Religious Freedom, I argue that one of the most overlooked institutions promoting religious freedom today is not a public body or a religious organization but an internal corporate network: the faith-oriented Employee Resource Group (ERG).
ERGs are still unfamiliar to many outside the business world, yet they raise an intriguing question: what happens when the everyday work of religious freedom shifts from courtrooms and legislatures to conference rooms and corporate offices?
The Limits of Law
Strong legal protections remain the cornerstone of religious freedom in the workplace. In the United States, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits religious discrimination and requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations for employees’ sincerely held religious beliefs unless doing so would impose an undue hardship. The US Supreme Court’s decision in Groff v. DeJoy (2023) significantly strengthened that protection by clarifying that employers must demonstrate a substantial burden—not merely an inconvenience or de minimis burden—to deny a religious accommodation.
Across the Atlantic, the Equality Act 2010 protects religion or belief as one of the United Kingdom’s protected characteristics. As the UK’s Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service explains, employers must prevent direct and indirect discrimination, harassment, and victimization based on religion or belief.
Such legal frameworks are indispensable. Without them, many employees would have little recourse when faced with discrimination.
But law has limits. It is very good at establishing minimum standards. It is much less effective at building trust.
A statute cannot teach a manager how to respond when an employee requests time for Friday prayers or asks for a schedule adjustment during Ramadan. A judicial decision cannot create curiosity about a colleague’s religious practices or encourage respectful conversations between employees who know very little about one another’s beliefs.
Most workplace conflicts involving religion do not begin with hostility. They begin with uncertainty.
A supervisor may worry about granting accommodation because they are unsure where the legal boundaries lie. A coworker may unintentionally make an insensitive joke. An employee may simply decide that it is easier to remain silent about an important part of their identity than risk being misunderstood.
By the time a complaint reaches a human resources department—or worse, a courtroom—the opportunity to build mutual understanding has often been lost.
This uncertainty gap has spurred my research: between legal rights and everyday workplace experience lies a space that law alone cannot fully occupy.
Why Religion Is Different
Religion presents a challenge that differs from most other dimensions of workplace diversity. Many organizations today have well-developed strategies for discussing race, gender, disability, or sexual orientation. Religion, by contrast, often makes employers uneasy.
Part of the hesitation comes from a long-standing assumption that religion belongs exclusively in the private sphere. Employers worry that discussing religion will invite conflict, accusations of favoritism, or unwanted proselytizing.
Yet religion rarely stays private. It shapes when people pray and worship, what they eat, which holidays they observe, how they dress, when they fast, and sometimes even the language they use to describe ethical questions at work. For many believers, faith is not simply one characteristic among many—it is a lens through which much of life is understood.
This creates a paradox. Religion is legally protected but often culturally invisible.
Employers know they cannot discriminate on religious grounds, yet many remain uncertain about how to engage religion positively. As a result, religion has historically occupied an awkward place within corporate diversity initiatives: acknowledged in policy but often absent from everyday conversations.
That may finally be changing.
The Rise of an Unexpected Institution
The organizations that attempt to fill this gap are not compliance offices or legal departments. They are employee-led communities.
Faith-oriented Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)—sometimes called Business Resource Groups or Faith and Belief Networks—bring together employees who share a religious identity or who simply want to foster greater understanding across religious traditions. Like other affinity groups, they are recognized and supported by their employers, but they focus on a dimension of diversity that has often been overlooked.
At first glance, these groups may not seem particularly significant. They organize discussions, host educational events, celebrate religious holidays, and occasionally advise management on workplace policies. But looking more closely, they perform a function that neither employment law nor corporate policy can easily accomplish. They translate abstract legal rights into everyday organizational practice.
That translation matters because religious freedom is not experienced through statutes alone. It is experienced through countless small decisions: whether an employee feels comfortable requesting an accommodation, whether a manager understands why a religious observance matters, or whether coworkers see religious difference as something normal rather than disruptive.
Faith-oriented ERGs help shape those everyday interactions before they become legal disputes. In other words, they operate as intermediaries between law and culture.
More Than Affinity Groups
One reason these groups deserve greater scholarly attention is that they differ from many traditional employee networks. Their primary purpose is not simply to build community among members of a particular faith. The most successful groups intentionally create opportunities for dialogue across religious traditions.
This distinction is important. A well-designed faith-oriented ERG is not a gathering place for employees to promote a particular religion. On the contrary, nearly every successful example emphasizes two principles from the outset: participation is voluntary, and proselytizing is prohibited.
The objective is not religious persuasion. It is religious literacy.
That may sound like a subtle distinction, but it changes the entire conversation. Instead of asking employees to leave their religious identities at the office door, these groups encourage people to understand one another’s beliefs well enough that ordinary workplace interactions become less awkward, less uncertain, and ultimately less conflictual.
The result is not greater religious visibility for its own sake. The result is a workplace that becomes better equipped to manage religious diversity.
Why Companies Are Paying Attention
One of the more surprising findings of my research is that faith-oriented ERGs are no longer isolated experiments. They are becoming part of a broader shift in how leading companies think about religion in the workplace.
Only a few years ago, explicitly religious employee groups were relatively uncommon. According to the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation’s early REDI Index, religion lagged well behind other diversity categories in corporate inclusion efforts. Many Fortune 100 companies did not even mention religion on their diversity webpages, and only a small fraction had faith-oriented employee networks.
That picture has changed dramatically.
Today, most Fortune 500 companies explicitly include religion or belief within their diversity policies, and an increasing number have established faith-oriented ERGs.
In the United States, this growth has been encouraged by organizations such as Brian Grim’s Religious Freedom & Business Foundation, whose benchmarking initiatives, corporate networks, and promotion of faith-at-work practices have helped move religious inclusion from a relatively neglected dimension of diversity toward a more visible component of workplace inclusion. Similar developments are taking place in the United Kingdom, where faith and belief networks have expanded rapidly across FTSE 100 companies. Organizations such as Faith at Work UK have further encouraged employers to recognize religious inclusion as part of healthy workplace culture rather than an exceptional accommodation.
This evolution is particularly interesting because it has occurred during a period of considerable political debate surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Many observers have assumed that religious inclusion would retreat alongside broader DEI programs, but the evidence is more nuanced.
Some organizations have undoubtedly reduced or restructured their diversity initiatives. Others, however, have continued investing in faith-oriented employee groups. This continued investment may reflect the distinctive position of faith-oriented ERGs within the broader landscape of workplace inclusion. Because ERGs are typically employee-led and relatively inexpensive to maintain, they can provide employers with tangible benefits—including greater employee engagement and belonging, improved religious literacy, and an internal forum for identifying and addressing workplace concerns—without requiring the level of institutional investment associated with broader DEI programs.
ERGs can therefore remain valuable components of workplace culture even as companies reduce, restructure, or rebrand their broader diversity initiatives. More fundamentally, the practical questions surrounding religion have not disappeared. Employees still observe religious holidays. They still request accommodation. They still bring deeply held beliefs into the workplace. In other words, religion remains part of organizational life whether companies choose to acknowledge it or not. Faith-oriented ERGs represent one pragmatic response to that reality.
Beyond Compliance, Toward Competence
Faith-oriented ERGs are increasingly valued for more than helping companies comply with anti-discrimination laws. While legal compliance remains important, many organizations now see these groups as assets that strengthen employee engagement, leadership development, recruitment, retention, and organizational culture.
This shift reflects a broader reality: religious diversity is not simply a legal issue to be managed but a workplace reality to be understood. By promoting religious literacy, facilitating accommodations, and encouraging dialogue, faith-oriented ERGs help organizations navigate religious differences before they become conflicts.
In this sense, these groups serve as intermediate institutions. They bridge the gap between employees and management, translating personal religious needs into practical workplace solutions while helping organizations transform legal obligations into everyday practices. They remind us that protecting religious freedom requires more than good laws—it also requires institutions capable of turning legal rights into lived experience.
An Invisible Infrastructure
A central conclusion of my research is that religious freedom at work can be built long before anyone cites a statute or files a lawsuit. It grows through everyday interactions—when employees feel comfortable requesting accommodations, managers understand different faith traditions, and workplaces foster a culture of respect rather than uncertainty.
Faith-oriented ERGs help create these conditions. They complement, rather than replace, legal protections by translating formal rights into everyday workplace practices. In doing so, they bridge the gap between law and organizational culture, preventing conflicts before they escalate into legal disputes.
For scholars of law and religion, this suggests that we should look beyond courts and legislatures when studying how freedom of religion or belief is realized.
Increasingly, the modern workplace is a principal setting\ where religious pluralism is practiced. By promoting dialogue, religious literacy, and mutual understanding, faith-oriented ERGs quietly strengthen the everyday experience of religious freedom—one conversation, one accommodation, and one workplace at a time.
Reference:
[1] Fábio Ferreira Nascimento, Mediating Religious Intolerance in Corporate Workplaces: The Legal and Strategic Role of Faith-Oriented Employee Resource Groups in Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 Companies, 19(1) INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM 77 (2026).