Justice in the Workplace: Overcoming Ethical Dilemmas

Abstract

bloc. Following the line of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘‘the end of history,’’ many academicians in the United States appear to believe that Communist ideology, even if it was dangerous, evaporated at the end of the Cold War, even though one-fifth of the world’s population has remained under the iron grip of a Communist Party that is indeed totalitarian with a global reach, and its threats to liberal democracies have increased in recent years. Clearly following a leftist line, Chapters Three through Five are framed in terms of race, gender, and sexuality and are critical of conservative religious coalitions in American politics. The framing issue or biased political position aside, it is actually interesting to read about Black entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. and White celebrities Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor converting from Protestantism to Judaism in the 1960s, Black boxer Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali to Islam (the Nation of Islam in particular, although later he changed to Sunni Islam) in the 1960s, and Chuck Colson (a former advisor of President Richard Nixon) and several others to Evangelical Protestantism in the 1970s. These highly publicized conversions variously attracted and repelled many people, as described by the author. As time goes on, however, it has become accepted by the American public as normal for Americans to convert to these and other religions. The author details the initial disbelief of Ali’s conversion by his own father and the media. Eventually, however, Davis admits that ‘‘Ali represented the greatness of American athleticism and the strength of American religious freedom when he lit the Olympic torch in 1996 in Atlanta’’ (p. 176). Given the eventual acceptance or affirmation of Muhammad Ali by the American public, I think it is right to say that religious freedom in the United States has in fact been enlarged to be inclusive of various religions. As a matter of fact, the anti-cult paranoia also died down by the 1990s. Religion in America has changed greatly in the twentieth century. In recent years, a significant proportion of Americans have given up self-identification with any religion. Which secularisms have substituted for their past religion? How much has Communism or militant atheism crept up on American society or politics again? What about religious conversions in other parts of the world, especially in post-Communist Eastern Europe and the rapidly developing economies of East and Southeast Asia? This historical study serves as a call for scholars to carry out more objective, unbiased, social scientific studies of conversion across religions and religion-like secularisms in the United States and around the globe.