When God Goes to Work : Most Americans say they are religious--but not on the job. Indeed, when people take their beliefs to the workplace, reaction can be swift and censorious.

When God shows up at work, there often is hell to pay.

Consider the tribulations of Monte D. Tucker, an analyst with the state Department of Education in Sacramento. In 1988, Tucker developed, partly on his own time, a computer program that expedited work in his office. Proud of his creation and grateful for the inspiration of prayer in putting the program together, he electronically signed it “Monte D. Tucker, Servant of the Lord Christ Jesus.”

His boss hit the roof, says Tucker, adding that the incident spawned a host of continuing troubles, including fights over his displaying religious material in his office cubicle. Tucker found no solace in federal court, where a district judge has twice ruled against his on-the-job expressions of faith.

Or ponder the trials of Dr. Joost Sluis, another Sacramento resident, who alleges he was fired from a medical group earlier this year because he sometimes mentioned religion to patients who seemed emotionally troubled. A complaint to his employer by a patient’s attorney led to his firing, the 68-year-old orthopedist charges. He is exploring ways to fight his dismissal.

Tucker and Joost are members of an uncommon breed, foot soldiers who wage lonely battles over religion in the workplace.

And, mostly, they lose.

In general, Americans believe in separation of work and faith, a belief strengthened by court decisions over the last several decades. When anyone brandishes religion in the office, reaction is often swift and censorious.

Frequently, employees are muzzled, threatened with dismissal or fired. In the rare instances when an employer imposes religion on employees, a disgruntled atheist or agnostic is usually ready to make a federal case out of it. Indeed, retribution against overt religion in the workplace--public or private--is so reflexive, one Christian attorney laments, that constitutional protection of religion “is one of the best-kept secrets” in the nation.

This summer, in what may be a statistically inexplicable burst--or leading indicators of coming social change--Tucker and Joost have plenty of company. A series of well-publicized episodes has made it seem as if the Supreme Being has been putting in overtime:

* The Dodgers’ high-priced Darryl Strawberry, who recently became a “born-again” Christian, blamed his much-publicized slump on his new mellow outlook, which made him less aggressive with bat and glove. Normally, Strawberry’s conversion probably wouldn’t have gotten much attention because Christian athletes are far from rare. But his slump--broken by home runs in two consecutive games--coincided with a long string of losses that threatened to churn the Dodgers’ field of dreams into a slough of despond.

* Los Angeles Assistant Police Chief Robert L. Vernon, who supervises 80% of the police force, has been under sustained fire, accused of allowing his fundamentalist beliefs to sometimes guide his work.

* Last month, Buena Park Junior High School teacher Philip Fivgas was suspended for inserting quotes from the Bible into the school yearbook. Meanwhile, in Earlimart in Central California, teacher Lamar Hagan resigned under pressure after he showed an anti-abortion film to junior high math students.

* In another anti-abortion incident, Michael Gerrety, the Roman Catholic police chief of Redwood Falls, Minn., was jailed in Fargo, N.D., for a May 31 protest at that state’s only abortion clinic. After being suspended as chief in June, Gerrety was fired this month because he remained in jail and was not cooperating with authorities.

* The Roman Catholic upbringing of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas raised questions of whether his religious background might influence his decisions on abortion.

Despite these incidents, the evidence is compelling that no matter how fervent their beliefs, few workers are exposed to or themselves flaunt a relationship with the Almighty at work.

A Los Angeles Times nationwide poll of 1,439 adults last month found that an overwhelming majority of Americans, 81%, seldom discuss their personal religious views or hear their fellow workers or employers discuss their own views. Moreover, 82% said they have never been discriminated against in the workplace because of religion. Of the remainder, 10% said they have never worked and 1% weren’t sure. Seven percent believe that they have been discriminated against in some way because of their religious beliefs. The margin of error was plus or minus 3%.

(Eighty-six percent said religion is very important or somewhat important in their lives, contrasted with 13% who said religion is not important. One percent didn’t know whether it was important.

(The poll buttresses others that perennially validate this country as the most religious among the developed nations. For instance, polls have shown that about 40% of Americans attend church once a week, more than three times the number attending in Great Britain and France.)

The religious neutrality of the workplace has evolved through a series of court decisions that both support individual expressions of religious belief and guarantee freedom of disbelief. These decisions apparently fit the tenor of the times, making most workplaces wholly secular.

“There’s almost an assumption that you can’t be a religious person on the job,” says John Stewart, a Los Angeles Christian radio talk show host who organized a June rally supporting Vernon.

“The live-and-let-live notion is fairly widespread. . . . Don’t force me and I won’t force you,” noted Marc Stern, an attorney with the American Jewish Congress in New York.

Others point out that a combination of court decisions and general reluctance among employers to get involved in religious squabbles has given most employees the freedom to observe religious holidays and other requirements of their faiths. The benchmark here has been a 1963 Supreme Court ruling that states could not deny unemployment benefits to Seventh-Day Adventists who refused to work on Saturdays.

“If a bank had somebody who, on their own time, practiced satanic religion, they couldn’t fire him,” says Michael Josephson, an attorney and founder of a local ethics institute.

Los Angeles Police Commissioner Stanley Sheinbaum expresses a similar view about assistant chief Vernon: “His religion is his own business, and I sort of object to the portrayal of his religion as extremist.”.

Violations of these standards nearly always occur among smaller employers where the costs of compliance are seen as an economic burden, the experts say.

“I think (large) employers have less difficulty in dealing with the church-state issue because they’re neither church nor state,” says Doug Mirell, regional president of the American Jewish Congress, based in Los Angeles. “They don’t want to rock the boat. They don’t want bad (public relations).”

Ironically, the Supreme Court, widely perceived as narrowing the gap between church and state, rocked the boat last year when it ruled against a religious practice, potentially threatening the live-and-let-live standard.

The court ruled that the Native American Church’s use of peyote in religious ceremonies is not a constitutionally protected right. In his opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia delivered a broadside against religious practices that clash with secular law.

After the ruling, a number of religious practices that had been allowed were banned--including a federal exemption for Sikhs, who wear turbans, from wearing hard hats on construction sites.

The decision alarmed both conservative religious groups and civil libertarians, and prompted the introduction of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which would overturn the Supreme Court decision against the Native American Church, now pending in Congress.

Nonetheless, according to the experts, there still is general agreement that the vast majority of workers have the right to be faithful to their religions--as long as they do it quietly. The flip side of the consensus is that employees--and bosses for that matter--should not proselytize on the job. Or let religion influence the way work is performed.

“The (religious) influence may be subtle, but once it becomes explicit, it’s beyond the bounds,” according to Wade Clark Roof, a religion professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“People who want to use the leverage their job gives them . . . can’t do that,” says Stern of the American Jewish Congress.

Stern cited a 1988 federal appeals court decision against a mining equipment manufacturer that required its employees to attend devotional services once a week. An atheist on the work force, who was told he could “sleep or read the newspaper during services,” eventually sued. In Redwood Falls, Minn., many residents apparently believed that former police chief Gerrety also crossed the line. “He could have protested until the cows came home, but he didn’t have to get himself arrested,” one resident told the Associated Press. “If I (were) him, I would head for the hills and hide. People are going to say, ‘How could you do this when you’re sworn to uphold the law?’ ”

In a similar vein, Stern and others argue that, ideally, judges and government policy-makers should not let personal religious beliefs influence actions on the job. But in such cases, the line against undue influence is often difficult to discern, they add.

Stern concedes that it probably is impossible to entirely exclude religion in government decision-making without requiring “people to be schizophrenic.”

When the issue of religion comes up regarding nominees for court positions--as it has for Clarence Thomas--or for elective candidates, Stern asserts: “I don’t think it’s relevant what his religious training or beliefs are.” But he quickly adds that it is appropriate to ask if candidates or nominees hold “religious beliefs that would color decisions.”

This summer’s handful of job-related religious incidents may not be a trend, but they might be evidence of what one observer says is a growing impulse not to hide shining convictions under a basket.

“You’re going to see guys like the Vernons popping up more and more,” says Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Cromartie, co-editor of the 1987 book “Piety & Politics: Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Confront the World,” notes that since their heyday in the Reagan Administration, religious activists have shifted their focus from the national to the local level.

Now religious activists are telling themselves that they “‘need to be concerned about not who the President is but where we live. . . . We had our fling with Reagan, and now we’re just trying to do it at home where we have some influence and have some numbers,”’ Cromartie explains.

If this strategy proves durable, it could create a climate in which on-the-job activism might become more visible, he adds: “There are a lot of people out there getting more courage to say, ‘This is what I believe.’ ”

Although he can’t quantify it, Steven T. McFarland, director of the Christian Legal Society’s Center for Law and Religious Freedom, agrees that there is “greater awareness among religious people of the need to integrate their faith into the workplace.”

McFarland adds that his center receives many calls related to religion on the job. He believes that nearly all involve legitimate complaints regarding religious rights. But he concedes that many religion-related job conflicts arise because “a lot of folks make unnecessary lines in the sand” and that “indiscretion, lack of diplomacy or obnoxiousness” may be to blame.