Does being a Christian in business mean you’ll never have to fire someone? Of course not. But that’s one of the many subtexts that is detectable in the recent attention being given to this story: “CEO of Christian Publishing Firm Fires 25 Employees after Anonymous Email.”

Now I don’t know any more details than what is contained in the Romenesko report, and it may well be that CEO Ryan Tate acted in an imprudent and incorrect fashion following his receipt of an anonymous email.

One of the things that’s interesting to me, however, is the implicit sense that because you pray with someone (“corporately,” in this case), you can’t fire them. Or at least not right afterward. That’s what the lede of the Romanesko report seems to convey, at least implicitly. Or it at municates the dissonance between prayer at an “all-hands meeting” and then going “ballistic” afterwards. In that case, it really might really be more about the particular actions of Tate than it is about broader conceptions of how prayer and work mix.

But is there a sense in which there’s some broader assumption that Christian businesspeople do things differently? I think so. Does it mean, however, that they don’t fire people? I don’t think so. But it may mean that they pray for (or even with) people before they fire them.

Again, being a Christian businessperson probably means you don’t fire people without appropriate cause. I don’t really want to debate the cause in this particular case. But it certainly doesn’t seem to mean that you don’t fire people ever.