Chapter 6: Abrahamization of Hospitality Services to Achieve Christian Formation of Staff in the Australian Hospitality Workplace

Organizations are becoming increasingly secularized as we progress through the third millennium. Laws governing discrimination are enacted to protect many aspects of a potential employee’s identity which may include nationality, religion, ethnicity, and gender. The religious composition of the Australian workplace is ever changing and the effects of legal protections, such as anti-discrimination laws, present individual entrepreneurs with ethical, socio-cultural, and legal challenges. Thus, the organizational staff in a nation built upon Judeo-Christian foundations are becoming decreasingly incentivized to deliver Abrahamic hospitality. Contributing to this are factors such as declining birth rates and increased immigration. This chapter explores the development of Australian workplaces to influence the formation of Judeo-Christian staff as well as the potential to influence non-Judeo-Christian staff in gaining appreciation for Australia’s Judeo-Christian foundations as a nation, while also remaining within statutory boundaries. The industry context which will be applied in this chapter is hospitality as a component of tourism, in which tourism stakeholders’ staff may play a role in presenting Australia’s Judeo-Christian identity through a tourism lens with the application of Abrahamic hospitality to guests, international and domestic, as discussed in the book of Genesis. Because Islam, an Abrahamic faith (together with Christianity and Judaism), is growing in Australia, the term Abrahamic is applied as a blanket terminology for this trilogy. Finally, the “CORE” model is applied to serve as a new theoretical framework to be applied in future spiritual hospitality/tourism research.