Can faith and business mix? The BYU Marriott MBA program and Wheatley Institute answer with a resounding yes.
“People are hungry for a way to bring their full selves to work, but in a way that doesn’t hurt their coworkers . . . and helps build mutual understanding,” says MBA director Daniel C. Snow (BA ’96, MBA ’98). BYU’s Faith and Belief at Work case competition gives business students a chance to practice interfaith inclusion in the workplace. The competition was started in 2022 by students Sarah Lyman Smith (BS ’18, MBA ’23) and Matthew B. Young (BA ’16, MBA ’23), who wanted to explore the “intersection of religion and business,” Snow says.
This year’s competition in February attracted support from sponsors like Coca-Cola Consolidated, Walmart, and Delta, as well as competitors from 16 schools across the country. Once they arrive at BYU, teams have 24 hours to research a case—a sponsor-provided, real-life business problem related to faith in the workplace—and then present their ideas to a panel of judges. The top four teams share their ideas in a final presentation, and the top three receive cash prizes. The 2026 winners came from Carnegie Mellon, Duke, and Pepperdine.
While the prestige the competition has earned is exciting, the real goal, says Wheatley Institute religion and human flourishing initiative director Paul W. Lambert (BA ’07), is to help business students learn to thrive in a “religiously pluralistic” workforce. Not only are there business benefits to this, but students also realize they “can bring their own faith [to work] and it’s good to create an environment where [their] brothers and sisters of other faiths thrive too.”
As part of this, visiting competitors of diverse faiths—Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Jewish—mingle and learn more about each other. Carson P. Gilbert (BS ’22), an MBA student on the 2026 competition’s leadership committee, especially loves watching the teams of different faiths pray: “It’s incredible to see how the room goes quiet . . . and everyone, for a moment, whatever faith or belief system they are, connects to something.”
