Work Pray Code

When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley

Carolyn Chen

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691220871
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

How tech giants are reshaping spirituality to serve their religion of peak productivity Silicon Valley is known for its lavish perks, intense work culture, and spiritual gurus. Work Pray Code explores how tech companies are bringing religion into the workplace in ways that are replacing traditional places of worship, blurring the line between work and religion and transforming the very nature of spiritual experience in modern life.Over the past forty years, highly skilled workers have been devoting more time and energy to their jobs than ever before. They are also leaving churches, synagogues, and temples in droves—but they have not abandoned religion. Carolyn Chen spent more than five years in Silicon Valley, conducting a wealth of in-depth interviews and gaining unprecedented access to the best and brightest of the tech world. The result is a penetrating account of how work now satisfies workers' needs for belonging, identity, purpose, and transcendence that religion once met. Chen argues that tech firms are offering spiritual care such as Buddhist-inspired mindfulness practices to make their employees more productive, but that our religious traditions, communities, and public sphere are paying the price.We all want our jobs to be meaningful and fulfilling. Work Pray Code reveals what can happen when work becomes religion, and when the workplace becomes the institution that shapes our souls.

CHAPTER 1

Losing My Religion … and Finding It at Work

This is a story about people who move to Silicon Valley and lose their religion. But it’s also about how they find religion someplace else: at work. Early on in my research, as I was interviewing tech professionals, I noticed that some of them said that they used to be religious. Leaving religion wasn’t a conscious choice for them. They didn’t actively reject it or experience a crisis in faith. Rather, religion had so quietly tiptoed out of their lives that most people could not explain where it went. John Ashton, a thirty-two-year-old entrepreneur from Georgia, is one of these people. In 2010, he moved to Silicon Valley when he was recruited by a start-up. At five-eleven, with his close-cropped brown hair, blue eyes, and earnest smile, John looks like the proverbial White boy next door. Like the rest of the guys at his start-up, he’s dressed casually, in bright green Adidas sneakers with neon yellow laces, jeans, a faded Georgia Tech t-shirt, and a light black windbreaker. For him, as for the rest of them, coming to Silicon Valley has been a journey of letting go of the old, and taking up the new.

Back in Georgia, the most important thing to John was his faith. He became a Christian in high school, when he joined the youth group at his best friend’s Baptist church. The church was warm and loving, nurturing him through his adolescent years. “It was the first time I experienced a loving community outside of family,” John explains. That early experience as a teenager laid a foundation for religious community in his life. From that point on, the church and Christian fellowships were always an anchor in John’s life. When he went away to college at Georgia Tech, John joined a Christian frat and became the president in his senior year. Its motto was the Bible verse Ephesians 5:1, “be imitators of God,” and it required a commitment to Christian service and godly living. Even though Georgia Tech’s frats were known for having lots of alcohol, their frat house was dry. When most college guys were drinking and partying, John and his frat brothers were feeding the homeless and visiting the elderly. Instead of heading to Florida for spring break debauchery, John and his brothers built orphanages in the slums of Mexico. His faith community in high school and college “built character,” he says, and they showed him “how to love people in different ways.” Once he started working after college, John joined an evangelical church in Atlanta that he describes as “big,” “fun,” and “crazy.” Attending Sunday service “was like going to a rock show.” All his friends were a part of the church, and John, who loved music, played guitar in the church band. The church and his faith “grounded” him, he says.

In 2011, John moved from Atlanta to Silicon Valley to join a tech start-up. He now refers to church as “a phase of my life” and explains that “it’s not a big part of who I am anymore.” When he first came out West, John tried out a couple of churches, but nothing felt right. Churches in Silicon Valley, he says, did not have the same “big” and “fun” energy that he experienced in Atlanta. And as the church and his friends in Georgia drifted further and further away, so too did the centrality of religion in his life. In retrospect John admits that during those years in Atlanta, “doubt started creeping in my head that this is the truth and the only thing right and true in the world.” But he didn’t leave Christianity, and he didn’t leave the church because “where we were from, it [church] was just what you did.”

John’s life is a vivid example of how the soul changes in the process of moving to Silicon Valley. Why did someone so religious leave religion after moving to Silicon Valley? I wondered. Is there something about working in Silicon Valley that makes people lose their faith?

John’s story prompts another question. If people like John are leaving religion after moving to Silicon Valley, what has taken religion’s place? Over 75 percent of Americans claim a religious identity. Religion has traditionally served as one the primary sources of belonging, identity, and meaning for them.¹ This was certainly the case for John in Georgia, who described his church as having been “like a family” and who had found personal meaning and purpose through his religion. What has become John’s “loving community outside of family” now that he has stopped going to church? What “grounds” him? If in Georgia going to church was “just what you did,” what’s “just what you do” in Silicon Valley? If Christianity shapes the soul in Georgia, what shapes the soul in Silicon Valley?

Leaving Home, Leaving Religion

To understand the souls of tech folk like John, the first thing we must remember is that almost no one who works in these companies is actually from Silicon Valley. They are “tech migrants”—immigrants who come to work in the technology industry. They come from far-off places like India, China, Korea, and Germany. Even more come from the far corners of the United States—small towns in Iowa, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Texas, and South Carolina. These details are important. For nothing stirs the young American soul like the journey of leaving home and finding a new one. Westward migration preceded some of the most dramatic moments of religious transformation in American history. The majority of people who were part of the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century were young migrants moving west, according to historian Whitney Cross.² So were those drawn to new religious movements in the Bay Area in the 1960s and 1970s.³ And to the masses of young Irish, Italians, and Germans who came to the United States in the late nineteenth century, migration, according to historian Timothy Smith, was a “theologizing experience.”⁴ But one important detail separates the spiritual journeys of “tech migrants” today from other migrants in America. In the past, immigrants found community and immortality by building churches, synagogues, temples, and communes. The “tech migrants” of the twenty-first century, however, meet these religious needs by starting companies.

About 80 percent of my research participants moved to Silicon Valley to work in the tech industry. The rest moved for other reasons—to attend school, to be with a partner—but all eventually found jobs in tech. Most tech migrants are single, college-educated White and Asian men in their twenties with engineering or computer science backgrounds. Untethered to familial obligations, they can move at the drop of a hat. They come alone and have at most a few acquaintances in Silicon Valley. In short, they are far from home, alone, young, impressionable, and eager to pour themselves into work. The decision to move to Silicon Valley is an easy one. It is, after all, the mecca of tech. Most have the attitude of Brian Ross, a twenty-seven-year-old Boston-based entrepreneur, who was offered a job in Palo Alto on a Friday, and expected by the company to be at work the next Monday. Despite the compressed timeline, the decision to move from Boston to San Francisco in two days was a “no brainer.” He explained, “It’s like moving from the minor to the major leagues … a chance to upgrade myself so I’m in a place to swing.”

Moving may be advantageous to their careers, but it has spiritual costs: it uproots people from the communities that nurture their religion. As a result, religion is one of the traditions that people may leave behind in the process of migration.⁵ That’s what happened to Ben Green, a twenty-nine-year-old tech entrepreneur. When he lived in New York City working as an investment banker, Ben was deeply involved in a Reformed Jewish synagogue. He observed Shabbat and did not work from sundown on Friday to sunset on Saturday, despite his demanding job. On Saturdays, he’d walk from his home on Forty-Eighth Street to his synagogue on Eighty-Sixth Street without a wallet or a cell phone, observing the Jewish religious law against mechanical devices and commerce on the Sabbath. Ben also took time out of his busy schedule to make regular trips to Israel with members of his synagogue. Since moving to San Francisco in 2010, however, Ben says, the influence of Judaism in his life is “not nearly as strong.” He doesn’t belong to a synagogue, nor does he observe Shabbat anymore.

South Asian immigrant tech workers also become less religious after moving to Silicon Valley. Most are Hindu and are separated from their families and the larger Hindu culture that nurtured their religion. For instance, Prakash Shankar was a devout Hindu when he lived in India. He practiced yoga every day and had even lived for a time in an ashram and studied under a guru. But after leaving India in the 2006, his Hindu world felt very far away, and he stopped practicing altogether. Most of the South Asian immigrant engineers that I interviewed associated religious practice with family and home. They talked about praying as a family in front of the home shrine or watching their parents and grandparents practice yoga and meditate in the morning. Their attachment to these traditions weakened with their distance from their family and the social institutions that supported Hinduism.

People lose their religion in the process of moving, not only because they leave home, but because the Bay Area is one of the least religious regions of the country. According to the 2014 Pew Research Landscape Study, 35 percent of Bay Area residents are religiously nonaffiliated, compared to 24 percent in New York, 25 percent in Los Angeles, and 23 percent in the general population. Moreover, the Bay Area is less Christian than the rest of the United States. Only 35 percent of San Francisco residents identify as Christian compared to 71 percent of the general population. When it comes to weekly religious attendance, the Bay Area trumps all as least religious—only 22 percent of Bay Area residents attend religious services weekly, compared to 32 percent in New York and 34 percent in Los Angeles. Silicon Valley is not alone in having a weak religious culture. Low religiosity is common to what urban studies scholar Richard Florida calls “human capital clusters,” or metro areas that have a high concentration of knowledge industries like technology. Places like Seattle and Boston, which have vibrant tech industries, are also among the least religious places in the United States.⁶

The experiences of John and others illustrate the effect of regional religious geographies. John is right when he attributes his Christianity to geography. On belonging to a church, he says, “Where we were from, it was just what you did.” In the Bay Area, on the other hand, people say things like “I’m surprised when I learn that someone goes to church regularly,” as one engineer told me. People experience a monumental shift in religious culture when they move from a devout region like Georgia to a nonreligious region like the Bay Area.

To be sure, millennials, who are the vast majority of tech migrants, are less religious than previous generations.⁷ Yet religious geography affects millennials’ religiosity too. Millennials maintain or even increase their religiosity when they move to places with a stronger religious presence. For instance, when millennial Susan Kim, a computer programmer who grew up in a Korean Christian home, moved from Southern California to New York in 2010, she continued going to church. She stopped, however, when she moved from New York to the Bay Area three years later. Similarly, Ben Green, who had been active in the Hillel House during his college years at Yale, became even more observant after he moved to New York City. But like Susan, he dropped his religious practice after moving to the Bay Area.

People have a hard time finding the right religious community in the Bay Area. For example, Ben Green tried to find a synagogue in San Francisco, but couldn’t find a rabbi that he “could connect with.” “The communities are more intact in the East Coast than they are here,” he observes. Jacob Simon also claims that he was “a lot more active” in the Reformed Jewish community when he lived in New York than he is now in San Francisco. Similarly, Arjun Patel, who in Bangalore had been active in the Ramakrishna Mission, known as the Vedanta movement in the West, claims he didn’t have the energy to attend the Vedanta Society in San Francisco, blaming the thirty-minute drive and twenty-minute hunt for parking.

Those who were religious emphasized how difficult it was to maintain their religion. Gwen Kowalski says that her family sticks out in the Bay Area because they attend Catholic mass on Sunday mornings. Her children’s sporting events and their friends’ birthday parties are all scheduled on Sunday morning when their family attends church. It wasn’t like that where she grew up in Michigan, she claims. One tech worker and his family decided to move back to South Carolina because of the lack of religion in the Bay Area. Even though his work was thriving, he and his wife wanted their children to grow up in a close-knit church community, something they’d had trouble finding in the Bay Area.

Engineers especially feel their tech workplaces, which claim to want their employees to be “authentic” at work, are hostile to religion. Most people who are religious keep their religion a secret at work. For instance, a vice president at one large firm who belongs to a small religious community says he is “in the closet” at work about his religion. None of the colleagues of another vice president know that he has been the devout follower of a guru for the last twenty-five years. Few of one engineer’s colleagues know that he is also a Buddhist priest. Christians also keep quiet about their religion.⁸ One entrepreneur claimed that in the twenty-seven years that he’s worked in Silicon Valley, he’s met only a handful of fellow practicing Christians. A local pastor confirmed this observation, claiming that members of his congregations who work in tech claim they don’t know other Christians at work. And Christian tech workers reported that they never brought up religion at work, fearing they’d be ridiculed or shunned in tech’s aggressively secular culture.

But look a bit deeper, and Silicon Valley culture isn’t quite as secular as it seems.

The Religion of Work

Tech migrants leave their religion when moving to Silicon Valley because of changes in religious geography. First, they are separated from their religious communities. And second, they move to one of the least religious parts of the country. But something else changes when they move to Silicon Valley, something that on the face of it has nothing to do with religion, but that, on closer examination, has everything to do with “being religious” in the new land of Silicon Valley. This new thing is also a source of identity, belonging, meaning, and purpose. It is the religion of work, and it is practiced in surprising ways.

Back in Georgia, John Ashton observes, work was different. “No one cared back there what I did for work or where I went to school. It was just what I did to pay bills.” Things are different in Silicon Valley. “Out here, it’s your identity,” he says. “It’s ‘this is what my life’s about.’ ” John started coding at the age of ten when his parents sent him to a coding sleepaway camp for a week during the summer. He’d always been a creative kid who tinkered with things—taking apart and reassembling toasters, radios, phones, lawn mowers, anything he could get his hands on. Once he learned to code, he programmed everything in the house, the thermostats and television controls. In high school he turned his basement into an arcade full of video games that he designed and built, charging friends three dollars for entry. John always thought of computers as his hobby, and the things he created as “quirky inventions.”

After graduating with an engineering degree from Georgia Tech in 2005, John got a job programming for a bank in Atlanta. It was an easy nine-to-five job, with little supervision, which freed him to work on his many “quirky inventions” both on and off the job. One of his side projects was an application that he developed initially to help himself and other members of the ten-person church band coordinate their scheduling for practices and performances, and organize the collective database of hundreds of scores of music that they used. The app worked like magic for his small team of ten band members. John saw he could develop it for larger working teams. He started connecting with others who were developing similar products at tech fairs like South by Southwest in Austin. That’s where he met Darren Tolman, the founder of Harmonize, a well-funded start-up in Silicon Valley that was developing a similar application. When Darren approached John to work for them, John jumped at the o...