Work, Pray, Code: How Big Tech is Replacing Religion
Dr. Carolyn Chen is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and Co-Director of the Program for the Study of Religion at Berkeley. Her new book, Work, Pray, Code explores the ways tech is replacing religion for some workers--and what this means for the future of the American public square and American religion.
Work, Pray, Code: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691219080/work-pray-code
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.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
And I have an amazing guest today, someone who's just written a unique and I think marvelous new book, and that is Dr. Carolyn Chen.
I'll introduce Carolyn in a minute, but first, Dr. Chen, just want to say thanks for being here.
Thank you for inviting me, Brad.
Happy to be here.
Well, you have written a great new book that we're going to talk about, and that is Work Prey Code, When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley, which is fascinating.
And I, both of us live in the Bay Area, and so Silicon Valley is kind of a pervasive cultural, political, economic force in this region.
So we'll get into that.
But first, let me tell folks who you are.
So Dr. Chen is faculty at Cal Berkeley.
And is now the co-director of the program on religion there, among other affiliations with Ethnic Studies and other programs and departments, formerly taught, and was on faculty at Northwestern, wrote a book called Getting Saved in America, Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience, which I I hope someday you'll come back and talk about that one too, even though I know it's old news for you.
Also the co-editor of Sustaining Faith Traditions, Race, Ethnicity, and Religion Among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation.
And as I mentioned, we're here today to talk about her brand new book, When work pray code, when work becomes religion in Silicon Valley.
And so this is an amazing work because you spent five years basically doing interviews and other forms of research and embeddedness in Silicon Valley, talking to folks who are highly skilled workers, working at tech firms, startups, other such things that folks I know hear about.
And and see on TV and and you know we we we sort of have this image of what Silicon Valley is like and so on one of the main ideas in the book.
Is that.
The workforce in Silicon Valley the people who are working at the startups in these tech companies.
Are now seeing their workplaces as spiritual centers, you know, in a kind of broad sense, uh, that, you know, some of the workforce understand work to be that kind of spiritual hub of their life.
If that's not too far of a reach and the leaders of the tech startups see themselves in some cases as spiritual leaders, as ministers, as pastors, you spent five years doing this.
Can you help us understand that dynamic a little bit?
Yeah.
So here I want to just say that this is, um, My book is a case study of Silicon Valley, but I'm arguing in my book that the trends that we're seeing here are really trends that we're seeing among high-skilled workers in all of America, and that this is not just a recent thing, but this has been a trend in the making for the last four years.
And so the larger argument that I make in my book is that work is replacing religion.
in for high skilled workers.
And we see this particularly in what I call knowledge industry hubs like the Silicon Valley, like Seattle, New York, Cambridge, these sorts of spaces.
And so back to your question about what's going on.
And yeah, you're, you're actually referencing one of the people that I talk about in the book, who says he calls himself the head pastor of his startup.
And this idea that, you know, this idea of bringing spirituality into the company is something that we really start to see happening in the 1980s.
Um, and this is a shift that's happening in companies.
You know, if I connect it back to the larger context, what's happening in the 80s is this, um, the rise of the knowledge economy, you know, a shift from industrial to post-industrial economy, but also the rise of global capitalism.
So companies really need to step up in order to compete in this global economy.
And so if you think about in a post-industrial economy, in a knowledge economy, a company's most precious assets is their human capital.
It's not their natural resources.
It's not necessarily their technologies.
It's really the minds and the spirits behind that technology.
So the question then becomes, this is not something that you could mechanize or outsource.
In a sense, how do you grow the value of your company?
Well, you grow it actually by investing in your human capital.
You can do this by equipping them with better skills, which companies do, right?
And they're hiring from, you know, the top 10 universities, this sort of thing.
And, you know, and this was also a theme among the people that I interviewed that is constantly needing to retool themselves, you know, to learn the latest programming languages, et cetera, to keep marketable.
But the other way that companies can grow the value of their human capital is by essentially investing in the spirits and trying to essentially get more of their engagement out of these workers.
So essentially, that's where we see this kind of what I call a spiritual turn in management happening in the 1980s, where Suddenly there becomes this, I shouldn't say suddenly, there is a precedent for it, but there becomes this emphasis on work culture and creating strong work cultures.
And how do you, and how do companies, how do companies, and you get the investment of your workers by trying to meet their social and spiritual needs.
And so one of the things that I find in my book is that, especially in Silicon Valley,
I see this principle operating which I call the personal is a professional which is essentially that people operate People are at their most optimal performance when they are optimally in their mind body and spirit so it then therefore is behooves companies to invest in the
emotional, spiritual, and even physical and emotional development of their employees because they will then benefit from the highest performance from their employees.
So in this particular case that I'm talking about in the book, this one startup founder sees himself as the head pastor of his startup, where he really sees himself as invested in the spiritual and social development of his employees.
And he offers benefits like, you know, like spiritual benefits.
For instance, the company will pay for employees to attend spiritual retreats.
He connects them with executive coaches who then teach them spiritual practices to align their souls, to align their, you know, their, their, the deepest parts of themselves with their work.
So that sort of thing.
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