Work Pray Code - WBUR
Uploaded by
OnPointRadioWork Pray Code - WBUR
Uploaded by
OnPointRadioI NTRODUCTION
How Work Is
Replacing Religion
What happens to us, and what happens to religion, when p eople wor-
ship work? Work Pray Code explores how the lives of Silicon Valley tech
workers are “transformed”—they say—by the religion that their em-
ployers offer on the job. On paper, Silicon Valley is one of the least
religious places in America. People there are more likely than other
Americans to claim no religious affiliation, or declare themselves to be
atheist or agnostic. Given those statistics, I expected Silicon Valley to
be a godless place. Instead, I discovered that it is one of the most reli-
gious places in Americ a. In the course of my research for this book,
I met p eople like the thirty-two-year-old entrepreneur John Ashton
(not his real name),* who left his tight-knit evangelical community in
Georgia to move to Silicon Valley—where he traded his Christianity
for an even more zealous faith in the eventual IPO of his start-up. As
with so many others, John’s new faith is sustained by a corporate “faith
community,” which gives him a strong sense of belonging, identity, and
meaning, much like his church back in Georgia.
I also met other p eople who described profound spiritual transforma-
tions, such as the twenty-seven-year-old German engineer Hans Schnei-
der. Emotionally abused by his parents as a boy and bullied by classmates,
* I have changed the names of all interviewees and their companies, as well as characteristics
that may make them identifiable.
1
2 i n t r o du c t i on
Hans grew up with a profound sense of worthlessness and self-hate. He
finally started “healing” from these wounds when the CEO of his start-
up put Hans in a Buddhist mindfulness program at the company’s time
and expense. Now, not only is Hans “more whole and more spiritual”;
he’s risen up the ranks to become the head of engineering.
Many others talked to me about their work in spiritual terms. For
instance, Doug Robinson calls himself the “head pastor” of the start-up
he founded. Management, he claims, is a lot like ministry. With the
help of a Buddhist teacher, Doug has developed a professional develop-
ment program for his team, one that integrates Buddhist-inspired
teachings and practices. The program helps employees “connect to
their authentic selves,” he says, so they can invest their “whole selves”
in work. Doug quotes the Buddha more than he does Andrew Carnegie,
Peter Drucker, or Tim Ferriss and describes his work as “partnering
with the Universe.”
Like John, Hans, and Doug, few of the p eople I met came from Sili-
con Valley. They described themselves as becoming more “whole,” “spiri-
tual,” and “connected” after moving there. Most did not identify with a
religion, belong to a religious congregation, or attend religious services.
Their spiritual transformations d idn’t happen at a church, t emple,
mosque, dharma center, or synagogue. Rather, they took place at work.
But tech workers channeling their religious needs into work is only
part of the story. The other part has to do with why Hans’s CEO paid to
send him to a Buddhist mindfulness program. The answer, I came to
realize, is that companies have taken up pastoral and spiritual care as a
way to make their employees more productive. One h uman resources
director told me that her job was to “nurture the souls” of the employ-
ees. One firm I visited sponsors weekly meditation sessions for its
employees to make them more focused. Tech companies often hire execu-
tive coaches, who serve as what one h uman resources director described
as “spiritual advisers” to senior leaders. These “spiritual advisers” train
executives in spiritual practices that help them align their work with
their “calling” in life. The benefits packages at several companies I spent
time at include the time and funds to allow employees to attend spiri-
tual and religious retreats. Some firms have dedicated positions such as
H o w W or k I s R e p l a c i n g R e l ig ion 3
“chief spiritual officer” and “chief mindfulness officer” to manage their
employees. In many tech workplaces, meditation rooms are as common
as the iconic Ping-Pong table.
What’s more, companies are actively bringing religion, particularly
Buddhism, to their employees. One firm I visited sponsors weekly
“dharma talks,” where employees meditate and reflect on the teachings
of the Buddha. Google sponsors Search Inside Yourself, a program that
brings in Buddhist teachers to teach Googlers meditation, which em-
ployees affectionately call “church.” The tech g iant Salesforce invited
over thirty monks from Plum Village, the order of the famous Buddhist
leader Thich Nhat Hanh, to chant and teach at the meetings of their
annual conferences in 2017 and 2018. At companies such as LinkedIn,
Buddhist virtues such as compassion and mindfulness are celebrated as
part of a company culture that supposedly gives them a competitive
advantage. “The workplace,” one tech executive told me, “is the hotbed
of spirituality” in Silicon Valley.
It is easy to dismiss all this as simply part of the strange antics of
a unique, privileged enclave. Media depictions remind us that Silicon
Valley is not the real America. And there is some truth to this. Not many
American firms, after all, have unlimited vacation, celebrity chefs, pets
at work, and Buddhist monks as consultants. While the rest of corpo-
rate America is slaving away in colorless cubicles, Silicon Valley tech
workers are getting massages, meditating, and playing foosball at work,
we are told.
But tech workers in Silicon Valley are not so different from highly
skilled professionals in other parts of the country. In surveys, when
asked what brings their lives meaning, Americans point to their jobs and
careers just as frequently as they do their children and grandchildren.1
Companies in other sectors and in regions of the country far from Sili-
con Valley are also trying to attend to their employees’ spiritual needs
with an eye on the bottom line. Firms such as Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and
Wal-Mart have hired chaplains to help workers deal with spiritual is-
sues.2 Not only Google but also companies such as Aetna, General
Mills, and Goldman Sachs are teaching Buddhist spiritual practices such
as mindfulness to optimize employee performance.
4 i n t r o du c t i on
Silicon Valley helps us to see a broader trend, one that has eluded
scholars of work and religion alike: subtly but unmistakably, work is
replacing religion. Over the past forty years, work has extracted ever
more of the time and energy of highly skilled Americans, crowding out
other commitments, especially religion. In 1990, only 8 percent of all
Americans claimed no religious affiliation.3 Today nearly a quarter of
them do.4 The number of “religious nones” has risen fastest in places,
like the Bay Area, that have a large high-skilled population. But numbers
can lie. As we shall see, high-skilled professionals haven’t abandoned
religion. Instead, they are looking to the workplace to slake their thirst
for belonging, identity, purpose, and transcendence. More and more,
companies have become America’s new temples, churches, mosques,
and synagogues. Work has become a spiritual practice that inspires re-
ligious fervor. People are not “selling their souls” at work. Rather, work
is where they find their souls.
Work Pray Code reveals how tech workers are finding their souls at
work. But it’s about more than the engineers, programmers, and execu-
tives who work at companies like Facebook and Google. Through the
lives of Silicon Valley tech workers, the book tells a story of how the
expansion of work and the decline of religion is reconfiguring the lives
of high-paid skilled workers in late capitalism. This is a familiar tale to
scholars and nonscholars alike. Many Americans experience the expan-
sion of work and the decline of religion in their personal struggles for
“work-life balance.” Work is taking more of their hours and energy, leav-
ing less time for families and friendships. Religion is one of many things
in the ledger of “life” that gets sidelined by work. The expansion of work
and the decline of religion is also the familiar story social theorists tell
about secularization in the West. According to sociologist Max Weber,
capitalism forms an “iron cage” of bureaucratic rationalism that “dis-
enchants” the world of the magical “otherworldliness” of religion.5
The lives of high-skilled professionals like John, Hans, and Doug sug-
gest that work’s influence is indeed expanding. It does so, however, not
by extracting and “caging” the human spirit, but by satisfying high-
skilled Americans’ social, emotional, and spiritual needs. Work, it ap-
pears, is fulfilling, not depleting, their souls.
H o w W or k I s R e p l a c i n g R e l ig ion 5
What happens when work is the place where Americans find their
souls? The book is organized around three facets of this question. First,
it shows how the experience of work changes when companies try to
fulfill the social, spiritual, and emotional needs of their employees. Sec-
ond, it assesses how religion and spirituality adapt when they become
a part of work. And third, it explores how the “religion of work” is alter-
ing the very social fabric of America. Through the lens of Silicon Valley’s
tech industry, Work Pray Code examines how the meanings of work,
religion, and community are transforming in late capitalism.
The Expansion of Work
How did work become a place where highly skilled Americans find their
souls? To answer this question, we need to understand how white-collar
work has changed in relation to other social institutions, especially re-
ligion, in late capitalism. More Americans took on white-collar manage-
rial and professional occupations starting in the 1940s.6 Writing in 1951,
sociologist C. Wright Mills described work very differently from the
way that Silicon Valley tech workers like John, Hans, and Doug do.
White-collar work, he claimed, was soul crushing. In the big bureau-
cratic organizations where they worked, white-collar workers “habitu-
ally submit to the orders of others,” selling their “time, energy and skill
to the power of o thers.”7 Under the oppressive weight of the corpora-
tion, workers lost their individuality, freedom, and personhood. The
faceless, bureaucratic corporation so squeezed the quintessential Amer-
ican spirit of independence and entrepreneurialism out of employees
that Mills characterized that time as the “rise of the little man.”8 “Under
neath virtually all experience of work t oday,” he wrote, “there is a fatal-
istic feeling that work per se is unpleasant.”9
If work crushed the soul, then it was in the world outside of work
where white-collar workers found their souls and built their “real” lives,
according to Mills. “Work,” he wrote, “becomes a sacrifice of time, nec-
essary to building life outside of it.”10 The typical 1950s white-collar
worker, who was White and male, worked from nine to five, forty hours
a week.11 Except for executives, work was understood to be contained