Book Review: Work Pray Code by Carolyn Chen

Charles Taylor, famed sociologist and author of "A Secular Age," argued that secularization is not a process of subtraction. Taylor writes:

Western modernity, including its secularity, is the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and related practices, and can’t be explained in terms of perennial features of human life.

In other words, secularization is not a product of our surrounding culture stripping away faith and religiosity. Rather, secularization is a product of positive construction, where our surrounding culture produces a new spiritual identity apart from the traditions of the church. And nowhere has this been more true than in the technology industry.

Carolyn Chen, author of "Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley,"

has observed that the tech industry has become a leading laboratory in this great spiritual reconstruction.

By tracing the stories of once-religious tech workers who relocated to Silicon Valley, Chen demonstrates the encroachment of the workplace into spheres once occupied by religion. The mechanisms of this encroachment are often described by Silicon Valley corporations as amenities, as enhancements to workplace culture. From meditation programs that teach "scientific Buddhism" to coaching offerings that promise "inner transformation," the tech industry has used these cultural offerings to displace the role once held by pastors, rabbis, and spiritual directors.

The once-religious emigrants that Chen describes are not rejecting Christian doctrine. They are not making an active choice to leave their upbringing in the church. Rather, they are shaped and molded by employers seeking to make the mundane into the transcendent. As our work becomes a source of our spiritual identity, we become more attached to and dependent on our employer. Chen's emigrants often look back on their religious past not with judgment or criticism, but with an acknowledgement that they have moved past their past spiritual selves.

When work becomes a spiritual journey, we approach it with an enhanced sense of purpose. We work harder, we produce more deliverables, we work longer hours. Chen is quick to point out that this transformation is taking place within a late capitalist frame. One wonders, while reading Chen's work, what will happen to the Google engineer or the Facebook account manager upon the next round of layoffs.

How will individuals who derived their spiritual identity from the workplace react when those same workplaces replace their jobs with AI? How will those who found transcendence through coaching and meditation regimes respond when their access to such programs is suddenly revoked? In a time where organizations are leaner and less committed to their employees, the juxtaposition of faith and labor has all the makings of a looming spiritual crisis.

Chen concludes her book by describing this transformation as a "cautionary tale." She asks:

"What kind of society do we become when human fulfillment is centered in the workplace What happens to our families, religions, communities, and civil society when work satisfies too many of our needs? Silicon Valley is a bellwether of what happens when we worship work - when we surrender our time, our identities, our resources, and even our cherished traditions in service to work. It is what will happen if we don't invest in building and sustaining social institutions and traditions that nurture community, identity, and purpose outside of work." (pg. 197)

As a sociologist, Chen asks these questions with a remarkable sense of clarity and urgency. The workplace has indeed encroached upon the spiritual sphere. Employers, not congregations, are forming faith identities. Chen has supplied the questions. It is time for the church to come up with the answers.

Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley, was published in 2022 by Princeton University Press.

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Ryan Panzer (@ryanpanzer) works in the technology industry. He received a master's in theology while working full time for Google. He now wonders whether the seminary or Google has had a more profound influence on his theology.

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Busy-ness, tech layoffs, and looming spiritual crisis

Writing for The Atlantic in 2019, Derek Thompson described the accelerating influence of "Workism,"or "the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose."

In the piece, Thompson traced two highly interrelated patterns in American culture: the drastic decline of religious participation, and the accelerating rise of those who describe themselves exclusively in terms of their career. Thompson argued that the workplace has supplanted religion and other institutions as a source of identity and belonging. Accordingly, the workplace has become America's new temple.

But I think Thompson's analysis is only part of the story. It's not just that the workplace has become a de facto temple. It's that our way of working - the busyness, the frenetic pace of it all - has become a cultural idol. Busyness, it seems, has entrenched itself as the only core value that we all share in common.

This explains why when asked to describe the state of our work life, we often share that we are "busy," with a smug sense of self-satisfaction, as if the busy are the blessed among us.

The symptoms of "Workism" are visible everyday, but are particularly striking during the summer months. We're working longer hours, taking fewer vacations, and leaving more paid time off on the able. According to the 2017 State of American Vacation report, American workers took an average of 20.3 days of vacation every year from 1978 until 2000. The rate has dropped nearly every year since. This year, Americans will only take an average of 16 days off, essentially donating one week of paid time off back to their employers.

Perhaps the case of the vanishing vacation can be explained not as a product of individual companies but as a broader cultural trend. Despite the fact that firms are doling out more vacation days to attract and retain talent, and despite their supposed support for detachment from email, 79% of American workers still check their work email while on vacation. According to The Washington Post, 4% of Americans check email constantly while on vacation. Workism has wheels, and will be joining you for your summer road trip.

The chief problem with Workism is that it places the things we do, or more specifically, the tasks we complete, at the pinnacle of human identity. When we put so much weight into the pursuit of tasks, we have little capacity left to examine our beliefs (what we think), or more importantly, our values (how we think about what matters). The things we do overshadow the things we believe, while crushing completely the things that we value.

It is ironic, although unsurprising, that our culture has a remedy for workism and task-obsession: namely, better organization of our tasks.

#productivitytok is among the most followed topics on social media. Books on task management are fixtures on Amazon's best-seller lists. And a cohort of productivity experts ranging from academics (Cal Newport) to evangelical Christian pastors (John Mark Comer) stands ready with exercises and checklists to reduce your busyness and organize the things you do - provided you are willing to complete the tasks they prescribe.

This is not to say that the we do is unimportant, or that doing a lot of meaningful work is undesirable. Occupations are often central to our vocational identity, and for good reason. Provided we have the opportunity to continue these efforts, our life may seem well-lived, perhaps even meaningful.

But what happens when our tasks are suddenly taken away from us?

Since the start of 2023, over 150,000 US tech workers have been laid off, their jobs cuts announced by a boilerplate email sent in the middle of the night. These lay offs are just the beginning of the disruption about to impact the workforce.

By some estimates, 300 million jobs globally will be "lost or degraded" due to artificial intelligence. And these jobs aren't the blue collar factory positions long thought of as at risk to automation. These job losses will affect computer programmers, graphic designers, digital marketers, and countless other white-collar professions long thought to be immune from automation and digital disruption.

It's no surprise, then, that layoffs are doing measurable harm to the mental health of workers, particularly those affected by job cuts. Indeed, this moment has all the makings of a shared cultural crisis.

For how can someone have a stable, rooted identity in the work they do when that work is no longer available?

How can one's sense of self be defined through tasks, let alone jobs or careers, when AI displacement and mass layoffs have arrived in seemingly every industry?

What happens when one's sense of identity, rooted not in religion nor in institutions but in the busyness of the workplace, is interrupted by job loss?

It's unlikely that there is a solution to this looming crisis of identity. Disruptions to our tasks and work lives are here to stay. This is not a crisis that has an easy solution. All one can do is to develop a certain capacity for resilience. And in this moment, resilience requires a shift in perspective.

It's time to label Workism as a destructive force, to view busyness as a threat to rather than a source of our identity.

It's time to find mentors, teachers, friends, and yes, even institutions, who can push away our growing list of tasks (if only for a moment) and to help us discover our values. It's time to study the art of discernment, rather than the practices of productivity.

As Carolyn Chen points out in her new book "Work Pray Code,"the world of work has developed its own theologies. These new theologies suggest that alignment between work and vocation defines our "authentic selfhood." In this digital age, our sense of selfhood has been redefined as alignment between work and purpose. It's time to rediscover the beliefs and values that are fundamental to our spiritual identities.