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Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley, by Carolyn Chen

Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley, by Carolyn Chen In recent years, scholars have learned a lot about religion and spirituality on the West Coast. From the Nones in the Pacific Northwest (Goldman 2012; Killen and Silk 2004) to evangelicals in Southern California (Dochuk 2010), a growing bookshelf of works has shown us this region’s impact on the American soul. Carolyn Chen’s new book is another such volume. Like an Intel Inside sticker, it tells us what’s going on inside the spiritual lives of America’s tech workers and who paid for it. But it does not just tell. It shows. “Show, don’t tell” is a maxim in many a writing class. In the social sciences, we often do the opposite, overwhelming our readers with tedious argumentation and jargon, rather than novelistic atmosphere. To be sure, Work Pray Code makes plenty of arguments, situating the denizens of Silicon Valley within a larger academic conversation about the “nones,” spirituality, and the world of work. Yet Chen does more than tell. She shows what it is like to work, play, and pray at Google, LinkedIn, and countless startups. Better yet, she brings us into company meditation rooms and onto yoga mats all over the Valley. Through in-depth interviews with over 100 respondents and ethnographic site visits, she conveys the ethos of a new form of corporate culture. A good storyteller, Chen chronicles the transformation of a Georgia transplant who replaced church with work after moving to Silicon Valley. In another chapter, she takes us into a company’s labyrinth that features a corporate logo at its center, a holy of holies in a temple of the information age. She also coins apt phrases that will make this book a memorable read for both specialists and the wider public (including undergraduates). With chapter and section titles such as “The Dharma According to Google” (121) and “The Spiritual Exercises of the Tech Company” (109), she conveys what is at stake when corporate America colonizes American spirituality. The corporate mindfulness revolution in the Valley would confuse the protagonists of novelist Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (Wilson 1955) and journalist William H. Whyte, Jr.’s The Organization Man (1956). Modular and institutionally differentiated, the postwar world separated work from home, business from pleasure, and the office from religion. Whyte, for example, includes a chapter on “The New Suburbia: Organization Man at Home” (265) with sections on “The Church of Suburbia” (365) and “The Web of Friendship” (330). That is not the case in Work Pray Code, where tech workers are encouraged to bring their full selves to the office, as long as those selves help improve productivity and the bottom line. Chen’s informants take their children to the office cafeteria for gourmet dinners and drop them off at evening playtime, pursue their hobbies at corporate headquarters, and engage in walking meditation (sped up for corporate efficiency) on the way to meetings. Inhabiting what Chen calls Techtopia (196), Silicon Valley employees can attend Zoom meetings in the morning, play video games in the afternoon, meditate in the evening, and code after dinner. Chen’s vignettes of meditating techies reminded me of nothing so much as the final episode of AMC’s Mad Men, when 1950s advertising executive Don Draper leaves his Madison Avenue office and lights out for the coast. The final scene shows him meditating by the ocean in a setting reminiscent of the metaphysical Esalen Institute (which shows up as a locale in Chen’s book). Based on research conducted between 2013 and 2019, Work Pray Code shows us what might happen if Draper (or Draper’s grandchildren) took his mystical experience back into the world of corporate America. In addition to old Mad Men episodes, Chen’s book should be read alongside a stack of new books on mindfulness and meditation. Sociologist Jaime Kucinskas introduced us to this world in The Mindful Elite (2018), showing how quasi-Buddhist practices were mainstreamed, packaged, and commodified in the sectors of business, education, and the military. Taking a social movements approach, Kucinskas showed how the movement’s leaders repackaged and marketed seemingly foreign practices with the help of sympathetic philanthropists (cue the Rockefellers and the Fetzer Institute), visiting many of the same places that we read about in Work Pray Code, including Google headquarters and the Valley’s Wisdom 2.0 conference. Yet corporate mindfulness culture is just one of the sectors profiled in The Mindful Elite, which takes readers into Harvard Medical School, Wall Street law firms, public television (Bill Moyers gave a big boost to mindfulness expert Jon Kabat-Zinn on PBS) and the U.S. Marines. For a bird’s eye view of the wider mindfulness movement, there is no better guide than Kucinskas. For a close-up of the board rooms and meditation retreats of Silicon Valley, readers should consult Work Pray Code. Jeff Wilson’s Mindful America (2014) is also good preparation for Work Pray Code, asking whether the spread of Buddhist-derived mindfulness and meditation is “the triumph of Buddhism in a non-Buddhist culture or its death knell?” Wilson (74) reveals the hidden history of practices that combine East and West. Like Kucinskas, he tells us about the spiritual entrepreneurs, scientists and lay people who translate quasi-Buddhist practices into the language of self-help and medicine. Such practices have been adapted for this-worldly ends that were never envisioned by Buddhist monastic communities, including weight loss and diet, career success, and better sex. Mindfulness and meditation are also a staple of campus wellness programs and a growing number of campus ministries and religious life offices. From Mindful USC on the West Coast to Mindful NYU in the East, such techniques are being adopted by chaplains and campus ministers as a response to the campus mental health crisis and growing levels of anxiety and stress (see Shy 2017 for an account of New York University’s approach). Even the United Methodist Church has published The Awakened Life (Bollinger and Olsen 2019), mixing mindfulness with references to Methodism’s founder John Wesley. On both college and corporate campuses, mindfulness practitioners have removed overt references to Buddhist terminology and Buddhist people from their discourse. Chen writes about this rebranding in Work Pray Code. While one Buddhist teacher has cleansed her vocabulary of “words like ‘consciousness,’ ‘dharma,’ and ‘liberation’” (154), another avoids the “B-word” because it “makes people ‘alienated and scared’” (156). Some dispense with the word “meditation,” preferring to speak about contemplation and breathing. While acknowledging Buddhism’s influence on mindfulness, many corporate consultants and meditation teachers talk vaguely about ancient traditions and practices. To erase the potentially stigmatizing elements of Buddhism, mindfulness and meditation practitioners also erase its racial and ethnic association with Asia. Borrowing a phrase from Jeff Wilson’s Mindful America, Chen shows how corporate mindfulness programs adopt a “whitened Buddhism” (164), adding that “Asian people are curiously missing in tech’s Buddhism” (167). Most corporate meditation teachers are white, reflecting a wider pattern in the mindfulness movement. Science, rather than spirituality, is often the first language of mindfulness and meditation programs, especially if they are grounded in Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) approach pioneered at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. In Mindful America, Wilson describes Kabat-Zinn’s own deep immersion in Buddhism, as well as his desire to take the wisdom of the Dharma to a wider audience. Ironically, this process of mainstreaming involves downplaying overt markers of Buddhist thought and practice, replacing them with the vocabulary of medicine and health. While mindfulness has become a staple in many campus wellness programs, employee wellness is not its primary justification in Silicon Valley. As Chen documents, corporate mindfulness practitioners justify their pay with appeals to productivity and profits, not health and wellness. While some cite improvements in employee morale, this too is in service to the bottom line. That is why contemplative practices such as walking meditation can be sped up and reduced to 5-min exercises. Many of the tech workers Chen spoke with do not have time to hang out in corporate meditation rooms. Like many college chapels, they exist more as a symbol than a destination. Silicon Valley’s tech workers are also absent from local congregations and voluntary organizations in a culture that has collapsed the boundary between work and private life. Corporate campuses cater to every whim and fancy (including the palate), leading Chen’s informants to spend most of their waking hours at work. While often resulting in high levels of employee satisfaction (despite the constant problem of burnout), Silicon Valley’s “Techtopia” (196) leaves much to be desired. Lowering levels of social capital (especially bridging capital) and weakening civil society, it keeps employees from contributing to public life. Describing how Silicon Valley swallows up tech worker schedules, Chen (63) argues that “the personal is the professional,” a riff on a ubiquitous slogan from the sixties (“The personal is the political”). The collapse of this boundary was the focus of Arlie Hochschild’s The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (2001). In Work Pray Code, it is taken to its logical conclusion. Chen’s interviews and fieldwork reflect the ethos of a particular time and place. It is worth noting that Work Pray Code is set in one of several “None Zones” in the United States (Killen and Silk 2004). Given this context, it is not surprising that tech workers are more engaged with work than organized religion. According to the 2020 American Values Atlas (PRRI 2020), 29% of San Francisco metropolitan area residents identify as “nones,” just under the percentages for Seattle (32%) and Portland (33%). Allergic to local congregations, Chen’s meditating engineers ignore the real live Buddhists in their midst, tracing their lineage back to the 1960s counterculture rather than to the Japanese Buddhist Churches of America who came to California in the nineteenth century. Things are different in other parts of the country. Though mindfulness and meditation can be found in many corporate settings (including among tech workers), they do not take the same forms in every community. Though many corporations seek to harness the power of spirituality, this does not always mean abandoning local congregations. For a counterexample, it is instructive to consider the lives of tech workers in the Arkansas Ozarks, home to three Fortune 500 companies. Along with executives and middle managers, Wal-Mart, J.B. Hunt, and Tyson employ large IT departments. As journalist Marjorie Rosen (2009) documents in Boom Town: How Wal-Mart Transformed an All American Town Into an International Community, the area has become one of the most diverse metro areas in this part of the Bible Belt. The past few decades have seen the establishment of new synagogues, mosques, and a Hindu temple founded by IT workers from Wal-Mart. Like the evangelical executives and cashiers profiled in Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Wal-Mart, the founders of these new immigrant congregations have not joined the ranks of the nones. In a similar way, the New York tech workers interviewed by sociologist Richard Cimino (2014) are engaged in their local mosques and temples and have earnest discussions about the relationship between religion and science. While some blend Hindu meditation with the New Age and popular psychology, they continue to acknowledge the South Asian lineage of their spiritual practices, in sharp contrast to Silicon Valley’s whitened Buddhism. Although some New York tech workers blur the boundary between religion and work, they do so in ways that accentuate, rather than erase, Hindu language and symbols. As one engineer explained, “The first thing I do when I enter my office is offer salutations to the statue of Lord Ganesha, which I have installed in a small shrine there” (Cimino 2014: 23). Still others argue that “Hinduism is the ‘most scientific religion’” (Cimino 2014: 22) or use the rhetoric of science to articulate a Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh critique of evolution, expressing admiration for the Christian intelligent design movement. Their affinity for creationism recalls historian George Marsden’s discussion of the influence of engineers in Protestant fundamentalism. According to Marsden (1991: 166), the “folk epistemology” of fundamentalism is “close to that which works best for engineers—straightforward, consistent, factual, with no nonsense.” That is not the folk epistemology of Chen’s respondents in Work Pray Code, who live in a region with a very different religious and cultural history. Growing out of the religious ferment of the 60s, Silicon Valley’s mindfulness movement was preceded by what sociologist Robert Wuthnow (1976) dubbed the “consciousness reformation.” While earlier generations of American office workers lived inside Max Weber’s “iron cage” (1930: 181) or C. Wright Mills’ (1951: 189) “enormous file,” Silicon Valley’s tech workers reside in a new spiritual and technological space that might be called the corporate yoga mat. To borrow a phrase from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber 1930), they are Buddhists without Buddhism, meditators without enlightenment, imagining that they have attained a level of corporate well-being never before achieved. References Bollinger , Sarah E. , and Angela R. Olsen. 2019 . The Awakened Life: A Guide to Student Well-Being. Nashville : United Methodist Board of Higher Education and Ministry . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Cimino , Richard . 2014 . Mystical Science and Practical Religion: Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh Discourse on Science and Technology. Lanham : Lexington Books . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Dochuk , Darren . 2010 . From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. New York : W.W. Norton . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Goldman , Marion . 2012 . The American Soul Rush: Esalen and the Rise of Spiritual Privilege. New York : New York University Press . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Killen , Patricia O’Connell , and Mark Silk. 2004 . Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None Zone. Walnut Creek, CA : AltaMira Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Kucinskas , Jaime . 2018 . The Mindful Elite: Mobilizing from the Inside Out. New York : Oxford University Press . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Marsden , George . 1991 . Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids : Eerdmans . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Public Religion Research Institute . 2020 . The American Values Institute. Washington, D.C .: PRRI . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Rosen , Marjorie . 2009 . Boom Town: How Wal-Mart Transformed an All-American Town Into an International Community. Chicago : Chicago Review Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Shy , Yael . 2017 . What Now? Meditating for Your Twenties and Beyond. New York : Parallax Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Weber , Max . 1930 . The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London : George Allen & Unwin. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Whyte William , H. , Jr. 1956 . The Organization Man. New York : Simon & Schuster . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Wilson , Jeff . 2014 . Mindful America: The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Culture . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Wilson , Sloan . 1955 . The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. New York : Simon & Schuster . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Wright Mills , Charles . 1951 . White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York : Oxford University Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Wuthnow , Robert . 1976 . The Consciousness Reformation. Berkeley : University of California Press . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review Oxford University Press

Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley, by Carolyn Chen

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Publisher
Oxford University Press
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.
ISSN
1069-4404
eISSN
1759-8818
DOI
10.1093/socrel/srac010
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

In recent years, scholars have learned a lot about religion and spirituality on the West Coast. From the Nones in the Pacific Northwest (Goldman 2012; Killen and Silk 2004) to evangelicals in Southern California (Dochuk 2010), a growing bookshelf of works has shown us this region’s impact on the American soul. Carolyn Chen’s new book is another such volume. Like an Intel Inside sticker, it tells us what’s going on inside the spiritual lives of America’s tech workers and who paid for it. But it does not just tell. It shows. “Show, don’t tell” is a maxim in many a writing class. In the social sciences, we often do the opposite, overwhelming our readers with tedious argumentation and jargon, rather than novelistic atmosphere. To be sure, Work Pray Code makes plenty of arguments, situating the denizens of Silicon Valley within a larger academic conversation about the “nones,” spirituality, and the world of work. Yet Chen does more than tell. She shows what it is like to work, play, and pray at Google, LinkedIn, and countless startups. Better yet, she brings us into company meditation rooms and onto yoga mats all over the Valley. Through in-depth interviews with over 100 respondents and ethnographic site visits, she conveys the ethos of a new form of corporate culture. A good storyteller, Chen chronicles the transformation of a Georgia transplant who replaced church with work after moving to Silicon Valley. In another chapter, she takes us into a company’s labyrinth that features a corporate logo at its center, a holy of holies in a temple of the information age. She also coins apt phrases that will make this book a memorable read for both specialists and the wider public (including undergraduates). With chapter and section titles such as “The Dharma According to Google” (121) and “The Spiritual Exercises of the Tech Company” (109), she conveys what is at stake when corporate America colonizes American spirituality. The corporate mindfulness revolution in the Valley would confuse the protagonists of novelist Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (Wilson 1955) and journalist William H. Whyte, Jr.’s The Organization Man (1956). Modular and institutionally differentiated, the postwar world separated work from home, business from pleasure, and the office from religion. Whyte, for example, includes a chapter on “The New Suburbia: Organization Man at Home” (265) with sections on “The Church of Suburbia” (365) and “The Web of Friendship” (330). That is not the case in Work Pray Code, where tech workers are encouraged to bring their full selves to the office, as long as those selves help improve productivity and the bottom line. Chen’s informants take their children to the office cafeteria for gourmet dinners and drop them off at evening playtime, pursue their hobbies at corporate headquarters, and engage in walking meditation (sped up for corporate efficiency) on the way to meetings. Inhabiting what Chen calls Techtopia (196), Silicon Valley employees can attend Zoom meetings in the morning, play video games in the afternoon, meditate in the evening, and code after dinner. Chen’s vignettes of meditating techies reminded me of nothing so much as the final episode of AMC’s Mad Men, when 1950s advertising executive Don Draper leaves his Madison Avenue office and lights out for the coast. The final scene shows him meditating by the ocean in a setting reminiscent of the metaphysical Esalen Institute (which shows up as a locale in Chen’s book). Based on research conducted between 2013 and 2019, Work Pray Code shows us what might happen if Draper (or Draper’s grandchildren) took his mystical experience back into the world of corporate America. In addition to old Mad Men episodes, Chen’s book should be read alongside a stack of new books on mindfulness and meditation. Sociologist Jaime Kucinskas introduced us to this world in The Mindful Elite (2018), showing how quasi-Buddhist practices were mainstreamed, packaged, and commodified in the sectors of business, education, and the military. Taking a social movements approach, Kucinskas showed how the movement’s leaders repackaged and marketed seemingly foreign practices with the help of sympathetic philanthropists (cue the Rockefellers and the Fetzer Institute), visiting many of the same places that we read about in Work Pray Code, including Google headquarters and the Valley’s Wisdom 2.0 conference. Yet corporate mindfulness culture is just one of the sectors profiled in The Mindful Elite, which takes readers into Harvard Medical School, Wall Street law firms, public television (Bill Moyers gave a big boost to mindfulness expert Jon Kabat-Zinn on PBS) and the U.S. Marines. For a bird’s eye view of the wider mindfulness movement, there is no better guide than Kucinskas. For a close-up of the board rooms and meditation retreats of Silicon Valley, readers should consult Work Pray Code. Jeff Wilson’s Mindful America (2014) is also good preparation for Work Pray Code, asking whether the spread of Buddhist-derived mindfulness and meditation is “the triumph of Buddhism in a non-Buddhist culture or its death knell?” Wilson (74) reveals the hidden history of practices that combine East and West. Like Kucinskas, he tells us about the spiritual entrepreneurs, scientists and lay people who translate quasi-Buddhist practices into the language of self-help and medicine. Such practices have been adapted for this-worldly ends that were never envisioned by Buddhist monastic communities, including weight loss and diet, career success, and better sex. Mindfulness and meditation are also a staple of campus wellness programs and a growing number of campus ministries and religious life offices. From Mindful USC on the West Coast to Mindful NYU in the East, such techniques are being adopted by chaplains and campus ministers as a response to the campus mental health crisis and growing levels of anxiety and stress (see Shy 2017 for an account of New York University’s approach). Even the United Methodist Church has published The Awakened Life (Bollinger and Olsen 2019), mixing mindfulness with references to Methodism’s founder John Wesley. On both college and corporate campuses, mindfulness practitioners have removed overt references to Buddhist terminology and Buddhist people from their discourse. Chen writes about this rebranding in Work Pray Code. While one Buddhist teacher has cleansed her vocabulary of “words like ‘consciousness,’ ‘dharma,’ and ‘liberation’” (154), another avoids the “B-word” because it “makes people ‘alienated and scared’” (156). Some dispense with the word “meditation,” preferring to speak about contemplation and breathing. While acknowledging Buddhism’s influence on mindfulness, many corporate consultants and meditation teachers talk vaguely about ancient traditions and practices. To erase the potentially stigmatizing elements of Buddhism, mindfulness and meditation practitioners also erase its racial and ethnic association with Asia. Borrowing a phrase from Jeff Wilson’s Mindful America, Chen shows how corporate mindfulness programs adopt a “whitened Buddhism” (164), adding that “Asian people are curiously missing in tech’s Buddhism” (167). Most corporate meditation teachers are white, reflecting a wider pattern in the mindfulness movement. Science, rather than spirituality, is often the first language of mindfulness and meditation programs, especially if they are grounded in Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) approach pioneered at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. In Mindful America, Wilson describes Kabat-Zinn’s own deep immersion in Buddhism, as well as his desire to take the wisdom of the Dharma to a wider audience. Ironically, this process of mainstreaming involves downplaying overt markers of Buddhist thought and practice, replacing them with the vocabulary of medicine and health. While mindfulness has become a staple in many campus wellness programs, employee wellness is not its primary justification in Silicon Valley. As Chen documents, corporate mindfulness practitioners justify their pay with appeals to productivity and profits, not health and wellness. While some cite improvements in employee morale, this too is in service to the bottom line. That is why contemplative practices such as walking meditation can be sped up and reduced to 5-min exercises. Many of the tech workers Chen spoke with do not have time to hang out in corporate meditation rooms. Like many college chapels, they exist more as a symbol than a destination. Silicon Valley’s tech workers are also absent from local congregations and voluntary organizations in a culture that has collapsed the boundary between work and private life. Corporate campuses cater to every whim and fancy (including the palate), leading Chen’s informants to spend most of their waking hours at work. While often resulting in high levels of employee satisfaction (despite the constant problem of burnout), Silicon Valley’s “Techtopia” (196) leaves much to be desired. Lowering levels of social capital (especially bridging capital) and weakening civil society, it keeps employees from contributing to public life. Describing how Silicon Valley swallows up tech worker schedules, Chen (63) argues that “the personal is the professional,” a riff on a ubiquitous slogan from the sixties (“The personal is the political”). The collapse of this boundary was the focus of Arlie Hochschild’s The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (2001). In Work Pray Code, it is taken to its logical conclusion. Chen’s interviews and fieldwork reflect the ethos of a particular time and place. It is worth noting that Work Pray Code is set in one of several “None Zones” in the United States (Killen and Silk 2004). Given this context, it is not surprising that tech workers are more engaged with work than organized religion. According to the 2020 American Values Atlas (PRRI 2020), 29% of San Francisco metropolitan area residents identify as “nones,” just under the percentages for Seattle (32%) and Portland (33%). Allergic to local congregations, Chen’s meditating engineers ignore the real live Buddhists in their midst, tracing their lineage back to the 1960s counterculture rather than to the Japanese Buddhist Churches of America who came to California in the nineteenth century. Things are different in other parts of the country. Though mindfulness and meditation can be found in many corporate settings (including among tech workers), they do not take the same forms in every community. Though many corporations seek to harness the power of spirituality, this does not always mean abandoning local congregations. For a counterexample, it is instructive to consider the lives of tech workers in the Arkansas Ozarks, home to three Fortune 500 companies. Along with executives and middle managers, Wal-Mart, J.B. Hunt, and Tyson employ large IT departments. As journalist Marjorie Rosen (2009) documents in Boom Town: How Wal-Mart Transformed an All American Town Into an International Community, the area has become one of the most diverse metro areas in this part of the Bible Belt. The past few decades have seen the establishment of new synagogues, mosques, and a Hindu temple founded by IT workers from Wal-Mart. Like the evangelical executives and cashiers profiled in Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Wal-Mart, the founders of these new immigrant congregations have not joined the ranks of the nones. In a similar way, the New York tech workers interviewed by sociologist Richard Cimino (2014) are engaged in their local mosques and temples and have earnest discussions about the relationship between religion and science. While some blend Hindu meditation with the New Age and popular psychology, they continue to acknowledge the South Asian lineage of their spiritual practices, in sharp contrast to Silicon Valley’s whitened Buddhism. Although some New York tech workers blur the boundary between religion and work, they do so in ways that accentuate, rather than erase, Hindu language and symbols. As one engineer explained, “The first thing I do when I enter my office is offer salutations to the statue of Lord Ganesha, which I have installed in a small shrine there” (Cimino 2014: 23). Still others argue that “Hinduism is the ‘most scientific religion’” (Cimino 2014: 22) or use the rhetoric of science to articulate a Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh critique of evolution, expressing admiration for the Christian intelligent design movement. Their affinity for creationism recalls historian George Marsden’s discussion of the influence of engineers in Protestant fundamentalism. According to Marsden (1991: 166), the “folk epistemology” of fundamentalism is “close to that which works best for engineers—straightforward, consistent, factual, with no nonsense.” That is not the folk epistemology of Chen’s respondents in Work Pray Code, who live in a region with a very different religious and cultural history. Growing out of the religious ferment of the 60s, Silicon Valley’s mindfulness movement was preceded by what sociologist Robert Wuthnow (1976) dubbed the “consciousness reformation.” While earlier generations of American office workers lived inside Max Weber’s “iron cage” (1930: 181) or C. Wright Mills’ (1951: 189) “enormous file,” Silicon Valley’s tech workers reside in a new spiritual and technological space that might be called the corporate yoga mat. To borrow a phrase from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber 1930), they are Buddhists without Buddhism, meditators without enlightenment, imagining that they have attained a level of corporate well-being never before achieved. References Bollinger , Sarah E. , and Angela R. Olsen. 2019 . The Awakened Life: A Guide to Student Well-Being. Nashville : United Methodist Board of Higher Education and Ministry . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Cimino , Richard . 2014 . Mystical Science and Practical Religion: Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh Discourse on Science and Technology. Lanham : Lexington Books . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Dochuk , Darren . 2010 . From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. New York : W.W. Norton . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Goldman , Marion . 2012 . The American Soul Rush: Esalen and the Rise of Spiritual Privilege. New York : New York University Press . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Killen , Patricia O’Connell , and Mark Silk. 2004 . Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None Zone. Walnut Creek, CA : AltaMira Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Kucinskas , Jaime . 2018 . The Mindful Elite: Mobilizing from the Inside Out. New York : Oxford University Press . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Marsden , George . 1991 . Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids : Eerdmans . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Public Religion Research Institute . 2020 . The American Values Institute. Washington, D.C .: PRRI . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Rosen , Marjorie . 2009 . Boom Town: How Wal-Mart Transformed an All-American Town Into an International Community. Chicago : Chicago Review Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Shy , Yael . 2017 . What Now? Meditating for Your Twenties and Beyond. New York : Parallax Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Weber , Max . 1930 . The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London : George Allen & Unwin. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Whyte William , H. , Jr. 1956 . The Organization Man. New York : Simon & Schuster . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Wilson , Jeff . 2014 . Mindful America: The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Culture . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Wilson , Sloan . 1955 . The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. New York : Simon & Schuster . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Wright Mills , Charles . 1951 . White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York : Oxford University Press . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Wuthnow , Robert . 1976 . The Consciousness Reformation. Berkeley : University of California Press . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Journal

Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly ReviewOxford University Press

Published: May 6, 2022

There are no references for this article.