What happens when our secular institutions spiritually define us.
The gospel of work is thin gruel, an ethically empty solution to meet our essential need for belonging and meaning. And it is starving us as individuals and communities. |
 | | Sean Dong |
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People often wonder why a sociologist of religion like me studies Silicon Valley. "Isn't it a godless place?" they ask. That's what I thought too, until I moved there. As I write in my guest essay for Times Opinion, I learned that the industry is actually driven by energies that if it were almost anyplace else we would call religious: worship, faith and sacrifice. Like most scholars of religion, I had studied religion by looking at religious things — individuals, communities, institutions, texts and practices that are associated with a formal religious tradition such as Islam, Christianity or Buddhism. But that approach doesn't help us fully understand the American religious experience today, when the fastest-growing "religious" category consists of people who don't even identify with a religion. |
American rates of religious affiliation have plummeted to their lowest point in the past 73 years. And nowhere are they lower than in knowledge-industry hubs like Silicon Valley, where high-skilled jobs are growing the fastest. If religion is in decline, I wondered, then what are Americans worshiping now? What has become our new religion? For many professionals, the answer is work. Work provides the identity, belonging, meaning and purpose that faith traditions once did. |
As Americans, we often think that we individually choose what we believe in and what we worship. But as a sociologist, I am trained to look for the social contexts that surround and condition our individual choices. I urge you to think about how our social institutions, even the secular ones, spiritually form us and direct our devotion as a society. Those of us who hold professional jobs in places like San Francisco, Seattle, New York and Washington are subtly but firmly being encouraged to make work our alpha institution, the sun around which our lives orbit. As my research bears out, the theocracy of work is hurting our democracy, our civil society, our families and our communities. |
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