Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine. My guest today is Professor Carolyn Chen. She is a sociologist,

associate professor of Ethic Studies at UC Berkeley. She's the author of Getting Saved in America,

and most recently, Work, Pray Code. When Work becomes religion in Silicon Valley, available from Princeton University Press.

Professor Chen, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you. Thank you for that enthusiastic introduction, Nathan.

Always enthusiastic. So your book, you start with this observation of a change that has occurred over time. You

focus on a set of relatively highly paid Silicon Valley workers, and you talk about the fact

that among this group of people, there is not so much devotion

to traditional religion.

They are not necessarily a highly religious bunch who attend church regularly.

But they are, in fact, in many ways, still religious.

And I'd like to start with what you found interesting

and whether you can start to describe what this change is

that forms the core of your book, this phenomenon that you're studying

and you're showing to us.

Yeah, so the main argument of my book is that work

is replacing religion. And I'm using Silicon Valley as a case study. But it's an argument that I'm

making that I'm generalizing to high skilled workers or professionals in the United States. And we see this

in a couple ways. First is that work is providing identity, belonging, meaning, and purpose in the

lives of professionals. And these are needs that Americans once turn to religion to fulfill. The other thing that we're

seeing is that work is, workplaces are taking on the pastoral role of providing spiritual

care and development to their workers because they see that spirituality is a competitive

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