Carolyn Chen | When Work Becomes Religion (and how it preys on us)

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:11] So you may not think of your work as your religion, but for many it is trying to become exactly that without us even realizing it. Question is, is that a good thing, a bad thing or just a thing? Today's guest, sociologist, associate professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley and co-director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, Carolyn Chen, has a lot to say about this silent yet deeply impactful phenomenon. She spent five years studying workplace culture, with a focus on the near religious cultures of Silicon Valley as home to start ups, major tech companies, and some of the world's most innovative and arguably faithful entrepreneurs and professionals. She noticed the lines between doing meaningful work and religion have not only been blurred, but work has in many ways squeezed out and even become employees. Religion. The problem is the goal is not personal and societal betterment here, but rather in service of one central purpose working harder and smarter and making more money. Carolyn is the author of Getting Saved in America Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience, and the co-editor of sustaining Faith traditions, religion, race, and Ethnicity Among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation, and her latest book, work, Pray Code When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley, is a fascinating account, an exploration of her time spent interviewing the best and the brightest in the tech world to unfold how tech giants are reshaping spirituality to serve their religion of peak productivity. In our conversation, we explore big questions like why are so many people leaving traditional religion? How do religion and spirituality meet our needs in the first place? And what are the ways big tech or corporations in general are filling those gaps? What does it look like for us to choose what we want to worship and find meaning and belonging in healthy, non-traditional spaces? And and is this conversion of work into faith actually a societally destructive phenomenon, even while organizations might benefit from it? And by the way, these topics and questions are on display in tech.

Jonathan Fields: [00:02:33] But don't think for a moment that a wide range of organizations aren't exploring them as well, and along the way, bringing us into the fold. Sometimes wittingly, other times maybe not. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is SPARKED. You know, I think an interesting place for us to jump in is a conversation that that, uh, I have been having in various different ways with various different people, from founders to leaders of faith to just everyday folks who are in, you know, like my world, which is what's happening to our needs as human beings and in particular, what needs do we have and how do they interact with the domains of faith and spirituality? You know, I've been fascinated with the role that faith and spirituality have played in people's lives for many, many different years. Like what physiological, what psychological? What emotional needs do these things fill? And I know this this was a, you know, sounds like a bit of a starting point in your process of inquiry. So I'd love your take on this.

Carolyn Chen: [00:03:47] That's a great question, Jonathan, and no one has ever asked me that yet. So I'm glad that you're asking me this opportunity to explore this with you. You know, I think that when we look at religion and I'm going to separate here religion and spirituality, we need to talk about them as two separate things. And here I'm going to define spirituality as a personal thing. And it's something like it's an individual connection with the divine. It's a having a sense of, you know, maybe meaning or purpose. This is something that you can pursue individually. I think when we talk about religion, it is something that is collective. It's a collective enterprise. It is social, it's a social institution. And so sometimes religion meets our spiritual needs and sometimes it doesn't. You know, a lot in my book I talk about what are the social needs that, you know, religion fulfills and other organizations fulfill. And I think that when we look at least contemporary American religious history, we look at the role of religious institutions and faith communities. I think they've played a really strong social role in meeting our social needs as human beings. So these are our needs to feel a sense of belonging in community and identity. And we've throughout the last, I'd say 60 years, but really more dramatically, in the last 30 years, we've experienced a decline in religious participation and religious affiliation. And that also maps onto a larger long term decline in civic participation, civic participation in the United States. So that sense of social belonging, and I think that we see that need really being not met today, I would say in many of our for many people, we currently are suffering from an epidemic of loneliness.

Carolyn Chen: [00:05:46] And that loneliness is most extreme among younger Americans. So Gen Z and younger millennials, and we don't see the loneliness experienced among older Americans who tend to still have that practice, that habit of belonging to social organizations, civic institutions which may be faith, community or otherwise. So I think that religion has for a long time fulfilled this very important social need. It has also fulfilled a spiritual need, a spiritual need for connection to the divine, for having a sense of meaning in one's life. But it hasn't always fulfilled that, I would say adequately. And I think that what we've found, as I mentioned earlier again, is this decline in religious participation that many Americans are moving away from formal religious organizations and they're pursuing a sense of spirituality. You know, spirituality is no longer tied to belonging or to community anymore. It might be they get it through oftentimes, the marketplace actually attending a retreat, which you pay for, right? Or going to yoga classes, buying a book, attending a seminar. Or it could be participating, you know, just walking in nature. But I think that there's still this dimension of that social belonging, which I think is still a really important need that people, I think are getting fulfilled in different ways. And in my book, I talk about how people are getting that need fulfilled actually through the workplace.

Jonathan Fields: [00:07:20] It's fascinating. Right? I remember reading a number of years ago Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone, and how he was really talking about this shift where, you know, we look to all these local community associations very often where there was a local league or the Chamber of Commerce or the Lions Club or your congregation to satisfy this need for belonging and how a lot of these things were falling away and no longer providing that need. At the same time, we have just as human beings who are looking to flourish, a psychological and physiological need to belong. And it's creating this chasm that we experience as suffering, but we can't quite place our finger on where it's coming from. And this question of like, what do we do? At that point, you're like, where do we turn to?

Carolyn Chen: [00:08:01] And I think that there's other factors here too, that are involved is that we get the approximation of community and belonging now through social media. Like how many friends do you have on Facebook or, or how many followers, which I think is also weird as, as a scholar of religion, you know, and it gives us this approximation of belonging, of community, of friendship, but it's simply not the real thing. Right? I think that when you think about and if I take community a bit further to kinship, you know, an even more intimate form of social belonging, you don't have to present your best self. Do you know which is what we do through social media? But I think that there is this, this element of performance that we perform for social media. And one of the biggest ironies, I find, is this obsession with authenticity, with this desire for authenticity. It's also in our spirituality. It's it's in our organizations. It's really so much of part of, I think, what our youth want as well. And I think it's so ironic because our forms of social media, actually, they don't cultivate authenticity at all. They are exactly the opposite of authenticity.

Jonathan Fields: [00:09:17] It is so interesting. Right? And yet I feel like I'm seeing a little bit of a pendulum swing backwards in the other direction. So I wonder if people are getting almost a little bit burned out on the shiny happy selves and yearning for something to a shared lived experience?

Carolyn Chen: [00:09:35] I think so, I mean, how could they not? I feel like that this is just simply human, you know? This is just simply human. And I think that honestly, we have a desire. All of us have a desire to be loved unconditionally. But it takes a certain amount of courage and trust and confidence to be able to reveal our authentic selves. And when you are getting rated and judged with the thumbs up, thumbs down, or you know, that's simply not environment where we can do that.

Jonathan Fields: [00:10:07] Yeah, no, I totally see that. It's interesting the way that you sort of, as you were describing, belonging and also the other things that we yearn for or the needs that we get satisfied through more of what you would classify as spirituality, it almost seemed like you were navigating a spectrum between religion and spirituality that moved us through Maslow's hierarchy. Um, whereas like religion is more around the middle, like the belonging and the security needs and the like sense of certainty, and then as we rise up, it goes more into sort of like what you would classify as spirituality. Does that resonate?

Carolyn Chen: [00:10:40] It does resonate. And I think that differentiating the two helps us understand that we might turn to different things to actually meet those needs. Yeah, that.

Jonathan Fields: [00:10:48] Makes sense to me. You also described the rise of what I've heard classified as the nones. So all these people who identify as, quote, spiritual yet are making their way from organized religion and I think often inadvertently making their way away from one of the primary mechanisms that satisfied these needs, because we need to have it satisfied. You know, either we we linger in suffering. There's a void that just kind of is perpetually there. But at some point, it feels like we start to look towards something else to satisfy that need. So the question is, what are they turning to? It sounds like this became a big focus for you that led you actually to spend a chunk of time in Silicon Valley. Um, you know, this study that looked at, you know, 2013 to 2019, what was the thing that motivated you to say, let me dive deeper into this, to sort of like, see, like, where are people going and are they going to work? And is that actually giving them something? And then why Silicon Valley of all places?

Carolyn Chen: [00:11:46] So I'm a sociologist of religion, and most scholars of religion, we study religious things so people, institutions, communities, practices, texts that identify with a religious tradition such as Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, etc. but I think that any of us who are living in these coastal cities these days, we see that religion doesn't have the same kind of social influence or social power that it used to have, and that there are rising number of folks who don't affiliate religiously. They are these, you know, so-called religious nones. For me, I was really curious about how do we still continue to study religion, what is the place of religion in secular society and among these group of people? So I actually first started my research by studying yoga. Yoga studios are sort of a quasi religious space. They have often, you know, Hindu icons, um, some practices, the chanting, but they are considered secular spaces. Right. And so I conducted interviews among some yoga practitioners because I'm always interested in their spiritual and religious biography. I talked to them and I asked them like I've. Really wanted to understand how and when and why they practice yoga. And as I asked them, the theme of work just kept on coming up. So they would say things like, well, I practice yoga after a long day of work to unwind, de-stress, and when I do this, it helps me become a better ex. And here you could fill in the blank.

Carolyn Chen: [00:13:19] It might be a nurse, it might be an engineer, it might be a lawyer. So they thought about their work very directly, their yoga practice in relationship to their work. And they would talk about how because of their work, they suffered headaches, lack of sleep, stress. And so it became clear to me that, wait, I was looking for the sacred by looking at Hinduism or yoga, you know, yoga as a Hindu inspired religious practice. But in fact, what was sacred here was really the work they were willing to sacrifice and surrender to their work. They were willing to undergo all these deprivations for their work. And when they even thought of yoga, they thought about it as a self-improvement practice to make them better workers. So it became clear to me that, hey, you know, if I'm really looking at what is religion in secular society, you know, what is sacred? What is that which we set aside and that we're willing to surrender, to submit, to sacrifice to? Well, it's work. It's actually work. And so that led me to look at the workplace and then why Silicon Valley? It was actually as actually just a serendipitous, because my husband and I were on sabbatical at Stanford for the year. And there we were in Palo Alto, in the belly of the beast in Silicon Valley. And what better place? So it was it was just perfect.

Jonathan Fields: [00:14:47] Yeah. That's so interesting that you started in the yoga world. It's a space I have some experience in. Also, in the early 2000, I actually owned a yoga studio in New York City, and it was interesting to see how, how and why people would come to the practice, what they were looking to contribute to it and what they were looking to get out of it. So what makes you sort of like then say, okay, I want to actually devote a substantial amount of my time and energy to a deeper study of this population to really understand, like in this context, what's happening with this seeming overlap between work and spiritual tradition or religious tradition?

Carolyn Chen: [00:15:27] Well, a lot of it was really intellectual curiosity, you know, as a sociologist of a religion. And for me, I felt like I was on to something where people hadn't talked about this before. People people hadn't understood. Here we have all these scholars studying religion, but what is really religion? You know, what is really operating as religion today in places like Silicon Valley or all other knowledge industry hubs? How do we think of religion and spirituality outside of the box? And I felt like, so here is me, a scholar of religion in a corporate space. And it was honestly, it was just like, oh my gosh, so eye opening. I mean, everywhere I saw religion, I didn't even have to look very hard. It was just all there in Silicon Valley, right? Things like angel investors, you know, they call people chief spiritual officers in Silicon Valley. So it was I didn't have to look very hard, actually. As I started conducting interviews, I very clearly saw a pattern. And the pattern was that people who what I noticed is that people who were religious before that, when they started working in Silicon Valley, they lost their religion because essentially the workplace the company took over, started to fulfill all the needs that were once met in their faith communities. So that was where they got their primary sense of identity, belonging, community through all the social events, their their meaning and purpose was supplied for by the corporation, by the company mission.

Carolyn Chen: [00:17:06] The company taught them spiritual practices like meditation and mindfulness and you might say like, well, meditation and mindfulness. That's those are also health practices, right? That's just about de-stressing. But wait, what about when you start to associate the place where you go for wellness and well-being to be your workplace? Well, then you start to develop a certain kind of attachment. And so what I saw very clearly was that people started to develop not only social and not only material attachments to the workplace, but also spiritual attachments to the workplace. And that makes you want to spend all your time at work and work really hard. So I think that one of the things that this is in many ways my book, one could read it like, okay, wow, there's this Wizard of Oz and this guy and puppet. These people are, are basically on puppet strings and they're being manipulated right by HR or management. But I think that there's another part of this story, which is that many of the people, the executive coaches, people in HR, the managers, many of them were very much interested in bringing wholeness to the workplace and helping people bring out and to really discover their authentic selves in the workplace. They were very genuine about helping people on their spiritual quests, and I think that it met a real need for the people who were in the in the workplaces for the tech workers as well.

Jonathan Fields: [00:18:42] Yeah. And whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. Yes. To all of the above or none of the above, I think that's something we'll explore a little bit. But, you know, it's interesting to see the phenomenon happen. You write really grabbed me, right? In the past, immigrants found community and immortality by building churches, synagogues, temples and communes. The tech migrants of the 21st century, however, meet these religious needs by starting companies. And I think a lot of us, you know, there is this mythology in particular around the world of startup and tech and Silicon Valley, around founders, around cultures, you know, around these scions who have, you know, like risen up and, you know, hundreds of thousands of people to be their quote follower slash employees, um, and then hundreds of millions to be their disciples, slash customers, you know, even external to the organization itself. So the analogy, at least in that space, you can literally I think, I would imagine, kind of go down a list of what are the traditional pieces of the puzzle of an organized religion, you know, like what are the checkboxes that you have for functional ones that have sustained over time and probably find analogs in these types of organizations?

Carolyn Chen: [00:19:56] Yes. And I would say that this is not just this is no longer just a Silicon Valley thing, but in most fortune 500 companies, they have a mission, they have a distinct ethics, they have an origin story or myth, and they have a charismatic founder. You know, they have things like, say, if you're a Christian, you wear a cross will if you work at Facebook, you wear a or now meta, you know, you wear a meta t shirt. You know, there's ways that you signify and you identify to others. And it's very clear also that you know, your sense of kind of value and worth comes from the company that you belong to. So, so many of the elements that you're absolutely right. The social and I would also argue spiritual elements of religion are now really being provided for by companies. And, you know, this is by design. It's not it is not a it is not a random thing.

Jonathan Fields: [00:20:49] You could just as easily swap in ashram for startup.

Carolyn Chen: [00:20:54] Yes, yes, you absolutely could.

Jonathan Fields: [00:20:56] And disciple or student or, you know, like a participant or devotee for employee, you know, and check really similar boxes. I think ashram in particular, because so often it becomes this residential thing that provides for all of your social and physical needs in a way that you know, certain other traditions or structures, at least in the US, don't necessarily, but it really is. It's such a similar thing, which really does bring us to, I think, some of the the bigger ethical questions around this, you know, you write and I thought this was a, this line just kind of stopped me dead in my tracks effectively. You know, you've got a scenario where the company is providing for all of your needs and then you in turn, end up spending all of your time there, you know, as you write, when the company takes care of the whole person, it gets the whole person, you know? So it begs the question, what are the trade offs? Like, what are we giving up in the name of this? And actually, is it different in the context of, you know, because we asked that same question in the context of faith, of of religion, like what is our sacrifice, you know, and is it different when we are sacrificing in the name of getting all these needs met with the ultimate goal of helping a corporation versus actually helping a faith based organization and whatever that mission is that's wrapped around it, and potentially our own self-actualization wrapped up in it.

Carolyn Chen: [00:22:24] Also, I think there is something different here. So in the corporation, in the tech company, people in, you know, wellness and health and human resources executive coaches, they all might have an individual desire to help you become a more whole person, but they have to work within the system of a company, which is a for profit institution, which is essentially operates by the bottom line. When you talk about what is when they explore with you, like what is your purpose in life, what is your mission? It ultimately has to benefit the company and it. Has to align with the company. And so in the end, to me, I feel like we end up with an impoverished sense of self, an impoverished sense of society, and an impoverished sense of a flourishing life. When we let companies be our temples and our churches and our mosques that define who we are as people. Because in the end, in these companies, the spirituality, your self-actualization, your wholeness is in service to productivity, everyone. So your value is always defined by your productive worth, you know, and I think that that was very clear. People accepted that. And the other thing that's different with the corporation is that it offers this sense of mission and purpose that is coming from down from this organization. And it's definitely you have at a place like Google, you have a whole army of human resources, people who are massaging it and making it sound, you know, to make sure that you're going to get, you know, full compliance and not just compliance, but, you know, exuberance and, you know, and embracement by all of the employees.

Carolyn Chen: [00:24:17] I think that what happens, what's different in a faith community is that it's a community of people who can come together to determine what their own vision is of a flourishing life and a good society that's a little bit different from a corporation. I think the other thing that's different in a faith community versus a corporation is your value is not judged by your productivity. There is a space for the practice of forgiveness, grace, unconditional love. There's no room for that in a corporation. They like to appropriate the language of the family and religion. You know, by talking about authenticity, by talking about love and joy and purpose. Passion. But the truth is, is that they cannot deliver on that. You're really not a family member there. You're not loved unconditionally. You still have to prove yourself. You're still going to be reviewed every six months, and if you don't meet it, you're going to be fired. So on one hand, this language and, you know, kind of this culture, but underneath it all, it doesn't offer the same kind of grace and unconditional love that maybe a family can offer, or that a really wonderful faith community can offer or spiritual community can offer.

Jonathan Fields: [00:25:36] Yeah. No. That resonates so deeply with me. I have heard in a number of different industries the line, you're only as good as your last successful X could have been a deal. It could have been a product, could have been a client launch or a campaign. And the minute you stop delivering on that success, you're out. You are ostracized from the congregation. Um, yes. And it's interesting because if you look at religion and if you sort of say broadly that it's about the betterment of the human condition, the betterment of society, the betterment of the individual as the fundamental unit of effort and contribution, like the idea. And then you look at the typical either startup or a larger public enterprise, like a startup. And everyone knows this, you know, especially if you're a VC backed, if you're a venture capital backed, if you've taken other people's money, which in certainly in Silicon Valley and the tech world most do. As much as you may lay a mission statement over whatever it is that you're doing. Fundamentally, at the end of the day, you need to first and foremost return the capital that your investors gave you. And then second, beyond that, give them a really healthy return.

Jonathan Fields: [00:26:49] And then everything else like comes into play. And everybody knows that if you talk about the fundamental thing, that's what's really going on. And then even if you reach a size where you're in a larger organization, a public entity, you are now legally beholden to, quote, maximize shareholder value. And it's interesting because you now see these special vehicles for business being created like a benefit corporation, where part of your legal responsibility is actually to elevate the individuals and the environment and the ecosystem around you. And you can literally point to that as something where you're making decisions about. But it's, you know, that is still very, very nascent in the business space. Here's what's going through my head around this. I wonder if part of the reason that the quote nuns started growing so quickly, the people who were fleeing organized religion is because, similar to what we're seeing, this sort of like double messaging in the corporate world, people started to sense that that was happening in organized religion, too, and they weren't buying in to the reason that they were told that this thing exists anymore. And they were starting to see we're being sold one thing, but there's actually something else happening here.

Carolyn Chen: [00:28:04] I think that's you're absolutely right about that. I think that when we look at organized religion in the United States, we really see the first sort of, I guess you could say earthquake, you know, kind of transformation happening as a result of the 60s and 70s and the counterculture and what happens there. And then there is this generational effect that when people tend to be religious, when they have been socialized in a religious way. So if you grew up in a religious family, you you're more likely to be religious, right? So if you have already people leaving because of the 60s and 70s and sort of what you're talking about. Right. There's sort of saying like, wait, there's a lot of hypocrisy here, particularly in certain sectors of Christianity where you have the rise of the religious right, where there's this all this now emphasis on, you know, personal morality and family values, which ended up creating boundaries and, and ostracizing and alienating many people. Sure. I think that you're absolutely right that this is also part of the rise of the nones. Um, there was a study, actually, that was done. So the number of nones, actually, since the mid 20th century has stayed had been stable at about 70% until the 1990s, is in the 1990s that it doubled to 14% and ever since has been rising. And so we've seen the hypocrisy in organized religion before the 1990s. But what happened in the 1990s and one study talks about essentially it was the rise of the religious right, um, that people who were more moderate and liberal politically and who identified as Christian just simply disaffiliated. So anyways, that kind of gets perhaps a little too technical for you, but yes, I think that that is that that is part of it, that there is also hypocrisy in organized religion. And certainly, you know, we've seen things like the child sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church. I mean, that is a big reason for a lot of people leaving, and rightly so.

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:08] I've always been curious. When you see any organization where you have these powerful individuals that rise up as figureheads and leaders. At what point do you transition from being in service of others to being more in service of self? And look, we all have ego like there's no way to annihilate. As long as we have pulses, it's there for all of us. But, you know, very often I think we have these wildly charismatic people who command the attention of so many others and bring them in. And then at some point, fall. And I feel like similarly, we see that happening in the world of business and especially in the world of ultra fast growth startups, that people are willing to surrender almost the entirety of their humanity in the name of following one of these individuals who at some point reveals their humanity, sometimes very destructive, self destructive nature or other destructive nature of their humanity and everything crumbles along with it. So I almost feel like there's like an oscillation back and forth between people trying to figure out like, well, I bought into this and it gave me this for so long and now I'm not feeling it anymore. Let me try this on for size. And now corporations kind of saw that and they're like, oh, I just got passed a baton. There is a business benefit to running with this for a while, but I almost wonder if people are starting to get that same sensation with business now. And in no small part, especially given the last couple of years. And really, it's giving them the distance to say, huh, I'm back in that place of wondering what's really going on here?

Carolyn Chen: [00:31:42] I think so, yeah. I mean, I wrote this book before the pandemic. I did all my research before the pandemic, but I think so the conversations that I've had with people and what I'm reading about is that being away from work, just doing work remotely, has literally made work more remote. And in a way, people are getting burnt out because they still have the same demands from work. But work is not able to deliver on the social and spiritual benefits that it used to. Because we are not in person. You don't feel sort of the immediacy of the mission and that sort of, you know, the rush that comes with being with others and fulfilling that mission together. So I think that some of the glow of work has, has or the shine of work, you know, has been revealed. And, and I think people are thinking twice about it for sure. And absolutely, I think that, you know, if I can go back to some of your earlier comments and then try to segue into just addressing this earlier, one is that I quote the late poet and writer David Foster Wallace in my book, where he writes, there are no such thing things as atheists. We all worship something. The only difference is that we get to choose what we worship.

Carolyn Chen: [00:32:57] And I think that this quote, I really like it because I think that it really sums up the quandary for the person of faith today or the seeker for today. And I think that he's right, that we all worship something. I think that there is a human desire to when we sacrifice for something, when we surrender for something, when we submit to something we like to give, we want to give. You know, there is a feeling of transcendence when we do that. We lose our self right when we surrender and we submit to something bigger than ourselves. I think this is a very human tendency. The question, though, is that in a place like Silicon Valley and I call it a tech topia, insectopia is a society where work is the highest form of fulfillment. And in a tech topia, essentially, it's a creation of an ecosystem where we worship work because all of the social, material and spiritual benefits are concentrated into the institution of work. And so, you know, here's where I disagree with David Foster Wallace, is that when we live in a particular ecosystem, oftentimes we don't get to choose what we worship because we are just simply assimilating. We're just led to worship that one thing because this institution fulfills this the most deeply.

Carolyn Chen: [00:34:29] And that's what I think is happening in Silicon Valley and in the case of work. And I think that in the 1950s, there was an ecosystem where you had multiple civic institutions, and the religious institution was probably the most important one that offered the most sort of articulated and pronounced sort of, you know, sense of meaning and purpose and practices. So that was an ecosystem that supported religion, you know, worship normal religious traditions. But I think that the question for us today is, you know, what are we going to choose to worship? And I think that here, you know, when I make this distinction between religion as. Virtualities that religion is a collective enterprise and so is worship. We get our sense of meaning and identity from who we belong to. Like, where are you from? Who are you? Who are you part of? Who's your tribe? Who's your. Who are your people? These are the people who define who we are. What is good to us? What is our vision of a flourishing life? And so I think that the question for us is people at this particular moment is how do we create these new houses of worship? This is a collective enterprise. This is about creating new social institutions that we can choose what we see as being a flourishing life.

Carolyn Chen: [00:35:50] How do we then shape our societies? How do we create a different kind of ecosystem? And I think that that's the question that we need to be asking. The pandemic gave us a moment to help us see that, okay, maybe work is just work. Work labor, in its most basic form, is essentially labor in exchange for wages, you know? And so when you kind of take away some of the shine of work, that's what it is. So that's what it is. So then how do we create, again, not a different kind of workplace. Because I don't believe that companies are going to save us from work. They're not going to it's in their interest to make us work harder and better for them. Right. The question then is how do we create a different kind of ecosystem? How do we create those different kinds of houses of worship? And they might be religious in the sense that they might be organized religion, but they might not be. How do we create those new houses of worship that we're going to want to submit and surrender to, that we're going to want to commit our time, energy and devotion?

Jonathan Fields: [00:36:51] It is such a fascinating question, and I agree, I think so many of us are at that moment now where we've been through a cycle of devotion and commitment and, and gotten like certain needs satisfied in exchange for that, like a bargain was struck. And then we kind of realized that that's not the bargain, that we want to keep moving forward, in no small part, because we've also probably realized that maybe it actually hasn't given us as much of our humanity back as we thought it was. We've just been so immersed in doing the work that we haven't had the space to notice. And now we do. And now we're realizing that we're actually not okay. The question for me is, if we were to reimagine this new container that would give us those things that we not only yearn for, but actually literally need to survive the belonging, the sense of identity and purpose and values and, and some sort of ethical core. How do we step into that? And maybe this is so like going into your broader experience in the domain of, of scholarship around religion, like how do we create a source or a container that gives us that in a way that is more likely to travel with us no matter where we go in life? This is like health insurance, right? It's like, how do we take it away from the organization as the provider and install it in us? So no matter where we might wander, no matter how we might age, no matter what our what happens, you know, like we can still feel like we are a part of that and it's dissociated from necessarily being provided or connected to some external thing, which depends upon us showing up in a very particular way that's not just meaningful to us, but appropriate for their needs.

Carolyn Chen: [00:38:34] Well, that's a big question, Jonathan. I'm going to try to.

Jonathan Fields: [00:38:37] It is I know.

Carolyn Chen: [00:38:37] I'm going to try to take a crack at it. You know, when I think about religious traditions and religion and just as a scholar of religion, I'm going to just talk about organized religion and faith communities and what they do. And I think that what they are at their very best, what they do is they offer us a story, a narrative that we can step into to help understand our lives and to guide our lives. And, you know, if you go deeply into any religious tradition, they're so rich and deep that there is so much room to explore, to go deeply. And I think that this is I'm not sure if I'm really answering your question, Jonathan, but I think that at the best that this is something that it can do for us, that I simply don't think a corporate mission can do. For instance, you know, and that one of the things that religions do is that they do offer us a story, a set of practices from really your birth to your death, right? To help you make sense of your life through all the kind of valleys, peaks, whatever that you go through. And I think that at its best, this is part of what religion can help us do. Does that kind of get at? Your question?

Jonathan Fields: [00:40:07] Yeah, I think so. It almost makes me wonder whether, because something that I've heard a lot lately is that people are they're actually religious, but they are devoted to the core ideas and ideals rather than the trappings and the translations and the edicts that are second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth generation quote interpretations of what somebody else says is the right translation and then execution of these ideas. And I feel like there's the nuns are less about running from the fundamental ideas and teachings of a lot of religious traditions, many of which when you really, really, really get down to the core, are quite similar. But it's more a running from the structures that have been built around them, and the layers and layers of translation that tell them what is and what isn't, not an appropriate or okay or acceptable way to live into these ideas. And that just doesn't resonate.

Carolyn Chen: [00:41:07] I agree, and let me back up here and say that any healthy faith, community or religious tradition, I mean, religious traditions are living things. They live and breathe, they stretch, they die. I mean, this is at least from the Christian tradition. What's so fundamental to the Christian tradition is a story of change. It's of death and rebirth, and that includes the church and that includes the community. So I think that a healthy community needs to make room for death, for change, for rebirth to be stretched. That's the only way that it can stay alive. Right? So anyways, to just get back to your question to about how do we build those kinds of institutions, well, how do we build institutions that have that kind of resilience, that have that kind of grace, that have that kind of trust and, you know, borrowing from the Buddhist sense of impermanence to trust in that impermanence and, and to accept it and be at peace with it. Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:42:10] Big questions. Um, but I think questions were all in right now. You know, we're all grappling with and as much as the thing that's brought us to this moment has been painful in a lot of ways, we are in a moment where there is a there's a level of questioning and reimagining that I think, I hope at least will yield some healthier futures and just lenses in the way that we step into our lives, our worlds, our containers for all of the needs that religion and and elements of spirituality have provided. And as you're sort of alluding to, maybe it's less about imagining or creating something entirely new, and maybe it's looking back at what has existed and sort of saying, you know, like, how do we make these more adaptive, inclusive, expansive so that it really accommodates a changing future with more grace?

Carolyn Chen: [00:43:00] Mhm mhm. Yeah. Well put. Thank you. It comes back to belonging. Mhm. Thank you.

Jonathan Fields: [00:43:08] Hey. So I hope you enjoyed that conversation. Learned a little something about your own quest to come alive and work in life. And maybe feel a little bit less alone along this journey to find and do what sparks you. And remember if you're at a moment of exploration, looking to find and do or even create work that makes you come more fully alive, that brings more meaning and purpose and joy into your life, take the time to discover your own personal Sparketype for free at sparketype.com. It'll open your eyes to a deeper understanding of yourself and open the door to possibility like never before. And hey, if you're finding value in these conversations, please just take an extra second right now to follow and rate SPARKED in your favorite podcast app. This is so helpful in helping others find the show and growing our community so that we can all come alive in work in life together. This episode of SPARKED was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and Me, Jonathan Fields. Production and editing by Sarah Harney. Special thanks to Shelley Adelle for her research on this episode. Until next time. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is SPARKED.