New College Berkeley is delighted to welcome new members to our Advisory Board! We are grateful for the expertise that our Advisors offer as we plan our future offerings. In this post, we’d like to introduce you to Professor Carolyn Chen, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, UC Berkeley. Carolyn attends First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley and has recently been featured in two KQED Forum broadcasts:
KQED Forum panel (July 6, 2022): “Religious Influence on U.S. Politics Grows Even as Americans Become More Secular”
KQED Forum interview (June 1, 2022): ”How Big Tech Turned Work Into a Religion” (an interview about Carolyn’s new book, Work Pray Code.)
We caught up with Carolyn a couple of months ago and she shared the following with us.
Please tell us a bit about your background, who and what shaped you, and how your faith informed your calling.
My parents are immigrants from Taiwan, and my great great grandfather was one of the first Taiwanese to convert to Christianity in Southern Taiwan. His unusual decision to become Christian in a country where less than two percent claim the faith laid the foundation for my family’s faith, identity, and community for generations to come. My upbringing in a Taiwanese immigrant church in Southern California was formative. Knowing where I came from, gave me a secure sense of who I was. When I went to college I discovered sociology. It gave me a structural lens to understand things like religion, race, and ethnicity, that had otherwise felt so individual and personal to me. Today I am a sociologist of religion and I teach in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. My early experience of faith, community, and ethnicity in my Taiwanese immigrant church inform many of my scholarly questions about religion in contemporary America.
Could you share a bit about your most recent book,Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley? How does this book relate to your academic, scholarly, and faith-related goals? What are you working on now?
Work Pray Code is my attempt to understand religion and spirituality in places like the Bay Area, where rates of religious affiliation are among the lowest in the United States. Usually religion scholars study “religious” things – people, institutions, texts, and practices that identify with a particular religious tradition. But that misses the growing population of Americans who are “religious nones” and don’t identify with any religion. At one time, faith communities were the primary source of identity, belonging, and meaning for many Americans. Today, that is not the case, especially in knowledge-industry hubs like Silicon Valley, Cambridge, Los Angeles, and so many other metro areas where high skilled jobs are growing the fastest. For many professionals living in these areas, workplaces have become the new faith communities, providing the identity, belonging, purpose, transcendence, and even spiritual care that religion once did for many Americans. Work, I argue, is replacing religion. Work Pray Code may seem completely unrelated to my earlier work on Taiwanese immigrant religion, but it’s not. At bottom, all of my work looks at how people find meaning and belonging in contemporary America.
Now that Work Pray Code is out, I’ve turned my attention to institution building. I’m the co-director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and we recently received a grant from the Luce Foundation to bring the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI) to UC Berkeley. We are sponsoring many exciting programs to advance the scholarly and public knowledge of APA religions.
Please share one hope you have for the future of Christians and the Christian community?
As a sociologist and Christian, I’m concerned with the hollowing out of our public institutions during a time of growing economic and political polarization in America. There are fewer and fewer public spaces that draw Americans from different walks of life together in community and to wrestle with the hard ethical questions that we face. We’ve become like Cain, asking “am I my brother’s keeper?” The rich are siloed with the rich and can buy their way out of engaging with the public. And the poor are left out of the good life. My hope is that the church, along with other faith communities, can be a generative space for real dialogue and community-building across the racial, class, political (and more) lines that divide us.