High tech quest

Christian Century, August 1, 2001 by Richard Scheinin

EVERY NOW AND THEN, one of Silicon Valley's high-tech workaholics makes a wrong turn off the freeway and stumbles upon a Californian Brigadoon. It's called Alviso, a backwater village that has so far managed to miss out on the technological revolution. In Alviso, everyone lives within a few blocks of the tiny church that is its centerpiece: Our Lady, Star of the Sea. On weekends, scores of children arrive for Bible study, violin lessons or catechism training, sometimes held in the garage beneath the parish house. People still walk to church in Alviso, which retains the feeling of a transplanted Mexican border town.

From Our Lady's courtyard, one can look across a highway and a broad swathe of undeveloped land--increasingly rare in the valley--and see an altogether different vision of Christian faithfulness. Rising in the center of grounds almost as large as all of Alviso is the Jubilee Christian Center, a theologically conservative, charismatic church with 5,000 steady members and a $15 million sanctuary that seats 3,000.

Multimedia rules at Jubilee. When Pastor Dick Bernal and M. C. Hammer, the rapper, sit down with Smokey Robinson and other born-again celebrities, the proceedings may be streamed over the nondenominational church's Web site (www.jubilee.org) or taped for cable television broadcast. On Easter Sunday, 1,470 young people received free Samsung cell phones at Jubilee's doors (unit value: $90) for bringing friends to services. "That was the hook, if you will," Bernal says. "Bring a friend, get a cell phone."

The cell phone giveaway may strike some as crass, especially compared to the traditional ethos of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in Alviso. From time to time, I have enjoyed sitting in the early morning silence at Our Lady. I can actually hear myself think there. That's novel in the high-tech valley where Christians--including ministers--have told me that they carve out time to pray while exercising on treadmills or changing lanes in the middle of hairy rush-hour commutes.

Yet there's something intriguing about Jubilee's embrace of valley culture. Bernal has advertised his church on freeway billboards and the Howard Stern radio show. He fell into the cache of cell phones through his chiropractor, who mentioned that a business friend needed to donate hundreds of phones as a tax write-off. "Why not?" Bernal reasons. "The kids get a cell phone to put in their backpacks, and their friends get to find out if they like church."

Silicon Valley is a place and a mind-set. Geographically, it wraps around San Francisco Bay, but its precise boundaries are mercurial. The computer and high-technology industries have historically been centered in San Jose, a city of 895,000 at the bay's southern end, and surrounding communities in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties and in southern Alameda county. It's been said that this area--despite the recent downturn in the high-tech industry--represents the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet.

Technology is ubiquitous. On Sunday mornings, pastors ask congregants to please turn off their cell phones, and moments later tell them to synchronize upcoming church events on their Palm Pilots. Work is venerated. Valley engineers put in 60- or even 80-hour weeks and see themselves as missionaries, promoting the values of efficiency, productivity, risk-taking and entrepreneurship. Many imagine themselves as creators of a utopian vision that will transform the world through better distribution of information, jobs and money. Business is religion, technology its fruits.

"It's not Protestantism, but it's sure the Protestant work ethic," said San Jose State University anthropologist Chuck Darrah, who has studied the effects of technology on family life in Silicon Valley for ten years.

Religion teaches a constant message. The valley values nothing more than change. Its mythical figures--its high priests--are businesspeople, the creators of products that make yesterday's innovations obsolete. In such a place, the church struggles to stay on the cultural radar screen.

"Silicon Valley has one of the lowest church attendance rates you can imagine," said Earnest Brooks, a Lutheran pastor who moved to San Jose six years ago. "You just don't have a lot of support here. You don't get a lot of overall reaction to what you do. And sometimes you get to the point where you wonder whether there is any meaning to what you do, and if the church has any meaning to the people who live here."

Technology was supposed to set people free, to save time so they could take time to pursue what's most important to them. Instead, technology's embrace seems to have left people famished for time, fighting through phone calls, e-mails and faxes to maintain priorities.

A time to plant? A time to sow? The Bible alludes to an abundance of time, while Silicon Valley makes it almost sexy to be frenetic. As a result, Silicon Valley workers may dismiss faith as irrelevant. Or inefficient, the greatest sin of all.