High tech quest

Christian Century, August 1, 2001 by Richard Scheinin

Phillips hopes the group will help business leaders to become "whole people." He suspects, as Wootton already knows, that most will find the wisdom of the ages to be surprisingly relevant to their harried lives.

"The value of that stuff isn't always readily apparent to someone who's working 60 hours a week and doesn't have time to play with his kids," Phillips said. Maybe that person will come to see that "the good stuff in life emerges from the down-time. Sabbath is forgotten here. You're no longer living in that seven-day cycle that reminds us that time is sacred."

AS I THOUGHT about the broad sweep of religious life in the valley, I decided to call Peter Wilkes. The retired pastor of South Hills Community Church, one of the largest evangelical churches in San Jose, is one of the sharpest observers of Christian behavior in the region. Wilkes commented that seekers in Silicon Valley aren't really looking for a path; they want only a feeling.

As he said this, it occurred to me that he could be describing half the people in California, from sun worshipers to tree huggers. But maybe his point is also valley-specific: Work is so strict a discipline for valley folks that when they leave the office, church is the last place they're headed. They need to breathe. They need a fast feeling of release. "It's a feeling," said Wilkes, "that need be tied to no creed, no dogma, no belief. And in Silicon Valley, whatever triggers that feeling for you, that is your experience of God."

"The feeling," he said, "is related to the feeling I have when uplifted by worship. For me, the emotion accompanies the worship, but in Silicon Valley the emotion is the worship.... How do you persuade people to come out of the sensual appreciation that surrounds the truth and into the truth itself?" he asked.

This British-born evangelical pastor, who sees this part of California as virtually godless in its devotion to materialism, once told me that "the valley is filled with the idolatry of self." He summarized his feelings by quoting from 19th-century British missionary C. T. Studd: "`If you want to serve God, pitch your tent within a yard of hell and operate a rescue shop.' I feel that's what I've done here," Wilkes said. "This valley is a place of great suffering, of great illusion and tragedy and many lives broken on the treadmill of technology."

But Chuck Darrah, who grew up in the valley when it was still filled with orchards and has studied its technology-driven culture for a decade, takes a different view. He and his colleagues at San Jose State University have shadowed a dozen families for years, watched them shop, go to school, take vacations, occasionally attend church and, most of all, work. Beneath the materialism and rhetoric of efficiency there is also "a moral vision of what the world could be like," Darrah told me.

"Why do parents buy computers for their children? Out of moral obligation. You don't want your kids to be left behind. You don't want your spouse on the road without a car phone, because it's a rough world out there. You plow through agate-thick computer manuals because the personal computer is the `New Latin,'" Darrah said. "You learn about it because it's good for you and it imposes discipline on your mind. The Protestant work ethic is just oozing through our technological lives." It is through work that people find "sheer intellectual wonderment. It's something more than a job. People are looking to find a kind of divine state through work.