What Matters: October 2007
The Lord of the Techies
By Br. Guy Consolmagno '74, SM '75
Photo: ©iStockphoto.com/Clint Hild.
It was after a long, exhausting day at a science-fiction convention that an old friend of mine from my MIT days and her husband caught me up with a surprising question. "Could you explain," they asked me, "how this religion stuff in your life actually works?"
They already understood that a person like me, a Jesuit astronomer, could exist. They knew I did exist. But what they wanted to know was how. What were the nuts and bolts of how I actually made it all work together?
They're interested in religion, now, in a way they never were when they were young punk engineers who knew it all. They're getting older; they're raising a family. And they're asking me, because along with my being a Jesuit brother (and a friend), I am also, like them, a techie.
I know my tribe. I spent seven years at MIT earning two degrees and researching as a postdoc, and I loved every minute of it. My friends are the kinds of people who break codes for fun, go camping with telescopes, build home-brew rockets and homemade robots. For Christmas they give their kids rocks—really cool rocks.
But how well did I know techie attitudes toward religion? In 2005 I spent a couple of months in Silicon Valley, talking to more than a hundred techies about their religious beliefs. For many techies, religion carries the connotation of an unresponsive hierarchy, a heavy-handed bureaucracy, a stifling set of rules. The costs and dangers of Big Anything are real and familiar to every techie: high overhead, loss of control, a lot of paperwork or other justifications to bosses who you suspect haven't a clue—the Dilbert syndrome. So why would a techie put up with it?
In the high-tech business world, big outfits are often the only show in town; for the chance to do what they love to do, and get paid to do it, techies will put up with the suits. The same fact of life holds true in organized religion. To the techie, the preacher in the pulpit might be just another incarnation of Dilbert's pointy-haired boss; but if the benefits are worth it, they'll ignore him just as they ignore their bosses.
Many techies are left cold by the rites and rituals at their churches, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't want or need them; they just aren't satisfied with what they're getting. I suspect that techies would respond to a well-crafted liturgy if they were told why they're doing what they're doing. Liturgists are the techies of religion.
Another thing many techies lack are the philosophical and linguistic tools to describe the religious experience. A number of times in these interviews, I had to puzzle out from the context what it was the techies were actually trying to tell me. An experience of God is hard enough for a poet to express; engineers rarely develop new metaphors. Furthermore, they are still trapped in a culture that tells them that real techies don't do church, so they imagine a very strong social pressure against expressing these ideas.
They do believe in God, and they do find God in their churches. But they have a deep reticence when it comes to talking about it—even to a trusted friend, even to a family member, even to themselves. But there wasn't one techie in all my interviews who looked blankly at me when I asked my questions or sought their opinions. They all knew what I was getting at; I wasn't raising anything new that they hadn't already thought about before on their own.
It so happens that unlike them, I find myself in a job and a life where I have the time, the training, and the encouragement to think about religion, especially my own religion. This doesn't mean that my thoughts are deeper than my fellow techies'. But what my religious formation as a Jesuit brother has given me is the vocabulary and categories—and the cultural permission—to talk about the sorts of transcendental things that everyone experiences but that not everyone has the tools to describe.
When I judge my Catholicism by the functions that I demand from a church, it passes the test. It does have a deep, rich, challenging history of interaction with God. It has a systematic theology that gives me a handle on that history without ever ceasing to challenge me to look deeper and grow further in my faith. It has a full suite of liturgies for every possible occasion in life. Its spiritual teachings give me a way of describing, understanding, and appreciating those odd moments I do experience, those moments that my religion successfully gives me the space to experience: when the transcendent God becomes immanent in my life. And at its best, it does it all with verve and joy.
The ultimate reason why I am a Catholic is because it works.
Adapted from God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion (Jossey-Bass, 2007).
About the Author
Brother Guy Consolmagno, SJ, is a planetary scientist and curator of meteorites at the Vatican Observatory. After his MIT degrees in Course XII he earned his PhD in planetary science from the University of Arizona, was a researcher at the Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and at MIT (1980-1983), served in the U.S. Peace Corps (Kenya), and taught physics at Lafayette College before entering the Society of Jesus in 1989. Along with more than 100 scientific publications, he has written a number of books including Turn Left at Orion (Cambridge University Press, 1989), coauthored with Dan Davis PhD '83, and God's Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion (Jossey-Bass, 2007).
What Matters is a guest opinion column written by a different MIT alumnus or alumna. The views expressed are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Alumni Association or MIT. Interested in writing a column? Email whatmatters@mit.edu.
