By Mark Ellis –
In Peter Rex’s outstanding Op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, the tech executive exposes the dearth of any semblance of Christian faith among the Tech industry in the Silicon Valley, with roughly half of tech workers self-identifying as atheist or agnostic.
Even worse is the outright hostility and persecution toward Christian conservatives and their social media presence, something that has directly impacted the God Reports website, as documented below.
Rex noted that “outing” someone – as portrayed in HBO’s “Silicon Valley” — does not involve revealing someone is gay, but learning that a certain tech worker attends church, something that “freaks people out in the Valley.”
“Having held tech jobs in Silicon Valley and Seattle, I’ve experienced a combination of hesitation and hostility toward my Catholic faith. Eastern Orthodox, Mormon and Protestant colleagues at my company have had similar experiences, leading them to worry about being open with their religious beliefs. The fear is valid. For all its talk of diversity, the tech industry has little room for devout believers,” Rex noted.
He quotes a 2018 Lincoln Network survey, showing that roughly half of tech workers identify as atheist or agnostic. Further, he points out that UC Berkeley, a top school for tech talent, ended its religious-studies program in 2017.
“When Google employees discovered that some of their Christian colleagues hold a weekly prayer group, some responded by asking ‘we employ people who pray?’ and ‘is that really appropriate to do at work?’”
Standing for the tenets of one’s faith can lead to compulsory resignation in Silicon Valley. The CEO of Mozilla, a Catholic, was forced out in 2014 after it was learned that he opposed gay marriage. “Untold people of faith have hid their beliefs, fearing retaliation or blacklisting. I’ve interviewed candidates who omitted attending religious universities on their résumés, and in one case deliberately misspelled the name of the pro-life group where she used to work. She didn’t want tech HR departments to discover what it was,” Rex stated.
A report by the Napa Legal Institute found that social-media platforms increasingly censor Christian conservatives.
In 2019, the God Reports website had four million views of our stories, according to Google Analytics. In the first few months of the presidential election campaign of 2020, there was a dramatic fall-off in our web traffic — during 2020 our traffic tumbled by 50%.
In 2021, our traffic fell by 90% compared to 2019 levels. Google’s suppression of our web traffic can be easily documented by searching for our stories using identical search terms on Google and DuckDuckGo, a competitive search engine.
On DuckDuckGo, God Reports’ stories will always come up on the first page, in the Top Ten. Using identical search terms on Google, our stories will most likely be buried in the 40th to 80th place – or disappear entirely!
Since we are not a political website, the only conclusion to be drawn is that our Christian witness and attention to Christian social concerns has placed us in Google Purgatory.
Did Silicon Valley executives take orders from the DNC during the 2020 election to suppress Christian conservatives? The answer seems obvious.
Rex notes in his article that leading Silicon Valley execs are pursuing “transhumanism,” meaning a portal to immortality through tech-enabled enhancements. If there is no God, then all things become permissible in their eyes, even building a technological Babel as a bypass route to heaven.
“Tech needs an infusion of faith. It could make the industry more humane and enlightened and morally grounded, helping lift up those it currently pushes down…Tech isn’t a god, nor are tech leaders, but they do need God.”
Peter Rex is founder and CEO of Rex, which builds and invests in tech companies. His article can be found here
