I recently picked up the Steve Job biography by Walter Isaacson the other day, and it has been a fascinating read about the personality, quirks, and traits of Steve Jobs and the history of his life’s work, Apple, Inc.
So far, I’ve encountered tons of astounding things about Jobs and Apple that I never knew before, such as the company’s unusual origins; strokes of luck that came at critical times of need; bizarre corporate dynamics; and the brilliance of Jobs to have tied all his connections and resources together to make Apple what it is today.
But what I’ve found to be most interesting is that the book talks in depth about the significance of Jobs’ religious proclivities and how they profoundly influenced him—possibly more than anything else.
Isaacson conveys that religion was never something Jobs merely dabbled with nominally, but rather, something he immersed himself with completely. And it was this significant experience with religion during his young adult years that would prove to set the bold trajectory for not only his personal life, but also for the life of his business as well.
Jobs’ Early Years
Most people know that Jobs was a proclaimed Buddhist; but that’s not how his religious experience started.
The biography relates that Jobs grew up in a rather small Lutheran church, but quickly developed an allergy for the traditional Christian religion. The story goes that when Jobs was just 13, he came to church one day carrying not a Bible with him, but instead an 1968 edition of Life magazine, which featured a pair of starving children from Biafra on the front cover.
He approached his Lutheran minister, and asked “If I raise my finger, will God know which one I’m going to raise even before I do it?”
The pastor answered, “Yes, God knows everything.”
Jobs then pulled out the Life cover and asked, “Well, does God know about this and what’s going to happen to those children?”
To which the pastor responded, “Steve, I know you don’t understand, but yes, God knows about that.”
After such a perplexing, dissatisfying, and even maddening response, Jobs announced that he didn’t want to have anything to do with worshipping such a God, and, as a result, he never went back to church again.[1]
In other words, it appears that Jobs’ earliest experiences with Christianity were largely stunted by the classic objection popularly coined as the ‘Problem of Evil’—the assumption that God’s love, God’s power, and the presence of evil can’t all exist simultaneously.
To Jobs, if God was as loving and as powerful as Christianity suggested, then the injustices of starving children should not exist. But because they do exist, then it would seem that an all-loving and all-powerful God certainly does not.
Yet, Jobs’ experience with the Lutheran church didn’t snuff out his spiritual interest; instead, it stoked the flames of his spiritual curiosities even more, causing him to wander into the domain of different religion altogether, namely, Zen Buddhism.
As everything else in life, Jobs dove into Zen Buddhism full tilt, even devoting several years of young adulthood to exclusively seek Enlightenment. In fact, when he was only 19, he took a brief hiatus from his enrollment at Reed College and decided to spend the following 9 months in India, where he sought the wisdom of popular gurus who taught the religious elite about how to follow the strictest tenets and higher levels of Zen Buddhism. Jobs spent that year striving to un-strive, desiring to un-desire, and trying to un-try, all in the effort to experience Nirvana, that rare, elusive salvation of the soul.
Isaacson never explicitly addresses why Jobs took such great interest into the spiritual realm. But he does connect it with the fact that Jobs sought liberation—in some form or another—from the deep pains of being abandoned and left for adoption by his biological parents. The book points in part to the idea that Jobs sought to medicate this pain with the existential, transcendental promises of Enlightenment and Nirvana that would lift him above the pain of his earthly domain.
Now, the story continues, of course, but I want to stop and zero-in on the nature of his spirituality, because that’s precisely where things start to get interesting. Let’s not disconnect his initial, allergic responses to Christianity from his long-term interest in Zen Buddhism, because there’s an incredibly ironic dynamic at play that I wish even Jobs himself was aware of.
Let’s look at Zen Buddhism and then let’s look back to his initial distaste with Christianity. In doing so, we’ll not only find some striking irony, but we’ll also find ourselves confronted with the glaring reality that Buddhism simply can’t deliver what it promises.
Zen Buddhism
Firstly, Zen Buddhism is frequently praised for its emphasis on the remedial effects of meditation and concentration. Let it be noted, these are good things for our soul, even godly things according to Psalm 1. However, it’s a religion that takes these good things, and makes them the ultimate things. Practically speaking, however, this leads unfortunately and inevitably to narcissism. In the most literal sense, it’s a religion that is necessarily curved in upon oneself, searching for one’s own divinity.
To be sure, there’s nothing wrong with taking personal evaluations every now and then and striving for personal growth. However, if that is the main crux of your religion—as it is with Zen Buddhism—it makes you wonder who you’re really worshipping.
I’m not saying all Buddhists are blatant narcissists; but I am saying that Buddhism as a worldview certainly makes it difficult to not be one. It’s simply the natural trajectory, as is any religion where personal performance is the primary emphasis.
In fact, Isaacson openly notes throughout his biography that Jobs was an incredibly narcissistic person. Isaacson concedes that Jobs knew it himself, and didn’t want him to gloss over that reality when he wrote the biography. As the reader discovers, Jobs rarely demonstrated any care or concern for anyone, even his best of friends, including his own wife. Even more shocking, it was in the very heat of his pursuit towards Enlightenment when he chose to abandon his own biological child.
This reality, especially in view of his allergy to Christianity, is heavily ironic. Irony might just lie at the bedrock of his spiritual journey after all, as unfortunate as it sounds. But what do I mean here?
The Irony
The irony is that Jobs turned his face against Christianity when he couldn’t reconcile the fact there were starving children in third world countries while there was an all-loving and all-powerful God.
However, the poetic justice of it all is that God allowed Jobs to be a multi-billionaire who could have very well leveraged his resources for the good of those starving children. And yet, for some reason, there’s no record of Jobs ever making any charitable endeavors whatsoever to help poor, starving children in third world countries.
Jobs shook his thirteen-year-old fist at God, making jabs about how God’s wisdom is insufficient, his love weak, and his willingness poor.
But maybe, just maybe, God was telling Jobs that he uses people and the resources he has entrusted to them to be His own hands and feet in service for the good of others. But, for some reason, Apple or Steve Jobs was never known to be particularly philanthropic.
NY Times even commented on the issue, “Steve Jobs is a genius. He is an innovator. A visionary. He is perhaps the most beloved billionaire in the world. Surprisingly, there is one thing that Mr. Jobs is not: a philanthropist.” In fact, the article continues to explain that there’s no public record of Jobs giving money away to charity at all.[2]
The Result
What Jobs was once so passionate about—and what initially turned him away from Christianity—was an issue that was no longer important to him. He blamed God for doing nothing, all the while God had given him the world at his fingertips to make a difference; and yet, he chose not to.
The irony is that Jobs became later in life exactly what he hated most about traditional Christian religion. The type of God that Jobs himself hated was exactly the type of god that Jobs himself became. What turned Jobs away from the alleged ‘weaknesses’ of Christianity, he blindly adopted himself.
And of course, I’m sure Jobs didn’t decide one day to not be a philanthropist. That would be absurd. However, it’s not absurd to think that philanthropy hardly crossed his mind.
But… why?
This is precisely because Zen Buddhism simply doesn’t foster a way of life that is generous to others. This is because it is a worldview that primarily spends its energies on refining, improving, and caring most for yourself. So it’s not at all surprising that Jobs didn’t have the necessary ‘bandwidth’, to put it in computer terms, to care for others; it’s just the natural effects of his worldview.
His preoccupation to make himself ‘right’ with God or with a higher power fundamentally severed his ability to think about the needs of others over himself. This is a fact shown with the relationships he had with his family, with his closest of friends, with his coworkers, and with his vocational aspirations. Zen Buddhism—or any form of religion that prescribes human performance for soul salvation—is one that inevitably gains momentum down the path of narcissism instead of the path of selflessness.
And that’s how it goes with any religion of this kind. If the main focus of your Christianity is all about staying in God’s good graces by your human performance, then you’ve lost track of what Christianity is all about anyways.
I said it earlier, but if the center of your religion is based on what you do, who you become, what you accomplish, etc., then it makes you wonder who you’re really, actually, truly worshipping after all.
But if the center of your religion is based on One who has done for you what you could never accomplish for yourself, then that’s where truly selfless worship begins. The self is joyfully forgotten.
Where Buddhism Fails, Christianity Succeeds
Jobs sought Enlightenment to purge his soul of the restlessness, guilt, and rejection he felt from being abandoned as a child. So he looked for vertical, transcendent acceptance that would provide inward, supernatural renewal. But even though he worked for his salvation with all his heart, he grew not increasingly peaceful, but increasingly frustrated with how the daunting feelings remained. And in the process, he became more narcissistic as a result.
He was right to understand his need for salvation, but he was wrong to believe that he could redeem himself. What he needed was transcendence, yes; but he needed to embrace the acceptance, love, and forgiveness of a transcendent God who gives that salvation as a gift in the person and work of Christ who came down to us, put his rights on the block for us, paid the penalty of sin for us, and vertically redeemed our standing with God with his imputed perfection.
This vertical ‘set rightness’ would finally put his restless, self-deprecating soul at ease, inwardly speaking. And outwardly speaking, it would have produced profound practical ramifications as a result. Receiving salvation from Christ’s sacrifice and generosity invariably begets a desire to want to sacrifice and be generous for the good of others, too. When we realize that God reached out to us and became like us, to save us… we respond to that radical grace by leveraging our resources to help others in need—not because we have to, but because we want to.
Transcendent vs. Descendent
Early Steve Jobs would have loved the Scripture, James 1:27, which makes clear: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”
But Zen Buddhism certainly didn’t lead Jobs to care for those in need. It encouraged transcendence by looking in; but as a result, it didn’t ever compel him to descend to the level of those in need.
But Christianity, on the other hand, does. That’s because its salvation is not a performance of religious merit. Rather, it’s a Person who bestows generosity on those he longs to save. And this Person—the very essence of our salvation—himself embodies generosity: “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:6-8).
Jesus was transcendent, though he became descendent in his life and in his resources so that we might benefit from his work and transcend out of our situation of brokenness and alienation.
Buddhism says look in and transcend… and when your gaze is transfixed inwardly, it’s hard to even see what’s beyond your own needs. But Jesus teaches us that true, spiritual transcendence comes from descending into the situation of others and helping them transcend out of their brokenness.
And he did it for you and for me, and for Steve Jobs and the children in Biafra.
Final Thoughts
To conclude, Jobs’ experience with Zen Buddhism was certainly ironic in relation to his distaste for Christianity. But what’s even more ironic is for Christians themselves to not live generously. Jobs possessed a faulty religious blueprint for generosity. But we have more than a blueprint: we have a Person who was generous to us at his own expense.
The transcendent God of Christianity descended into the human situation so that we could transcend out of our own. So how much more then should we leverage our resources for the transcendence of others, the widow, the orphan, the homeless, the dropout, the single mother, the hurting friend, the struggling family member?
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[1] Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster), 2011. Page 84 iBook edition.
[2] NY Times, “The Mystery of Steve Jobs’ Public Giving” by Andrew Sorkin. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/the-mystery-of-steve-jobss-public-giving/?_r=0.
