The Religious Profile of Technologists

Executive Summary

The Morality Behind the Machine

It is difficult for anyone to fully separate their morality from their everyday life — and particularly from their work. Who we are seeps out in everything we do. The diversity of backgrounds and beliefs found in technology is, in many respects, a tremendous asset to the world. Innovation thrives on varied perspectives.

That said, as our studies on the Concentration of Wealth and Attention and Intelligence show, technology has come to concentrate some of the most important forces in human life. A close look at the people at the helm becomes that much more important. Our world is slowly shifting from being governed primarily by elected government institutions to being shaped by technological institutions run, largely, by people who are unelected. That raises a question: what is the moral makeup of those people, and is it representative of the country they shape?

Section 1

The Moral Makeup of Technology Leaders

Of the 19 largest U.S. tech companies by market cap, 11 CEOs have publicly disclosed their religious affiliation — through interviews, memoirs, or well-documented public observance. The remaining 8 have not made public statements that allow reliable coding.

Section 2

The Moral Makeup of Employees by Sector

The leadership composition is not anomalous within tech. The workforce below the C-suite shows the same pattern: tech sector employees rank at the bottom of the U.S. economy on Bible-believing weekly rates.

Section 3

Implications

The two layers reinforce each other. Tech leadership and tech workforce point in the same direction. The gap between Energy (22% Bible-believing weekly) and Information Technology (3%) is one of the largest workforce religious-practice divergences in the modern U.S. economy.

This report does not advocate for forced equality of religious representation. The goal is not a quota, and no individual's faith should be a factor in hiring or leadership selection. Diversity of belief is healthy, and it has produced remarkable innovation.

But the impacts matter. Technology today is not merely a product category — it is infrastructure. It shapes what billions of people see, believe, and value. When the sector exercising that influence diverges so consistently from the moral and religious composition of the people it serves, the question of representativeness becomes legitimate. Not as a grievance, but as a practical matter of stewardship. The most powerful shaping force in modern life deserves close attention to who is doing the shaping.

Section 4

Conclusion and What We Should Do

The data here is descriptive, not prescriptive. It documents a gap — one that is consistent across both the leadership and workforce layers of the most economically concentrated sector in the country. What we do with that knowledge is the more important question.

The companion studies in this project — the Concentration of Wealth, the Exponential Divergence, What Shapes Children — describe what the products built by this workforce are doing to American life. This study describes who is building them. Read together, the two halves form a single picture: the most powerful shaping force in modern life is being built by a population whose moral and religious composition differs sharply from the people being shaped.

For faith communities, the response is not alarm but engagement: preparing people of moral conviction to work faithfully inside the institutions doing the shaping. For policymakers and civil society, it is a call for transparency and accountability from companies whose products touch every area of human formation. For all of us, it is an invitation to ask more carefully: who is building the world we live in, and do we understand the values they carry?

The question is not whether technologists deserve their roles. They do. The question is whether the country that lives inside their products has any meaningful stake in how those products are shaped — and whether the people doing the shaping see themselves as stewards of something larger than the next quarter's metric.

Appendix A

Methodology

A.1 CEO Religious Affiliation

The CEO composition data covers nineteen U.S. publicly-traded technology companies, approximately the top-19 by market capitalization in mid-2025: Apple, Applied Materials, AMD, Amazon, Broadcom, Salesforce, Alphabet, IBM, KLA Corporation, Lam Research, Meta Platforms, Micron Technology, Microsoft, Netflix, NVIDIA, Oracle, PayPal, Qualcomm, and Tesla.

Each CEO is coded into one of five categories: Christian (practicing), Jewish, Hindu, Atheist/secular (which includes those raised in a tradition who publicly identify as non-religious), and Not publicly disclosed. Coding is based on public statements, interviews, memoirs, and well-documented public profiles. Where an executive has not made a clear public statement, the category is Not publicly disclosed; the report does not infer affiliation from heritage, ethnicity, or surname.

A.2 Workforce Bible-Believing Rate by Sector

The sector-level rates are an approximation, not a direct measurement. There is no canonical study that surveys employees by industry and reports a single "Bible-believing weekly" figure per GICS sector. The figures used here are reconstructed by combining three publicly-available data streams:

1. Workforce composition by sector from BLS occupational and industry employment series — specifically the distribution of each sector's workforce across education attainment (high-school, some college, bachelor's, graduate), age cohort, and geographic region.
2. Religious-practice rates by demographic from the Pew Religious Landscape Study (2024) and Pew/PRRI cross-tabulations of weekly attendance, Bible belief, and self-identified evangelicalism by education, age, and region.
3. Geographic concentration of each sector from BLS state-level industry employment data, cross-referenced against PRRI's American Values Atlas of state-level religious composition.

The "Bible-believing weekly" figure is defined as the intersection of self-identified belief in the Bible as the word of God (approximately 35–40% of U.S. adults per Pew/Barna) and weekly worship attendance (approximately 27% per Pew). The intersection is approximately 11–13% of the U.S. adult population — represented in the chart's reference line as roughly 12%.

The "AI Researchers" category is not a GICS sector. It is a sub-population — PhD-level machine-learning researchers concentrated in academic departments and Big Tech research labs — included as a leading indicator of where the broader tech workforce composition is trending.

This is an estimated approximation, not a measurement. The directional pattern (energy/industrials high, tech low, AI researchers lowest) is robust across plausible reconstruction methods. The specific percentages should be treated with ±3-point error bars.

A.3 Comparison Baseline

The baseline for the U.S. adult population is the Pew Research Center's 2024 Religious Landscape Study: approximately 62% Christian, 28% religiously unaffiliated, 2% Jewish, 1% Hindu, and 7% other.

Appendix B

Limitations

On Layer 1 (CEO Composition)

1. Small sample (n=19). A single CEO change shifts the distribution.
2. Large undisclosed group (n=8, 42% of scope). If those CEOs match U.S. population (~60% Christian), Christian representation rises from 0% to ~25% of total. If they match the disclosed group, the picture intensifies. The report takes no position on what the undisclosed group looks like.
3. CEO ≠ company. Leadership religious composition does not determine workforce, board, or institutional culture composition — though the Layer 2 data suggests the workforce trends in the same direction.
4. Affiliation ≠ practice ≠ influence. "Hindu" or "Jewish" coding captures cultural-religious identification, not intensity of practice or weight in decision-making.
5. Snapshot. Mid-2025 only; whether this distribution is recent or longstanding is a separate question.

On Layer 2 (Workforce Bible-Believing by Sector)

1. Approximation, not measurement. The figures are reconstructed from BLS workforce demographics × Pew religious-practice rates by demographic. There is no canonical direct survey. Treat with ±3 percentage-point error bars.
2. Definitional choices matter. "Bible-believing weekly" intersects two distinct measures (belief and attendance). Different definitions (born-again identification, evangelical self-identification, biblical-literalism survey items) produce somewhat different numbers but the same ordering across sectors.
3. "AI Researchers" is not a GICS sector. It is a sub-population (PhD-level ML researchers in academic departments and Big Tech research labs) included as a leading indicator. Direct measurement of this sub-population's religious composition is not available; the 1% figure is derived from the religious profile of comparable academic populations (PhD-holders in technical fields per Pew/National Science Board data).
4. Within-sector variance is large. Health Care varies dramatically between research-oriented (low Bible-believing) and direct-service (higher). Information Technology varies between Bay Area headquarters (very low) and distributed remote workforce (closer to U.S. average). The sector-level figure is an average that obscures meaningful within-sector heterogeneity.
5. Sector classification follows GICS, which has known boundary cases (e.g., Tesla in Consumer Discretionary, Alphabet/Meta in Communication Services).

What the Report Deliberately Does Not Do

• Does not claim religious composition at either layer causes corporate behavior.
• Does not normatively evaluate the gap.
• Does not assert religious composition of leadership ought to mirror the U.S. population.
• Does not impute religious affiliation from heritage, ethnicity, or surname.

Appendix C

References

Religious Affiliation and Practice Baselines

• Pew Research Center. Religious Landscape Study 2024. Primary baseline for U.S. adult religious composition and practice rates by education, age, and region.
• Public Religion Research Institute. American Values Atlas. State-level religious composition data used for geographic sector adjustment.
• Barna Group. Bible engagement and weekly attendance cross-tabulations. Cross-tabs of belief and attendance used to construct the "Bible-believing weekly" intersection rate.

Workforce Composition by Sector

• Bureau of Labor Statistics. Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. Workforce composition by education, age, and region per sector.
• Bureau of Labor Statistics. Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. State-level industry employment for geographic concentration analysis.
• National Science Board. Science and Engineering Indicators. Workforce demographic data for PhD-level technical/research populations underlying the AI Researchers estimate.

CEO Religious Affiliation Sources

• Auletta, K. (2014). Profile of Tim Cook. The New Yorker.
• Nadella, S. (2017). Hit Refresh. HarperBusiness.
• Isaacson, W. (2023). Elon Musk. Simon & Schuster.
• CNBC. (2024). Coverage of Mark Zuckerberg's stated re-engagement with religion.
• Jewish Federations of North America. Public profiles of Jewish-affiliated executives.

Appendix D

Project Files

Companion project: TechConcentration/ — economic concentration of the tech sector in U.S. equity markets, 1900–2025.