Vocation • On Daily Work
“Severance”, the Most Theologically Accurate Diagnosis of the American Workplace
Before becoming a pastor, I spent 12 years working as a consultant at various tech startups. I can remember the sound of my first Human Resources Director’s heels as she clodhopped across our high-gloss epoxy floors to begin orientation. With vivid red lipstick she expeditiously exclaimed, “Welcome! Two things we never talk about here: politics and religion. Got it? Okay, let’s get started.”
Watching my favorite TV show, I realized that onboarding is our severance procedure.
New Jersey junctions—my church is in the “sixth borough” of New York City—are not the only reason Severance is currently my favorite show. It is my favorite because it accidentally became the most theologically accurate diagnosis of the modern American worker ever put on screen.
Severance follows the main character, Mark Scout (played by Adam Scott) and his internally disheveled team of misfits at Lumon Industries: a fictional, fluorescently drenched data center filmed in Holmdel, New Jersey. Mark’s entire team has undergone “severance,” a medical procedure that physiologically separates the work brain from the normal brain. This procedure allows the characters to completely “sever” the work self from the normal self, so they don’t have to pretend to be two different people.
When Mark and his team step into their office at Lumon, they effectively lose all memory of and interaction with their normal world. At Lumon, they are only an employee. By the time they clock out and reach the parking lot, they regain their understanding of the normal world and lose all memory of and interaction with their office. Severance literally creates two separate psychological realities, supposedly to guard work-life balance, though—as the show details—often to use their work hours to escape the challenges and traumas of their personal lives.
Is it achievable to separate our work self from our normal self? Societally, we seem to be trying.
Are we living a severed life? Are we mindlessly sprinting to Friday afternoon so we can slip off our tie or heels and put on our comfortable pants to visit our favorite places with our preferred people all weekend? Or are we barreling through to Sunday night, when we once again prepare to put on our work self the next morning, a self that is familiar and yet unrecognizable to our full self?
Gallup says our answer is most likely yes, because 69% of American workers reported being disengaged at work in 2025. I firmly believe the primary reason we are less engaged at work than we should be is that we have learned to sever our work selves from our everyday selves. Mark Scout had a surgeon, but you and I had an HR Orientation.
But we are pretending.
What would have to be true about our work for us to stop pretending it is separate from the rest of our lives? We would need to see the fiction and then stop the severance.
Severance—not simply the show, but the aspiration—is a fiction. Work is essential to who we are before God. Work is deliberately introduced as our first thought about the Lord. The book of Genesis begins, “In the beginning God created.” Creating is labor. Everything in the natural world, then, is the result of God at work (John 1:3). It follows that everything we see is the byproduct of a collision between faith and work.
Whether you believe in the supernatural or not, it is quite miraculous that we spend most of our waking hours in a workplace. Whether it’s an office-bedroom or the 27th story in Midtown, we typically spend over forty hours in our own place of work. But it doesn’t stop there…. We take a break and spend time at the Italian sub spot downstairs—a place of business. Then we clock out and grab a movie with a friend—another place of business. Then we go home, eat our Home Chef dinner subscription (another business), and unwind with a sturdy doomscroll (in the digital world that’s… a business.)
Consider how all those businesses exist only because someone believed and worked. Meta has our attention because many years ago, Mark Zuckerberg had an aha moment in a dorm room at Harvard University. He believed in a digital concept that did not yet exist, believed it would turn into a platform worth spending time on, worth billions of dollars. So, almost everything you see is a result of a collision of faith and work.
Even in the not-for-profit world, what may not be a business is still most definitely work. You are reading this article because someone believed that if they produced this article—the combined work of writing, editing, producing, and publishing—then people would read it.
Then, on the second page of the Bible, the Lord positions breathing and working as the foremost faculties of humanity:
“7 Then the Lord God formed the man out of the dust from the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being. 8 The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he placed the man he had formed.
15 The Lord God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden to work it and watch over it.” (Genesis 2:7–8, 15)
Don’t get me wrong; I am not here to lobby for political and religious round tables at your warehouse job. But we must question whether separating faith from work is realistic.
We cannot sever our work from the person who gave it to us. Quite the opposite, if work is the gift of God, then we need a posture of humility that recognizes that our work is not simply ours to maneuver however we prefer. Instead, work comes from God, and we must relate to it the way he envisions.
The Bible assumes a connection between work and worship. The Hebrew word for work in Genesis 2:15 (`abad) occurs over 140 times in the Old Testament. `abad fuses work and worship together because it includes a sense of serving and devotion. It carries a sense of service, even being used as one of the major Hebrew words for worship! This is why I typically use “Faith at Work” as the title of the movement to express faith in the marketplace, not “Faith and Work.” The “and” implies faith and work are separate ideas. `abad means that work and faith are one inseparable reality. To work is to worship, and worship involves work.
The Bible, then, emphasizes weaving work and faith together. In just the first two pages, the Bible corrects its Ancient Near East counterparts’ idea of work. The cognate of this same Hebrew word, `abad, occurs in many texts from antiquity, including the famous Mesopotamian Epic of Atrahasis. This extrabiblical ancient Sumerian epic also presents work as an activity created by the gods for humans. Yet, it presents work as slave labor. The gods were tired of working, so they created humans to do all their work for them.
Atrahasis anticipates our modern world’s view. Work is slavery. If it is so, why would we not sever it from our outside lives?
Here’s why: attempting to remove God from our work is like unplugging our washing machine from the wall. The appliance might look the same, we may even figure out how to hand-wash clothes inside it, but it doesn’t work the same. We have disconnected it from the very thing that makes it go! And then we wonder why we are burned out, overworked, yet under-engaged.
We have been taught over time to unplug our work from its true power source. At some point, we must reconnect our work to its power source. Separating God from work will strip work of its greatest strengths. Treating work like necessary slave labor convinces workers that a perfectly good washing machine needs repairs, when a healthy read of the owner’s manual would adjust perspective properly.
I learned this firsthand in the boardroom, not a systematic theology class. One day, the VP of Sales at our then-$4 billion-valued organization got up to deliver a zealous speech, a five-minute monologue about… belief. He said that for our team to surpass new goals, we needed to elevate belief in our industry, in our organization, in our particular product, and, most importantly, in ourselves. He came to the realization that every job has potential at its core that can only be unlocked by belief. The job you hold has immense value to God that can only be unlocked by working as if worshipping.
We onboard, and the HR department tells us that work must be severed from faith. And yet, simultaneously, our world seems unable to remove the residue of God’s created purpose. Work, even after the HR meetings have come and gone, still has elements of a religious act. Companies have largely assumed—even while they tell us to sever—that showing up to work is a religious act. Work and devotion have been one connected concept since the beginning of recorded history. To resist faith in the workplace is to reject the deepest potential for flourishing in your work. The Bible is not philosophically far-fetched in saying faith and work belong together.
Nonetheless, somehow, we now think we can separate faith from work.
So, how do we stop the severance? Before you find a job, realize that you have a calling. When we start believing we have a calling, not just a job, separating our normal life from that calling becomes paradoxical. Genesis 2:15 tells us we have a spiritual office before a physical one. Every physical office comes with spiritual offices. Are we operating in them?
God created Adam in Genesis 2:7–8 with a spiritual office and then in verse 15 gave Adam the physical office of Eden. There’s a difference between anointing and hiring. A man or a woman can hire us. Only God can anoint us. We can be hired into and fired from a physical office, but calling is forever. When we have an office that cannot be given or taken by any company, we have an office worth waking up for every day, no matter what the pay looks like. The call of God on your life is beckoning an end to your severance.
Without setting out to do so, the show demonstrates exactly that. The insipid nature of the severed floor creates a tension that unravels over many episodes of Severance. The characters’ workplace selves and their normal-life selves crave knowledge of one another. One heart-piercing scene depicts this evergreen tension. Dylan George, played by Zach Cherry, is suddenly awakened in a closet, perplexed and dismayed, because he doesn’t know how he got there. He is breathing heavily. Everything in the closet is familiar yet unrecognizable. Then he sees his boss in the closet. His boss ferociously whispers, “Stay quiet.” As his boss tries to retrieve critical information from him, a small child hears them, opens the closet door, and nervously asks, “Dad, what are you doing?”
At this moment, Dylan’s work self finds out he is the father of a beautiful young boy in the normal world. The realization of fatherhood lights a fire inside of Dylan that cannot be stamped out. He discovers fatherhood, and along with it he discovers a treasure hidden deep inside his being. He was made—we are made—for more than Lumon.
Lumon could sever his memory. It could not sever his calling. Dylan, as a man, was created to be something his job could only partially express. The severance procedure proved no match for the call of God on the whole of Dylan’s life.
The Bible is a motivating equalizer. Genesis 2:7 reminds us that all work comes from God. No matter what role you are filling tomorrow, there is God-given potential in that work, potential waiting for you to draw it out. Because we all equally bear the image of God, every person carries God-given significance into work before clocking in, no matter how dusty the work may seem. Even the CEO of the Garden of Eden came from dust. Whether you are writing checks or receiving a pink slip tomorrow, you bear the image of God, and you hold work that is acutely connected to the whole of who God created you to be.
Do not sever yourself to protect yourself emotionally from work that seems insignificant. The grace of God is such that we can go to work tomorrow as those going to something with eternal significance. Whether it’s your favorite job or not, it matters! Because when we go to work, we do not go there searching for significance. We show up to work knowing we are just as significant as everyone else there, because we all bear the image of God. We all come from the same place, and we all have the same opportunity to honor God through our worshipful work.
