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In the confessional of a Swiss Catholic church, where the priest normally sits, the face of Christ appears. “AI Jesus” speaks in a German monotone (unless you set him to one of his 100 other languages), opens with a data privacy warning and then answers your religious questions. Powered by an OpenAI chatbot, the experiment ran last year in Lucerne’s St-Pierre Chapel. This Christmas, many Christians will use some form of AI to talk to Jesus. Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and Jews have chatbots of their own. Your preferred deity already seems more lifelike in AI than in any painted image and will become more so as AI and virtual reality advance.
AI is accelerating a decades-old trend: the morphing of religion from communal activity into private pursuit. “Faith community” is becoming an outdated term. The solitary believer, alone with their chatbot, is upending millennia of tradition.
Religion always adopts new tech, from the printing press to Twitter, explained Beth Singler of the University of Zurich at last month’s Aspen Institute conference in Cap-Ferrat, France. Most religions are based on holy books, but in the digital era, the book started to become an anachronistic technology. Many believers went online to seek knowledge alone. Clerics and religious scholars were bypassed, just like gatekeepers in the media and academia. New DIY beliefs emerged.
Some people sampled from different faiths to customise their own personalised religion. Budding jihadis did some Googling and constructed homemade versions of Islam. The QAnon and Maga cults arose, largely online, as quasi-religions with their own idols and demons.
It became ever-easier to mash up quirky personal obsessions with traditional religion. JD Vance argued that Christians should love co-nationals more than foreigners, prompting a rebuke from the dying Pope Francis. (Populism was always going to clash with the world’s largest traditional institution, the Catholic Church.) Most recently, Britain’s Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said it could be argued that welfare spending is unchristian.
The fading of physical religious communities accelerated during the pandemic, when many people began attending services remotely. But in that long-lost era of the early 2020s, believers still operated in virtual communities. They followed clerics online, or found fellowship on chat forums. Today, with AI, the believer can do without human company.
A religious chatbot is more available than an overworked (and increasingly scarce) living, breathing cleric. French seminaries now graduate about 80 priests a year, down from 1,000 in the 1950s, the scholar Olivier Roy told the Aspen event. Various religions have already trialled robot priests. Clerics could eventually be automated away like management consultants.
Tech is more than just an adjunct to traditional religion. It is a continuation of it. As Singler explains, AI can appear divine. Like God, its workings are mysterious, and it seems all-knowing and all-seeing — though not necessarily all good. The widespread fear that AI could wipe us out echoes traditional fears of God.
Modern tech more broadly has acquired quasi-religious qualities. Tech’s utopian visions can inspire greater awe than any ancient speculative depiction of heaven. Tech “evangelists” prophesy our move to other planets. They promise immortality in this world, not in the afterlife. Tech that’s this potent undermines the traditional religious notion of humans as the apex of creation. No wonder some tech evangelists, such as Elon Musk, advocate transhumanism: the merging of humans with technology, for instance by uploading our minds to the cloud.
As people embrace tech-tinged or personalised religions (or none at all), old communal religions don’t disappear. Rather, they are being repurposed from faiths into markers of ethnic identity. This is a global trend. Roy says that when European populists talk about the continent’s “Christian identity”, that tends to be code for “Europe is white”. That’s often the message when, for instance, politicians place nativity scenes in town halls. In the US, some Trump-supporting evangelicals follow a creed that’s not so much biblical as American exceptionalist. Russia’s Putin-backing Orthodox church pushes an increasingly nationalist, messianic ideology. India’s ruling Hindu nationalist BJP and Israel’s religious right are both, in part, anti-Islamic ethnic supremacist movements. Hamas merges a violent interpretation of Islam with antisemitism. Nowadays, if you want a faith community, take up politics. Religious belief is becoming a personal affair.
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