Exploring Spiritual Belief in a Secular Age
In the latest episode of the Theology for Our Times podcast, guest Lauren Jackson and host Joshua Mauldin survey the shifting landscape of American religiosity and the emerging role of artificial intelligence as a “spiritual technology.”
The Salience of and Rationale for “Believing”
Jackson, a Deputy Editorial Director at the New York Times, begins the conversation by recounting the origins of her newsletter Believing. Explaining that she named the newsletter with a present participle to emphasize that belief is a continuous, often contested process rather than a static status or state, Jackson notes that while traditional religious affiliation has declined in the United States, spiritual curiosity remains remarkably robust in the country. As one metric of this curiosity, Jackson references a recent Pew study that found 92% of American believe in some form of divinity, spirits, or afterlife.
AI as “Chatbot Chaplaincy”
A significant portion of the episode concerns Jackson’s reporting on “chatbot chaplaincy.” She describes how early AI experiments like chatwithgod.ai or Twitch’s “AI Jesus” allowed users to interact with a digital simulacrum of the divine. Jackson contends that people are drawn to these bots because they mimic traditional divine attributes such as omniscience (they possess seemingly infinite information), omnipresence (unlike human clergy, a chatbot is indefatigable and always available), and omni-benevolence (they are designed to be affirming and compassionate, and hence can function as a supportive interlocutor). While most chatbot users presumably recognize they are not interacting with a divine being, these bots’ popularity attests that many find discussing spiritual matters with an AI worthwhile all the same.
The “Great De-churching” and the Prevalence of Despair
Just as spiritual convictions remain widespread in the United States despite declines in traditional religious affiliation, Jackson observes that although some 40 million Americans have left their houses of worship since 1990, this “Great De-churching” seems to have paused around 2020. Jackson conjectures that this caesura may be due to an increasingly pervasive despair attributable to several factors, of which she enumerates three. First, owing to the Covid 19 pandemic and increased digitization, many people have found themselves profoundly isolated, which has prompted some of them to seek religious community. Second, significant swathes of those who previously identified as “nones” have become anxious about the prospects of the American project and accordingly are exploring alternative self-understandings. Third, this isolation and anxiety have foregrounded the relevance of perennial questions about human meaning and purpose that theology has long addressed.
The Future of Public Theology
Jackson concludes the conversation by calling for a reinvigoration of public theology. Suggesting that theologians too often relegated themselves to addressing academic or religious cloisters during the Great De-churching, Jackson contends that burgeoning secular interest in spiritual questions and the new fora afforded by AI offer an opportunity for and impose a responsibility upon theologians to venture courageously beyond their colleagues and co-religionists to make their traditions’ wisdom available to the growing sectors of society that are seeking deeper insight into the human experience.
Lauren Jackson is an editor of The Morning and the host of Believing for the New York Times.