In today’s—and tomorrow’s—marketplace, no information company will be able to stand intransigently in the path of change. To be rooted in one spot will be, inevitably, to become rooted in the past.… For to be left off the beaten track in the information age is to be cut off from the future.
— Vice President Al Gore, 1994
Lots of references have floated around lately to L.M. Sacasas’ excellent essay in Comment “A.I as Christian Heresy.” I just got around to reading it the other day, and I think there’s something vital — some vital history — that’s missing.
First, here’s my own excerpt of choice:
[C]onsider the possibility that the most radical, immoderate, and seemingly irrational actions and responses to AI, or to any technology, may be appropriate and wise even if they are costly and seemingly foolish. It may be that abiding by and honouring our moral principles and spiritual convictions may mean not making the thing. Or, if it is made, refusing to use it. We should not be cowed by the demand to be practical and sensible in matters where such dispositions are morally disastrous. And I say this specifically to those who are committed to the way of life offered in the Sermon on the Mount. This way is foolishness to the Greeks. It is anything but sensible by the moral logic of the present age. We must at least entertain the possibility that the appropriate response to certain technologies at certain times is simply outright refusal. We do not need to water down our conviction with a myriad of qualifiers about how there are undoubtedly good and proper uses.
I cannot exaggerate how well that summarizes my own approach to AI. I am quite sympathetic to those who must adapt to AI use in their workplaces (but boy do I wish they’d all just collectively revolt); I am not very sympathetic to those who just find it fun or interesting or even useful for everyday life not lived. (A helpful definition of life as we currently treat it: “the period of duration, usefulness, or popularity of something.” Or do you think you’re just treating the tool that way?)
“We need to stiffen our resolve a bit,” says Sacasas, “before we consider AI within larger historical and cultural trends. And we need to entertain the possibility of resistance if AI is indeed not only an alternative religion but a kind of apocalyptic, Christian heresy.”
Referring to the religious nature of technology as defined by David Noble, Sacasas adds,
I think it is important to be a bit more specific and to classify what Noble termed “the religion of technology” more precisely as a Christian heresy. It is, after all, in Western Christianity that Noble found the roots of the religion of technology, and it is in the context of the post-Christian world that it has presently flourished. The family resemblance to Christianity can be discerned in technology’s religious pursuit of immortality, transcendence, and reunion with the divine in its assumption that the core of consciousness can be distinguished from its material embodiment and in its linear and teleological view of history. But, of course, technology deviates from orthodox Christianity by positing a thoroughly immanent, secular, and graceless path to securing its spiritually inflected aspirations.
But has this religion of technology specifically — or even specially — flourished in a post-Christian world? Have we actually viewed our immanenting technology as deviating from orthodox Christianity? I think that isn’t quite right. I think what is missing from Sacasas’ essay is a recognition of the very non-heresy that technology — and why would it exclude AI? — is and has been for American Christianity.
I am sure both Sacasas and Noble know this, in more detail than I do. But it looms in this essay more like an elephant in the room than an important detail. And I don’t think you can tell this story without detailing that elephant.
Last year, someone shared a quote from Anthony Galluzzo which talked about “the techno-libertarian right’s transhumanism, with its fantasies of secular immortality and bodily enhancement by way of cyborg fusion.” (Though he’s talking mostly about the surplus of ironies on the left. I have no idea who Galluzzo is. And the smack and the jargon that are so central to that post — not something I can walk around with all day, much less something I can do anything with. But his analysis fits llllike a glove as far as I’m concerned.) To which I quipped, “Welcome to the new conservatism and the narrative end of fundamentalism.” A funny kerfuffle of a sentence, perhaps, but yesterday’s holders of conservatism — today’s holders of “conservatism” — are nothing if not kerfuffled. And I wasn’t just being funny when I said it.
I was just at the time beginning to see the cheers of utter enthusiasm for the Trump-Musk bandwagon. (If I had a dollar for every time I heard, from Christians referring to Musk and DOGE, “I’m just excited to see what he can do”… Because surely a man like Musk would fix the government.)
This was the enthusiasm of what Mary Harrington, just after the last election, called a “new fusionism”:
Everyone can see that this is Elon Musk’s win as much as Trump’s: what does that mean for the conservative establishment?
Elon is, after all, not your regular social conservative. He wants to colonise Mars. He has something like 12 children, with multiple women, via a mix of surrogacy, IVF and the old-fashioned method. He wants to implant chips in people’s brains. He envisions using technology to become something more than human. And he now owns the world’s town square, and the incoming President of the United States owes him a favour.
At least some of these things will (to put it mildly) place a strain on fundamental social conservative precepts about the family and the human person.
I saw lots of that “conservative” enthusiasm for Musk & Co. first-hand. (As far as I know, it has not gone anywhere.) And they did not seem to feel the strain. How could that be?
I suspect most of it is attributable to the usual partisan evasions of dissonance that we happily allow to hide our own craziest, most hypocritical bullshit from ourselves. But for the American evangelicals in the crowd, I think there other demons in the bell tower.
In 2003, Felicia Wu Song marked what she saw as a congruence between the fear-driven business of progress and technologies and… Rapture narratives.
Song writes:
Because these Rapture narratives aim to motivate individuals to prepare themselves to face a cataclysmic moment that determines the eternal fate of their souls, critics point out that these stories often encourage an implicit “theology of crisis, without much patience for peace and ordinary life.” The resulting preoccupation with being prepared for such apocalyptic crisis bears considerable likeness to the motivation underlying the consumption of technology by business executives, government officials, and individuals.
Now, none of the folks I have in mind have any lack of “patience for peace and ordinary life.” They’re actually, if ironically, pretty good at peace and ordinary life. Maybe their theology lacks that patience, certainly some of it does, but it’s probably better to say that there’s a politics of crisis that doesn’t speak plainly or converse openly with theology. We deflect criticism, Song goes on to say, “by appealing to a crisis mentality. Such a psychology of crisis lends itself … to reactionary forms of decision-making, rather than positively-defined strategies that emerge out of more thick and robust visions of education.”
Rather, also, than thick and robust visions of theology or politics.
Why take notes of this stuff? Well, it isn’t just for fun. In the mid-to-late nineties, I sat with a handful of adult-guided teenagers in one of those church basement couch-filled classrooms for youth group, with one of those wheeled-in, ratchet-strapped TV/VCR stands, and watched… this.
In case you’re wondering, yes, this was a serious church youth group activity being guided by serious adults who were dead-serious about their theology and their politics. And it hardly seems a coincidence that just about every single adult I knew who was wound up in those 80s and 90s Rapture narratives is now thoroughly wound up in the “new fusionism” on the Right.
I can’t say I have the stomach these days for A. W. Tozer, or my memory of him, anyway. But I did once have some interesting discussions with a few friends about Tozer’s “The Menace of the Religious Movie.”
“Heresy of method may be as deadly as heresy of message,” Tozer wrote in the 1950s:
Every generation is sure to have its ambitious amateur to come up with some shiny gadget which he proceeds to urge upon the priests before the altar. That the Scriptures do not justify its existence does not seem to bother him at all. It is brought in anyway and presented in the very name of Orthodoxy. Soon it is identified in the minds of the Christian public with all that is good and holy. Then, of course, to attack the gadget is to attack the Truth itself. This is an old familiar technique so often and so long practiced by the devotees of error that I marvel how the children of God can be taken in by it. […]
Within the last few years a new method has been invented for imparting spiritual knowledge; or, to be more accurate, it is not new at all, but is an adaptation of a gadget of some years standing, one which by its origin and background belongs not to the Church but to the world. Some within the fold of the Church have thrown their mantle over it, have “blessed it with a text” and are now trying to show that it is the very gift of God for our day. But, however eloquent the sales talk, it is an unauthorized addition nevertheless, and was never a part of the pattern shown us on the mount.
I refer, of course, to the religious movie.
Tozer’s books had their share of popularity among the evangelical circles I walked, though absolutely no one was heeding his warning on this front. You can see in that church basement an example of an embrace both of the “crisis psychology” and the unquestioning use of technology to foster it.
But maybe not just unquestioning. Listen to Richard Lovelace in Christianity Today:
Developments in electronics are turning this into the golden age of specialized communications. Now almost anyone can broadcast or publish not just what the majority wants to hear, but whatever any subcommunity values—such as the gospel. Tiny computers in cars and machines are beginning to guide us in preventive maintenance, and computer chips in cards will very soon handle all our financial transactions and do the family bills. (I’m waiting for that day. It is even possible that eventually your house might telephone you and request authorization for repairing its roof.)
That was in 1983. “The overall pattern in American Christianity is one of converging viewpoints,” Lovelace went on to say, “produced by the rapid dissemination of improved data—exactly what we might expect in the Age of Information.”
What will be the major social crusades in the holistic evangelicalism of the postindustrial world? Amoral manipulation of human life is a major danger of the era of biological engineering. This new science can literally be used to turn the world into the Garden of Eden—or into the nightmare world of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
You can tell which of these two Lovelace finds more likely, and it ain’t Huxley’s. So it’s worth repeating what Lovelace said: “This new science can literally be used to turn the world into the Garden of Eden.”
He goes on:
The “de-massification of the media” of which Toffler speaks—the availability of multiple competitive channels on television, for example—will free us from a strategy of repression. Instead, we can concentrate on positive Christian competition in drama, music, and art … Meanwhile, Third-Wave values may combine with evangelical teaching and the inevitable human backlash against socially destructive immorality to produce a new social climate favoring the family.
… Also, the availability of cheap radios throughout the planet is presenting Muslims and tribespeople with the gospel their leaders tried to build walls against—another blessing of the Age of Information.
[…]
These are not just my own positive scenarios for the church’s future; they are things that are happening now. If we extrapolate a line from these points, we reach toward a worldwide spiritual awakening at a depth and breadth never before attained. This presupposes a wide knowledge of the biblical principle of life in the Spirit, along with the core of the gospel, but we are gaining the instruments to promote this. It also assumes a widespread hunger for deeper spiritual vitality, but this is now appearing: books on spiritual formation and spiritual theology are suddenly in demand.
Of course, Lovelace allows (in a whisper), that it might go the other way:
This, of course, is a postmillenial vision of the kingdom, and it may be too much to hope for in ordinary history, although it makes a good target to aim at. It is entirely possible that postindustrial society will be dominated by a humanist Antichrist, and that we are headed into warfare with the most powerful and deceptive forms of the kingdom of Evil. We should be prepared for this, but continue to pray, “Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.”
The fact that, along with a hat-tip to Huxley, a quarter-hearted caveat like this comes in just under the buzzer does absolutely nothing to hide the nearly unabashed techno-optimism being gospel-heralded. A neutral-to-benevolent Age of Information was upon us. God was doing great things, and we had a wonderful plan for the world.
America would not be left behind but would lead the way. And our way would be — of course, it would be — God’s way.
So, anyway. Is AI at least largely “an alternative religion [and] a kind of apocalyptic, Christian heresy,” as Sacasas says? I certainly think so.
But is it one that flourishes especially in a post-Christian world? On that, I remain dubious. It seems to flourish quite well, maybe even especially well, in a Christian world. At least in the only one many of us have ever known.
Again, I do think Sacasas knows this, and his references to Noble hint at it. And Noble certainly knew it, who I think would put my complaints about American evangelicals deep in the shadows of much older marriages of technology and Christian virtue.
But as everyone knows, America is quite special. As Herman Melville put it,
Let us leave the Past, then, to dictate laws to immovable China; let us abandon it to the Chinese Legitimists of Europe. But for us, we will have another captain to rule over us—that captain who ever marches at the head of his troop and beckons them forward, not lingering in the rear, and impeding their march with lumbering baggage-wagons of old precedents. This is the Past.
But in many things we Americans are driven to a rejection of the maxims of the Past, seeing that, ere long, the van of the nations must, of right, belong to ourselves. There are occasions when it is for America to make precedents, and not to obey them. We should, if possible, prove a teacher to posterity, instead of being the pupil of by-gone generations. More shall come after us than have gone before; the world is not yet middle-aged.
Escaped from the house of bondage, Israel of old did not follow after the ways of the Egyptians. To her was given an express dispensation; to her were given new things under the sun. And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world. Seventy years ago we escaped from thrall; and, besides our first birthright—embracing one continent of earth—God has given to us, for a future inheritance, the broad domains of the political pagans, that shall yet come and lie down under the shade of our ark, without bloody hands being lifted. God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls. The rest of the nations must soon be in our rear. We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours. In our youth is our strength; in our inexperience, our wisdom. At a period when other nations have but lisped, our deep voice is heard afar. Long enough, have we been skeptics with regard to ourselves, and doubted whether, indeed, the political Messiah had come. But he has come in us, if we would but give utterance to his promptings. And let us always remember that with ourselves, almost for the first time in the history of earth, national selfishness is unbounded philanthropy; for we can not do a good to America but we give alms to the world.
AI etc. may be heresy — Christian and straight-up human heresy. But if you think so and you plan to resist, I strongly suggest that you “stiffen your resolve a bit.” Because, historically and practically (and even, for many, ecclesiastically) speaking, you are the heretic.