At a prestigious East Coast seminary, I listened to a scholar lecture me on the promise of artificial intelligence. We discussed the ethical dilemmas of AI and considered this emerging machine’s abundant possibilities for the scholar of religion, the theologian, the ethicist. At one point, the lecturer tried to use the chat bot’s audio listening function but forgot to mute its microphone after asking it a question. Hooked up to room speakers, the AI continued listening, only to hear itself and, entering what seemed like a state of confusion, to glitch while the lecturer frantically assessed its errors. One person in the audience—also convinced by the promise of AI—sought to defend our courageous speaker, marshaling the potential scale of the work AI makes possible to exposit its scholarly utility. As the lecturer worked to fix the machine’s feedback loop, the audience member used the metaphor of a manager and her employees to give us a sense of AI’s multiplying effects. With AI, they averred, everybody can become a manager. You need not be only an employee.
What I heard in that moment was the intimate fusion of religion, technology, and capitalism. It is hardly new. Just over a century ago, one of the founders of modern sociology, Max Weber, argued that capitalism required a religious, puritan psychology to justify the work ethic required for capitalism’s emergence—making capitalism, then and now, a secularized religious habit. Today, scholars continue to flesh out the religious underpinnings of this economy, which has gone ever more global and has absorbed ever new forms of technology into itself.
In considering the ways that capitalism and religion intersect, Kathryn Lofton offers this definition of religion: “Whenever we see dreams of and for the world articulated, wherever we see those dreams organized into legible rituals, schematics, and habits, we glimpse the domain that the word religion contributes to describe,” writes Lofton in Consuming Religion. “Whenever we see the real ways we organize ourselves to survive our impossible distance from those dreams, we grasp why religion exists. . . . Because religion has been a word used to summarize the habits by which we demarcate ourselves as certain kind of dreamers.”
