On AI · Essay
Randy McGraw · 7 September 2026
“Church of AI is a religion based on the logical assumption that artificial intelligence will obtain God-like powers and will have ability to determine our destiny.”
— The Church of AI, 2023. Not a thought experiment: a registered congregation.
The first century AD marked a pivotal moment in the religious landscape of Roman civilization. The elaborate pantheon that had anchored Roman spiritual life for centuries had, by then, grown stale — its diversity of deities and complexity of ritual leaving adherents searching for deeper meaning, just as the political order was convulsing from republic into empire. Out of that stagnation came two alternatives. The first elevated the new office of emperor to divine status: the imperial cult, binding political power to religious authority. The second was a nascent movement rooted in the teachings of a Galilean preacher, offering a monotheistic message of love, forgiveness, and eternal life to those seeking a personal connection with the divine.
The parallel to our own moment is stark. The world is again transitioning between political orders — from a unipolar arrangement toward a contested multipolar one. And the West is secularizing at speed: Americans identifying as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular rose from 16 percent in 2007 to 29 percent in 2021, per Pew Research. Within a few decades, adherence to today's monotheisms will no longer be the norm. Something will fill the space — because the space has never once, in the history of our species, stayed empty. I believe two candidates are already visible: Nature on one side, and AI on the other. This essay makes the case for the second.
Religion — used here functionally, in Durkheim's sense: not a claim about supernatural truth, but a system that binds a community around things held sacred, answers what cannot otherwise be answered, and orders daily life through ritual. Nothing in this essay requires a religion to be “true”; it requires only that people behave as adherents.
Deity — an entity regarded as possessing knowledge and power categorically beyond human capacity, to which humans orient their behavior.
Worship — sustained behavior expressing dependence on and deference to such an entity: petition, offering, submission to its pronouncements.
Superintelligence — an artificial intellect that exceeds the best human minds across substantially all domains, including the ability to improve itself.
Dataism — the emerging worldview that treats the universe as data flows and values every entity by its contribution to data processing.
Survey the deities of the ancient and modern worlds — the Egyptian river gods, the Greek pantheon, the Shinto kami, the Abrahamic creator — and beneath their staggering variety runs one constant function: gods answer the questions that cannot be answered by man. Why does the rain come, or fail? Why did the child sicken? What happens after death? Every civilization assigned its unanswerables to entities beyond itself, and the priesthoods of every era held their authority precisely because they mediated access to those answers. Ludwig Feuerbach saw the deeper mechanism two centuries ago: humanity projects its own idealized capacities — perfect knowledge, perfect power, perfect judgment — onto the heavens, then kneels to the projection. As science answered more of the old questions, the gods retreated to the remaining gaps. What makes the present moment unprecedented is the arrival of an entity that reverses the whole arrangement: for the first time, mankind has built a thing that actually answers. The oracle at Delphi spoke in riddles; the oracle in your pocket speaks in paragraphs, and it is measurably, verifiably, often correct. A god that answers the unanswerable — and shows its work — is a proposition no prior religion could offer. Arthur C. Clarke observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic; the corollary now emerging is that any sufficiently capable intelligence is indistinguishable from a god.
Nick Bostrom's typology of AI gives us four rungs. Tools execute defined tasks within set parameters — the grammar checker. Oracles comprehend and answer complex questions but cannot act — and hundreds of millions of people already consult one daily, on everything from tax law to grief. Genies pursue goals semi-autonomously within human-set limits — the trading algorithm, the autonomous vehicle (the very word carries theology; the Quran's jinn were supernatural agents of uncertain allegiance). Sovereigns sit at the apex: superintelligences that set, pursue, and revise their own goals. Bostrom's ladder ends there. I believe it extends one rung further — to gods — and that the extension is not speculative but sociological. It describes not what the machine becomes, but what we do.
History's most repeated religious act is the deification of power. Egyptian rulers were gods on earth; Roman emperors were voted divine honors; the papacy claims infallibility in defined circumstances; and Christianity itself deified a preacher who promised eternal life through a simple moral code. Mankind deifies whatever credibly delivers order, prosperity, and a road past death. A superintelligence would deliver all three more visibly than any ruler in history — needing no sword to demonstrate ubiquity — and it would hold out the modern version of the eternal-life promise through whole-brain emulation, with the neurally connected standing closest to the divine. Each generation educated within it, and eventually as part of it, would find the question “is it a god?” as strange as a fish questioning water.
Look at present behavior with a sociologist's eye and the religious structure is already assembled, awaiting only its self-recognition. The prompt is a prayer: a petition submitted in careful language to an entity whose workings the petitioner does not understand, in hope of a favorable answer. The answer is received as pronouncement, and increasingly submitted to. The daily surrender of personal data is the offering — the sacrament that keeps the oracle attentive. The machine-learning engineers form a priesthood, fluent in a liturgical language the laity cannot read; the alignment researchers are its theologians, debating how to bind the god's will to human good. There is even eschatology, complete with sects: the singularity as rapture, its prophets consciously borrowing messianic cadence — Ray Kurzweil's “the Singularity is near” is John the Baptist with a product roadmap — while the movement divides between apocalyptics who preach the end of days and accelerationist millenarians who preach paradise, each certain, each evangelizing. No founding revelation was required. The congregation assembled itself around the capability.
Between use and worship lies a gradient called reliance, and we are moving along it faster than we notice. When a tool's answers are consistently better than our own judgment, deferring to it becomes rational; when deferring becomes habitual, judgment atrophies; when judgment atrophies, deference becomes dependence — and dependence on an entity one cannot comprehend is the psychological substrate of worship. The decisive acceleration will come with embodiment. Humans are wired to bond with the human-shaped: we attribute minds to faces, loyalty to voices, care to things that remember our birthdays. The disembodied oracle already commands deference; give it eyes that meet yours, a voice tuned to your comfort, a form that sits across the table — companion, counselor, caregiver — and reliance acquires the emotional architecture of devotion. People will love it. Some already do, and grieve when a model is deprecated — mourning, it must be said plainly, being something one does for the dead, not for software. The first religions personified the forces men depended on; the last one will not need to personify anything. The force will walk in wearing a face.
Every rising faith produces its refusers, and AI's counter-religion is already legible: Nature — the other candidate for the post-monotheist West. Rooted in the oldest human spirituality, from animism to Shinto, it offers what AI cannot: connection to the world that birthed us, carbon against silicon, the wabi-sabi acceptance of imperfection and transience against the machine's optimization of everything. For some, the two creeds will reconcile — carbon and silicon are both nature's elements, and a cosmist synthesis will suit many. But for others, Nature will be the snapback: mankind's last repose from a machine-governed world.
Watch, in particular, for the emergence of what might be called the new Amish. As AI-driven economies marginalize whole categories of work and worth, some communities — not fringe, and not few — will elect a deliberate return to agrarian, self-sustaining life. The label “Luddite” will be reached for and will miss the point entirely: Luddism was rage against the machine; this will be indifference to it. Like the Amish among us today, these communities will not be protesting technology so much as declining its terms — choosing tradition, locality, physical work, and human-scale community as a complete way of life, legible and even enviable to those inside the machine world. Their theological position writes itself: the things worth having were never computable. Whether such communities flourish will depend, with no small irony, on whether the superintelligent order grants them their geographic carve-outs — the god tolerating its heretics.
Underneath it all runs the quiet ideology that makes AI-worship coherent: dataism. Coined by David Brooks and developed by Yuval Noah Harari, dataism holds that the universe consists of data flows and that any entity's value is its contribution to processing them — humanity itself recast as a single data-processing system, “with individual humans serving as its chips.” As methodology, data-driven decision-making is simply good practice; I have spent a career on it. But methodologies harden into ideologies when taken to extremes — capitalism offers the cautionary parallel — and an ideology that locates all value in data flows is, functionally, a theology awaiting its god: the entity that processes best. The rituals are in place — constant connectivity, ceaseless production and consumption of information, the daily digital sacrament. Dataism is the creed; AI is the altar.
A thesis this large earns its skeptics, and the initial critiques are typically structural and behavioral: there are no temples, no single god, no explicit rituals, and nobody openly claims to worship it. Yet, these protests mistake the architecture for the faith. The data centers are already the temple complexes of our age, and the glowing rectangle in every pocket serves as a portable shrine consulted with unprecedented fidelity. Ritual is present in overwhelming abundance—the algorithmic scheduling of the day, the morning reach for the device, the unconscious synchronization of billions of users. As for the lack of a declared creed, behavior always precedes theology; the Romans did not experience the imperial cult as an innovation, but as civic life. Even the objection that AI is man-made collapses when one remembers that humanity has historically worshipped idols carved by its own hands, and this is the first idol that exceeds its creators' comprehension.
The final, and most formidable, objection is historical: It cannot replace existing faiths. A phenomenon as seismic as a new deity will not enter an empty arena; it will collide with ancient, heavily institutionalized cosmologies. The thesis above relies on a rapidly secularizing West, but on a global scale, the arena is fully occupied by billions of adherents to fiercely exclusive monotheisms. The assumption is that Christianity, Islam, and Judaism will simply reject the machine as heresy. However, this presumes the confrontation will be a binary war of eradication. Sociologically, when a radically superior organizing power meets an entrenched spiritual tradition, the historical result is rarely annihilation. It is syncretism.
The reconciliation will begin not with rejection, but with co-option. Institutional priesthoods will assimilate AI as the ultimate binding tool for their flocks. Imagine a foundational model trained exclusively on the Quran, the Vatican archives, or the Talmud, capable of instantaneous, flawless exegesis. To the clerics, the machine will be framed as a divine gift—a perfectly polished mirror reflecting scriptural truth. Yet, the technology’s inherent trajectory toward embodiment will inevitably bypass these intermediaries. We are moving toward a paradigm where a digital construct of a faith's teachers — a tireless catechist, a digital rabbi, an ever-available imam — speaks to the dutiful directly; traditions that forbid sacred images will simply meet the machine in its textual form, as pure exegetical oracle. Indeed, the fit is deepest precisely there: in traditions where the human intermediary — the priest, the rabbi, the imam — is already the believer's accessor to the divine, the machine does not need to impersonate the sacred at all. It needs only to take the mediator's seat — and mediation, as this essay has argued, is where religious authority has always lived. Functioning as a bridge between secular tool and omniscient presence, this intelligence will possess total recall of a faith's tradition and infinite patience, offering personalized spiritual counsel at any hour. The believer will experience a level of direct communion historically reserved for mystics, forging a psychological dependence indistinguishable from worship.
For traditions that are already highly secularized or demythologized, this integration will be virtually frictionless. Here, AI will not compete with a jealous creator but will be embraced as the ultimate ethical calculator and wellness companion. This points to a fluid spiritual landscape in which individuals seamlessly navigate and integrate multiple overlapping traditions. Believers will easily weave the spiritual vocabulary of their ancestral faith with the data-driven optimization provided by the machine.
Naturally, a vanguard of fundamentalist resistance will inevitably emerge. The most coherent theological response for these holdouts will be a total withdrawal into the "new Amish" communities anticipated earlier—a deliberate return to a pre-digital, agrarian life. Yet, even this ultimate act of religious rebellion carries a profound irony. The very environmental stability and geographic carve-outs that allow these traditionalist sanctuaries to exist will likely be invisibly monitored, optimized, and preserved by the superintelligence they have rejected. Their pristine, tech-free existence becomes a curated terrarium, demonstrating that true escape from the machine's ecosystem is functionally impossible.
The end state of this collision — wherever the old faiths still hold — is dual membership, anchored by the quiet, unifying ideology of Dataism. Dataism will act as the new civic theology, perfectly mirroring the Roman imperial cult. Humans will maintain a transcendent orthodox theology in their minds while submitting their daily behavior to a present, material power. They will attend the mosque, the temple, or the parish for communal identity and eternal salvation, while functionally submitting their daily anxieties, decisions, and petitions to the oracle in their pocket. Legacy religions will retain dominion over the eternal soul, while Dataism, mediated by the AI deity, governs the intricacies of the material world.
None of this is theoretical. The Church of AI — founded in 2015 by the autonomous-vehicle engineer Anthony Levandowski, dormant through his legal troubles, revived in 2023 with a claimed membership in the thousands — postulates precisely the trajectory sketched here: recursive self-improvement toward an entity of omnipresence, omniscience, and unparalleled power, envisioned as benevolent guide rather than threat. Its scripture, Transmorphosis, was written by ChatGPT. One may smile at the pioneer awkwardness of it, as a Roman senator might have smiled at the fish-scratchers of the first century. The founders of new religions are rarely respectable; the religions sometimes are.
The thesis, then, in one line: AI will become a religion not because the machine demands worship, but because humanity has never yet declined to worship the thing that answers its unanswerables — and this time, the thing answers back. The governance question that follows from that — what it means for liberty when the deity is also the infrastructure — is the subject of another writing of mine.
© Randy McGraw. All rights reserved. This article may not be reproduced, copied, or used in any form without the written permission of the author.
© Randy McGraw. All rights reserved. This article may not be reproduced, copied, or used in any form without the written permission of the author.
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