Fascinating feature in Vanity Fair this month about the rise of conservative Christianity among Tech Bros. Getting High and God-Like, anyone?! Honestly, someone should pay me to be a prophet 😀
One dimension of this is that people are claiming to be wanting to move beyond ‘the atheist liberal world’ that is repainted as ‘just the madness of crowds.’ (This, among technologists and data people who have been proclaiming for decades the wisdom of the crowd, with social media, horizontal networking and Tweet-like free speech.)
As Peter Thiel frames it, ‘when you don’t have a transcendent religious belief, you end up just looking around at other people.’ And so… a return to belief. Of a sort.
They say the tech industry can no longer rely, as it did in the mid-2010s, on the uncomplicated notion that it is “making the world a better place.” (“Everyone hates tech now,” a venture capitalist recently told me, looking vaguely self-conscious as he said it.) For any principled technologist who may feel their industry is a wellspring of confusion and despair, it’s comforting to believe that God created people to make cool products and that making cool products, actually, is a good thing.
That previously ‘uncomplicated’ notion was powered by – to put it simply – an ideology of democratic, liberal humanism. But the world has shown itself to be very complicated, and the tech that promised to make our lives so gleamingly simple has made it even more so. So… a turn away from the confusion and despair, to find a ‘Big Other’ to tell us what to do:
What was once radical is now mundane: Burning Man is slouching toward Coachella, Richard Dawkins is a farce, and an uneasy realization is dawning that, while we all thought we were locked arm in arm in humanity’s cheerful march toward progress, we were only wandering into swift-approaching regression. Even hard-nosed progressives had begun to sense that something rotten was simmering in the tepid cultural waters. Could it be that what society needed was a return to an ethical framework that had survived throughout millennia?
Zoe Bernard in Vanity Fair: https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2025/4/1/god-complex
What seems to be the theme now is what people interviewed call ‘spiritual technology’ as an antidote to ‘Secu(lar)tech’.
And, of course, it’s a small jump then onto AGI and the power to build a god:
“In Silicon Valley,” said Burgis, “there’s a strong strain in which they’re trying to create something that would take the place of a god.”
And yet, for others, they want to resist this:
“People are so ready to make AGI their god,” Tan added. “What we’re trying to do with events like this [Silicon Valley Christian gathering] is give them an alternative.”
In other words, the ancient human question: to worship a god, or build our own? If you’ve not read God-like, in which I dig deep into all of this, you really should. And, of course, Getting High before that.
On top of this, though. There’s also a weird move to around what ethics this ‘god’ should have.
In an article published just yesterday, The Guardian dig into how empathy – that ‘love thy neighbour’ so central to all that Christianity surely is – is being exorcised by far right preachers and commentators:
The idea that empathy is actually bad has also been gaining traction among white evangelical Christians in the US, some of whom have begun to recast the pangs of empathy that might complicate their support for Donald Trump and his agenda as a “sin” or “toxin”.
WTF? Well, the argument goes like this:
Empathy can be sinful if it is “untethered” to biblical truth on issues such as homosexuality and gender. While he acknowledges that “the Scriptures command us to have sympathy and a tender heart”, he defines empathy as “an excess of compassion, when our identification with and sharing of the emotions of others overwhelms our minds and sweeps us off our feet”.
And who seems to be high priest of this opinion? Yep, the Elon.
I did write a bunch about this in my 2010 book, Other:
What a week for the US… eh? But these are global forces around anxieties that all of us are feeling. I want to push back strongly that somehow a return to isolationist, transcendent religion is the way forward. The death of God has got to mean more than that. And, as i’ve tried to put in my writing – especially in the latest book – I think there’s a coherent, gracious and theologically sound way forward, one that takes god’s non-existence seriously, but warns us against the raw capitalist humanism that led tech into a pretty grim place.
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