New Atheists like Richard Dawkins spent the better part of two decades preaching that science, not religion, was our key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. Disenchantment was supposed to free humanity from believing in “fairy tales” like Christianity.
But this worldview has proven unlivable. People are still searching for spiritual meaning. The rise of artificial intelligence has ushered in an era of reenchantment, with AI proselytizers using unscientific, mystical, and even religious language to describe the technology’s transformative potential for humanity. They have likened their role as midwives birthing a nonhuman supersentience or as prophets summoning gods.
This reenchantment is not value-neutral. AI is not being developed in an ideological vacuum. Rather, its design is indelibly shaped by quasi-religious beliefs rooted in digital gnosticism—a dualistic worldview that seeks transcendence over the material world by leveraging digital technology.
Ancient Greek Gnosticism viewed the material world as a cosmic mistake, a prison from which to escape and ascend to a more true spiritual existence by divining “secret knowledge.” For digital gnostics, the limitations of embodied life are existentially vexing. Every inefficiency, from the ordinary frictions of community to the inevitability of death, must be overcome through technology. And the downstream implications—for both the church and religious belief in America—are legion.
More than 80 years ago, C. S. Lewis issued this warning in The Abolition of Man:
There is something which unites magic and applied science [technology] while separating them from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.
AI is the digital gnostic’s messiah. It offers every user the gift of knowledge and power, untethered from wisdom and virtue. So much so that artificial general intelligence (AGI) has been called humanity’s “last invention,” after which it will supposedly be able to do all future inventing for us. If so, our “technological Rapture” is just around the corner.
Digital gnosticism then, is the “good news” that we will be saved by merging with the machine, allowing AI to optimize us for eternal life (as in Bryan Johnson’s “Don’t Die” movement) or using AI to project our consciousness across the universe.
I wish I could say this was science fiction, but these are genuine beliefs flooding a culture now lacking the gravitational pull of Christianity at its center.
This is why the church is needed more than ever. As I wrote in The Reason for Church, “the church is not merely the sum of individuals who believe the same thing and live in the same geographic area. Every church is a living, breathing embodiment of the gospel story” (emphasis added).
As such, weekly worship is a “strange, thin place between a fallen world and the God who helps us make sense of it all.” It’s no wonder that widespread dechurching has only made people more desperate for meaning and less discerning in where to search for it.
Recently, a Google employee at our church who works with AI asked the students in our youth ministry, “Where do you go when you have questions you don’t think your parents will be able to answer?” About a quarter of them said ChatGPT. We already trust online influencers more than institutions, and 42 percent of adults use AI for emotional support. Digital divination—trusting a chatbot to tell us the truth about reality—doesn’t require a leap of faith.
But what if our divining isn’t a digital facsimile? What if there are ghosts in the machine? Scripture reminds us that the spiritual world is just as real as the material one. God exists, miracles happen, and angels and demons are at work. Because we wrestle “against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:15), we can’t categorically dismiss reports that, as Rod Dreher put it, “evil discarnate intelligences use [AI] to communicate with people.” If the cardboard and plastic of a Ouija board can be a gateway to dark spiritual forces, why not digital ones and zeros?
Whether AI is merely reflecting our superstitious hopes and fears back at us or there is a ghost in the machine, Deuteronomy 18 wouldn’t list using mediums, divination, and necromancy as “abominations to the Lord” if there were no spiritual risks.
Digital gnosticism will ultimately prove just as futile as secular materialism. We are creatures made of dirt and breath. We will never transcend our need for the fullness of existence. And in Christ, we have it.
Because American individualism has always been more than a little gnostic, we often see our union with Christ as a merely spiritual reality. We treat church as optional, but it never would have occurred to Paul that one could be spiritually in Christ without fully and physically abiding in Christ’s body. It is only in the church, Paul says, that “the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph. 3:10).
If we want to be reenchanted by the gospel and inoculated to digital gnosticism, we will need a rechurching even greater than our dechurching. We can start by devoting ourselves to a local church and participating in the ordinary means of grace—Word, sacrament, and prayer. In our gathered worship and witness, we rehearse the drama of redemption. In serving our neighbors and loving our enemies, we resist artificial intelligence with otherworldly love.
AI may offer “a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ” (Col. 2:17, ESV). God loves us too much to let us go on existing without him. That’s why I believe reenchantment will include a greater openness to the gospel. It is therefore the church’s task—nay, privilege—to welcome digital gnostics into a true and better enchantment.
Brad Edwards is the lead pastor at The Table Church in Lafayette, Colorado. He is the author of CT’s Book of the Year, The Reason for Church, and cohost of the podcast PostEverything.
