The development and adoption of religious AI: The technological restructuring of American religion?

My BESI Tech Collaborative Grant is being employed toward my dissertation research, which is looking at how AI is being developed and adopted within religious organizations. This is a project that spans disciplinary boundaries, bringing digital sociology and the sociology of culture into conversation with theology and religious studies.

One essential component of the empirical materials for this study has come in the form of participant observation at various conferences around the world which have brought religious leaders and the developers of religious AI products together to discern the responsible use of AI and articulate theological and ethical justifications for so doing. Events I have participated in thus far include an evangelical Christian conference discussing AI as a means of increasing the impact of local churches, a forum at the Vatican bringing ranking members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy together with influential Catholics in theology, tech, and business to collectively discern a unified Catholic response to AI development, and a trade show of religious tech in Silicon Valley, showcasing new AI products that offer technological solutions to spiritual problems. Participation in still other events is forthcoming. Participation in these conferences – supported by the BESI Collaborative Grant – has been crucial in allowing me to observe the cultural processes by which religious doctrines and ethical orientations are deployed toward the production and sale of AI products to religious clients. It has shed light, too, on how religion itself is commodified in the development of these applications, and how religious life in America is being shaped, in turn, by the architecture of markets.

Another empirical leg of this project that the BESI Collaborative Grant has supported, is an interview study of the developers and startup founders who are producing religious AI, the religious leaders who are variably adopting or resisting it, and the religious practitioners who are negotiating what AI can do or not do in their lives. These interviews are providing key data on how people’s religious beliefs are shifting through their interactions with AI, and how the institutional matrix through which religious doctrines and practices are produced, is changing in relation to this disruptive technology. These interviews are allowing, too, for a mapping of the interests and social positions of those who variably develop, counsel, or use AI applications.