I’ve read many critiques of the new techno-religion, or political theology, emerging from the tech world (and its promised land, Silicon Valley). These kinds of critiques have existed for years, but they have been proliferating and continue to do so. I recently listened to Cade Metz discuss his August 2026 analysis of this whole phenomenon, for the New York Times. He points to the kernel of truth behind the accusation that the people most worried about the world-ending capacities of AI are just part of a “doomsday cult”. I won’t summarize the whole argument here; if you’re interested, it’s probably worth your time to read the article or listen to the podcast. But, in essence, Metz walks us through the decades-long development (beginning especially in the 1990s) of groups like the rationalists and effective altruists. He blends together groups of people who are often considered separately and points to their soft, quasi-religious underbellies—to the way they treat emerging AI technologies as something loosely akin to a divine or providential power.
Metz also notes that, while it’s become taboo for people in Silicon Valley to actively identify as rationalists, it’s nevertheless the case that many, many people who currently hold power in the tech world were deeply influenced by this movement and its ideas at some point in their career. It got into the water. An interesting detail is that a rationalist theory (Roko’s Basilisk) was the precedent for Elon Musk’s first encounter with his ex-wife Grimes. Arguably, as I read it, this stuff is in the public waterways as well. The secular(ish) theology ghosting so much of the current tech discourse (to summarize it crudely: technology plugs us into a more than human power that people must answer to, in some debated way) has captured the imagination of many, many Americans far beyond the valley. Perhaps, above all, it’s tapped into their already over-active apocalyptic imaginaries, which are now filled with the world-collapsing visions of people like America’s favorite tech prophet of the moment, Dario Amodei. His visions, along with those in his cohort, have set loose a sense of prophetic doom in American public discourse.
I find all of these critiques interesting, of course, because this is exactly the sort of thing I spend my time thinking about, anyhow. I see current tech discourses laced with all sorts of strange religious and quasi-religious supplements—even beyond Peter Thiel and his fixation on the Antichrist. I see theology all over the place in public right now, even if God is conspicuously absent. But it often seems that the operating presumption behind many of these conversations and critiques is that “exposing” the motives of these power brokers as quasi-religious will also expose them as fundamentally illegitimate actors. The comfortable, or perhaps even comforting, secular assumption is that religion should be private, so people like this shouldn’t be out there in public doing something that looks like religion. If you’re found to be affiliated with a doomsday cult in some way, then everything you say is obviously ideological drivel. Or, if there are quasi-religious dimensions to your theoretical framework, it’s obviously wrong or bad. It’s as if exposure of the underlying quasi-religious ideology is all we need, to break the spell that these powerful discourses seem to have cast. This is a common treatment that religion tends to receive in American public culture, unless it’s just promoting something like being nice, or sharing.
But it is, I think, unwise to discount such elements of culture and politics. It is predictable that I would say this, of course, given that I am an academic who spends her life thinking about such things. But I think about these things because I am convinced that they matter; that religion and theology are buried all over the place in public, in the form of precious gems and landmines. And I think it’s worth our time to find the gems and defuse the landmines.
The general consensus (at least outside of the academic study of religion and theology) tends to be that civil religion is dead, or mostly so. It’s a thing of the past. It’s a ghost of America the Christian Nation, which was defeated by the secular liberal mindset of another kind of America. Of course, there are rampant fears that this figure of the past has resurrected itself, with the MAGA movement. But as people have preoccupied themselves with this possibility, I think that the techno-religion of Silicon Valley has meanwhile assumed the mantle of America’s most powerful civil religion.
I’m not making this up out of thin air; the assertion is inspired by Tara Isabella Burton’s characterization, in Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, of techno-religion as a “remixed” (more spiritual, less explicitly religious) version of civil religion. She contrasts it with what she sees as its antithesis: social justice. In 2020 (when the book was published), Burton saw these two forces at battle against one another for the hearts and minds of Americans. If it looked, for a brief spell, as if social justice was winning, it now looks as if techno-religion may have claimed the throne. Or perhaps these are just the Janus faced sides of civil religion, in an American public that has to be completely fractured into two opposing sides, if it’s going to be a public at all. And perhaps these battling civil religions are just going to endlessly struggle with one another for imaginative power, in the two party system of our minds.
I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. If I am making the case that techno-religion has become the (fearsome) civil religion that’s captured the hearts and minds of Americans with its prophecies of a potentially angry more than human power, it’s not because I think it’s a good religion. I think it deserves all sorts of scathing critiques! Of course I do. But I also think that dismissing it with the simplistic gesture of ideology critique only feeds a sense of public sanctimony. And sanctimony has limited power, and limited functions. The American public deserves more than doomsday or sanctimony. These fearsome and apocalyptic visions are going to keep appearing, despite the fact that some people find them stupid or misinformed.
When contemplating apocalypse, I always find myself coming back to the work of my mentor in theology, Catherine Keller, who wrote critically about apocalyptic thinking in the early days of the environmental movement, when it was a world encompassing political project caught up in strange ways with the fears generated by the Cold War. Catherine has been thinking about what to make of apocalypse for most of her long career. Initially, in her early work like Apocalypse Now and Then (1996), she focused primarily on the social dangers of apocalyptic thinking, and reflected on its troubling and destructive potency. But in later work like Facing Apocalypse (2021), Catherine concedes that there may be something worth seeing, in apocalypse. It is, after all, etymologically an unveiling. And Catherine suggests that facing into visions of apocalypse might show us things about our world that we need to see. But what should be seen isn’t necessarily what apocalypse shows us, on the surface. All along Catherine’s work has been animated by what she calls a counter apocalyptic sensibility: she wants to resist being sucked into the rabbit hole of apocalyptic logics, habits, or fixations. But she still wants to be able to think carefully about what apocalyptic visions might actually be showing us.
I’ve been thinking about what it would look like to be better at dream reading the apocalyptic visions that are animating our public discourse right now. It wouldn’t look like pure dismissal, but it would also refuse to take these visions at face value. The visions that make it from the mouths of tech prophets into the American public are unlikely to be unmixed truths. But they’re also unlikely to be pure fiction. And the furor they feed, in the American public, might only be spreading through the masses at such a pace because it taps into something that is—emotionally, at the very least—deeply real.
Republished from the Substack Galactic Underworlds.
