Following up on my previous posts on AI and Faith (links below): New York Review of Books, Against Slop: An Interview with Meghan O’Gieblyn:
“The whole field of AI alignment—ensuring that machine intelligence can peacefully coexist with humanity—grew out of the pervasive anxiety that we might create monsters.” This is, Meghan O’Gieblyn argues in our June 25, 2026, issue, a distinctly parental anxiety, a primordial kind of maternal metaphor that appears over and over again in writing and interviews about AI development. The metaphor asks not only what kind of child we are raising, but what kind of mothers we might be to what is an increasingly mysterious entity. …
O’Gieblyn’s primary subject is not artificial intelligence—she is one of the most prolific working thinkers on contemporary religion, in particular its relationship to technology—but she was one of the first writers during the machine-learning revolution to take a serious look at the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence, in her 2021 book God Human Animal Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning. Her first book, Interior States (2018), was a collection of essays with the more earthly preoccupations of American Christianity and the Midwest, where she grew up and attended Bible college, which subject also features in her forthcoming memoir, Will and Attention, publishing in October. Since 2023 she has been a frequent critic for the Review, writing about novels, religion, and philosophy.
Over the past month, we emailed about AI consciousness, the craft of essay writing, and contending with John Calvin. …
[A]s a writer with a religious upbringing you have been at times considered a kind of messenger from the other side who can explain religion to the secular world. Is that true? What are the advantages and disadvantages of being seen that way? What are some misconceptions you’ve noticed?
It’s a role that I’ve admittedly never felt comfortable with, but I can see how some of my work invites that expectation. I started writing about Christianity because I was frustrated by how frequently secular commentators were getting it “wrong.” I kept reading about evangelicalism in coastal newspapers and magazines, op-eds or pieces of cultural criticism that contained the worst kinds of misunderstandings and were prone to cheap shots and sneering condescension. I’d left the church by that point, but I would get weirdly defensive of the faith I’d abandoned. I felt that any substantial critique had to start by taking the church’s doctrine and theology seriously. I started writing mostly as a way to correct certain premises, and I drew on my experience because that was really the only authority I had. I’d studied theology formally, but I was by no means a theologian or a scholar of religion. I was simply someone who’d experienced religion from the inside. I still value experience as the ultimate form of authority, especially when it comes to spirituality. There are certain things that you simply cannot understand unless you’ve been immersed in a religious tradition for many years.
The risk with any attempt to explain religion to a secular audience is playing into the misapprehension that American Christianity is monolithic. I’m often asked to write things about trends in Pentecostalism, for example, or Catholicism, traditions that are very different from the faith communities I’ve experienced directly. This was true even when I began writing about Christianity back in the early 2010s, but the attempt to say anything definitive about the faith today is even more treacherous. Christianity is so fractured, not just within denominations but within individual congregations, within individual families. There are no longer religious figures like Billy Graham who serve as the unofficial spokespeople for American Christianity. Instead, there are countless influencers, preachers, and personalities who have created niche movements with their own theologies and political alignments. It’s just not possible to speak about what is happening in the faith in any kind of general way. …
So much of my writing is responding, either explicitly or implicitly, to John Calvin. I first read him at Bible college, which was very grounded in the Reformed tradition, and wrestling with his theology was part of what undid my faith. I wouldn’t necessarily say I disagree with him—you don’t continually return to a thinker whose ideas are easily dismissed—but I’ve been having an ongoing argument with him for about twenty years.
- Russell Moore (Christianity Today), How to Stop Technology from Rotting Your Brain (Aug. 30, 2026)
- Avital Balwit (Chief of Staff to Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic; The Free Press), Searching for God in Silicon Valley (May 24, 2026)
- Nuno Castel-Branco (All Souls College, Oxford), Why The Pope Is Right to Weigh in on AI (Feb. 22, 2026)
- Russell Moore (Christianity Today), Your Understanding of Calling Is About to Change Radically (Feb. 22, 2026)
- Tyler Cowen (George Mason), Can AI Help Us Find God? (Feb. 1, 2026)
- Mitchell Bahnsen (Westmont College), A Theological Approach to Artificial Intelligence (Jan. 4, 2026)
- Jessica Grove (New York Times), Chatbot Jesus, The Church, and Human Flourishing (Nov. 30, 2025)
- Ross Douthat (New York Times), Peter Thiel And The Antichrist (June 29, 2025)
- Zoe Bernard (Vanity Fair), Christianity Was ‘Borderline Illegal” In Silicon Valley. Now It’s The New Religion. (Mar. 30, 2025
- Emma Goldberg (New York Times), Seeking God, Or Peter Thiel, In Silicon Valley (Feb. 16, 2025)
- Peter Rex (Wall Street Journal), Silicon Valley’s Secret Christians (Feb. 22, 2022)
- Linda Kinstler (UC-Berkeley), Can Silicon Valley Find God? (June 26, 2021)
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