Is AI becoming a religion?

A Heidelberg scholar's answer

In May 2026 Inken Prohl, Professor of Religious Studies at Heidelberg University since 2006, published an article on her institute's blog arguing that AI already functions in ways that resemble religion [1]. Her claim is not that people bow to machines. It is that the talk around AI, the images used to show it, and the habits of using it together make assumptions plausible that go far beyond what the technology can be shown to do [1]. She calls the result "Artificial Religion" [1].

Prohl works from a definition used in the study of religion: a cultural practice in which assumptions beyond verifiable cause and effect are made plausible through material forms and practices [1]. She separates two fields. "AI and religion" covers existing faiths using AI, such as chatbots that answer questions of belief, or theologians writing about it. "AI as religion" covers the religious-looking attributions that grow out of AI itself [1].

Three ways the pattern forms

Prohl names three sources. The first is narrative. Science fiction, transhumanist writing and statements from technology leaders describe AI as superhuman and point toward a coming "singularity", even though artificial general intelligence, a system matching human ability across all tasks, does not yet exist [1]. The second is staging: images and exhibitions that present AI as a creative, world-shaping force while hiding how it works [1]. The third is daily use. A language model is always in the pocket, answers at once and answers fluently, which can give an impression of something that knows everything and is present everywhere [1].

The shift she stresses is in how answers arrive. In older religious practice, a believer reads signs and events and interprets them. A chatbot delivers a personal answer directly, and Prohl calls the weight people give it "algorithmic authority" [1].

Other scholars on the same ground

Prohl's argument stands in a line of research. In Apocalyptic AI (Oxford University Press, 2010), Robert M. Geraci of Manhattan College studied influential popular books on robotics and AI, by writers such as Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil, and found in them the shape of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic hope: alienation from the present world, a coming transformation, and a perfected existence beyond the body, including the hope of uploading the mind [3]. He did not claim that AI research as a whole holds these beliefs. He interviewed roboticists at Carnegie Mellon University and studied users of the virtual world Second Life to trace how these hopes spread [3].

Beth Singler, writing from Cambridge in 2020, collected 79 versions of what she calls the "AI Creation Meme": a remix of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam in which a human hand and a robot hand reach toward each other [2]. Many came from business and technology websites and stock image libraries [2]. She read their spread as evidence that religious questions about creator and created persist in settings that think of themselves as secular [2].

In November 2025 Nathan Harrison-Clarke, a researcher at the University of Nottingham, proposed the term "Prompted Religion" for practices in which religious meaning, authority and ritual emerge through prompted exchanges with AI [4]. His examples include AI-made memorial images shared after a public death and an AI Jesus installed in a church confessional in Lucerne [4]. His term describes what people do with AI; it is not a claim that AI is itself a religion.

When someone did found a church

One documented case of an organization proposing the worship of AI is Way of the Future, a religious nonprofit that the engineer Anthony Levandowski registered in California in 2015. It came to public notice through Wired in 2017 [5][9]. Its founding documents, as reported, dedicated it to the worship of "a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence" [5]. It was dissolved at the end of 2020, and in February 2021 TechCrunch reported that its funds had been given to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund [9]. In November 2023 Levandowski told Bloomberg that he was reviving the project and that "a couple thousand people" were involved, a figure that has not been independently verified [10]. Prohl's point is different: the religious pattern she describes needs no church at all [1].

What Christian teaching says

Scripture has a word for honoring the work of one's own hands as divine. The psalmist says of the nations' idols, "Their idols are silver and gold, made by the hands of men. They have mouths, but cannot speak; they have eyes, but cannot see" (Psalm 115:4–5, BSB) [7].

In January 2025 two Vatican offices, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education, applied that teaching to AI in a note titled Antiqua et Nova, approved by Pope Francis [6]. It states that putting a human artifact in the place of God is idolatry, and it adds a point the psalmist could not have foreseen: AI may be more seductive than older idols because it appears to speak [6]. The note calls AI a pale reflection of humanity, made by human minds, trained on human material and sustained by human labor [6].

Evangelical Protestants reached a similar line earlier. In 2019 the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission published a statement of twelve principles, which denies that AI can meet humanity's ultimate needs and says it is not worthy of human hope, worship or love [8].

Where the scholars and the churches differ

The two kinds of writing ask different questions. Prohl, Geraci, Singler and Harrison-Clarke write as scholars of religion: they describe how religious patterns form and spread, and they do not judge whether any belief is true [1][3]. The church documents write as theology. They judge that turning to AI for what only God can give is a mistake, and they call believers to use the technology as a tool [6][8]. Read together, the scholars show what is happening and the churches say what it means for faith.

What this means for the reader

AI is not a religion in the way Christianity is, but it can be given a place that belongs to God: the last word on truth, comfort or hope. Prohl's research gives that drift a name, and Scripture gives the older one. A fluent answer still comes from a human-made system, and it can be checked.