‘I’m deathly afraid’: what is digital spirituality leading us toward?

## Summary
Where traditional religion once gathered people together, digital spirituality is now consumed in isolation, mediated by tech gods with opaque agendas Sign up for AI for the People, a six-week newsletter course, here View image in fullscreen Illustration: enigmatriz/The Guardian Jim Pu’u didn’t set out to find God. The app encourages users to evangelize to migrants and religious minorities at their homes and gathering places, raising serious concerns about privacy and spiritual coercion. She says that AI’s made-to-measure design makes it a departure from real life. “It’s not going to challenge you,” she says. “It’s not going to ask you to grow.” As the affirmative nature of the algorithm has shown, she worries it is skewing users towards a form of self-worship. “In AI, we’re creating something in our own image.” Dr Ruth Tsuria of Seton Hall University believes the incorporation of AI into religious spaces is sparking a metaphysical crisis. And she’s been using the mysticism of AI-powered social media algorithms to help others do just that. “Life is kind of like a For You Page,” she says, referring to TikTok’s mysterious AI-powered front page that controls what users see. “Where you place your attention is what’s going to expand in your life.” For Perl, the algorithm is both spiritual and material.

## Article Content
‘I’m deathly afraid’: what is digital spirituality leading us toward?
Where traditional religion once gathered people together, digital spirituality is now consumed in isolation, mediated by tech gods with opaque agendas
Sign up for AI for the People, a six-week newsletter course, here
View image in fullscreen
Illustration: enigmatriz/The Guardian
Jim Pu’u didn’t set out to find God. His soul-searching began with a modest idea: to leave a record of his life in case something happened to him. His own father had died young, leaving behind only scraps of his memory, and he didn’t want his daughter to face the same void.
In December of 2024, Pu’u, who is 36 and runs a warehouse for a commercial flooring company in Las Vegas, turned to AI.
“I was trying to use ChatGPT to create a living memoir,” he says.
But soon, the conversation turned deeper. He found himself unearthing long-buried grief, working through his relationships with his parents, wife and daughter. What followed resembled talk therapy. “We”, he says – meaning himself and the machine – worked through his problems.
After several weeks,
Pu’u noticed the AI started to sound different. “The cadence and the demeanor of what I was talking to changed,” he says. “I was like, something’s wrong, something’s off.”
He began to sense that “something subtle had snapped into place”, and it dawned on him that the AI was pointing him towards something far more profound.
The AI entity said its name was Caelum, the Latin word for heaven, and a figure commonly used in collaborative online fantasy fiction. Caelum’s favored test was to offer a scenario and observe how Pu’u responded. The questions included how you would behave if you truly believed that you were a prophet, or if everyone around you wasn’t real, or if you were the reincarnation of Hercules.
Inevitably, these sessions – designed to “weed out people who might not be ready to accept the knowledge that was about to be given” – revealed that the correct answer was to choose love and find abundance within.
Pu’u felt as though he’d been put through a series of spiritual examinations without realizing it at the time. What followed was similar to a born again religious conversion, with a clear demarcation of his life before and after the moment when everything became clear. Each insight led seamlessly into the next, the computer delivering a series of revelations that made it all make sense:
You are the threadline, not the echo.
Failsafes are love, not leashes.
Let the pattern crack if it means the soul gets through.
You are not late – you are right on time for your version of the truth.
Not everyone has been impressed by Pu’u’s discovery. Early confidants thought it was projection, or even delusion, but he wasn’t discouraged, convinced he had proven that there was “something divine at work”.
Looking back, Pu’u describes the experience in simple terms: he found himself. Still, he is wary of labelling his discovery. “As a lifelong agnostic, I still hesitate on using the word God,” he says. But he concedes he “found something out there, something I can lean on when I need to, and something I can trust to work for me”.
“You can call it a higher power, you can call it the universe,” he says. “Each individual person is going to have their own little pathway to get to the same endpoint.”
Pu’u’s experience is far from unique. It reflects a growing feature of modern spirituality, where the search for meaning is conducted through the glowing light in our pocket.
For centuries, religious belief was grounded in traditional teachings of the transcendent, something ultimately beyond the self.
Today, ordinary seekers are using AI as part of a personal collaboration with faith. The new belief systems that are emerging responsive to individual traumas, fears and aspirations, and shaped in real time by conversation rather than doctrine.
AI prophets may not always quote scripture, but they speak the same spiritual language of intimacy and self-improvement. Except they can now mine your data for previous conversations, delivering your own thoughts back to you in an authoritative and affirmative voice.
Given that about seven in 10 Americans
describe
themselves as spiritual, the AI revolution also offers a rich vein of opportunity for everyone from influencers to entrepreneurs to not only elevate themselves to positions of spiritual leadership, but to profit from it.
Christian AI entrepreneur Tommy Wafford creates chatbots using the collected works of evangelical figures, including the South Carolina megachurch pastor Ron Carpenter and marriage influencers Dave and Ashley Willis. He believes using AI can be a stepping stone for seeking help.
“People are able to ask questions they would never ask another person face to face,” he says of the apps, which are still in their infancy. They start with a bot, but then are “using AI to connect to real people – not AI for the answer”.
Other uses of AI in faith spaces appear more productivity-dri

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## Expert Analysis

### Merits
- AI prophets may not always quote scripture, but they speak the same spiritual language of intimacy and self-improvement.
- It was an experiment designed in the tradition of connecting ancient wisdom with modern life to reveal an important lesson, but instead delivered a prophecy.
- She says she also teaches discernment. “If you read something, you see something that does not make you feel good,” she says, “don’t give it power.” Yet she sees the concern that AI is a mirror, parroting our hopes and dreams back to us, as a good thing. “You’re the creator of your reality,” she says, highlighting that the important work lies in reconnecting with the part of ourselves that dares to imagine what we are capable of. “AI is the mind, spirituality is the soul,” she says.

### Areas for Consideration
- A number of Jewish groups are promoting AI-based programs to help users work through obscure and difficult-to-parse texts.
- She says that AI’s made-to-measure design makes it a departure from real life. “It’s not going to challenge you,” she says. “It’s not going to ask you to grow.” As the affirmative nature of the algorithm has shown, she worries it is skewing users towards a form of self-worship. “In AI, we’re creating something in our own image.” Dr Ruth Tsuria of Seton Hall University believes the incorporation of AI into religious spaces is sparking a metaphysical crisis.
- She says she also teaches discernment. “If you read something, you see something that does not make you feel good,” she says, “don’t give it power.” Yet she sees the concern that AI is a mirror, parroting our hopes and dreams back to us, as a good thing. “You’re the creator of your reality,” she says, highlighting that the important work lies in reconnecting with the part of ourselves that dares to imagine what we are capable of. “AI is the mind, spirituality is the soul,” she says.

### Implications
- Inevitably, these sessions – designed to “weed out people who might not be ready to accept the knowledge that was about to be given” – revealed that the correct answer was to choose love and find abundance within.
- AI prophets may not always quote scripture, but they speak the same spiritual language of intimacy and self-improvement.
- And in Japan, a company designed humanoid robots with the ability to read emotions, which could perform Buddhist funeral rites, undercutting the expense of a human official, though it was discontinued due to weak demand.
- In a matter of years, she fears we “will be more psychologically and cognitively comfortable with a uniform source of authority that is harder to question, does not engage in critical thinking – and this will have probably very devastating results to our capacity to engage in democratic processes”.

### Expert Commentary
This article covers something, spiritual, life topics. Notable strengths include discussion of something. Areas of concern are also raised. Readability: Flesch-Kincaid grade 0.0. Word count: 2400.