Finding Sacred Spaces in an AI-Shaped Culture

The sociologist Emile Durkheim argues that religion is defined by the concept of sacred spaces. A sacred space is one that is inherently distinct from the ordinary aspects of life. This differentiation clarifies why churches have sanctuaries, why worship involves liturgy, and why traditions are centered around canons of holy texts.

While I'm not an expert on Durkheim's work, it appears that this demarcation primarily pertains to rituals: Christianity, for instance, maintains spaces for church rites that are set apart from daily life. However, in my personal experience, it seems that questions and conversations can also hold significant power in designating a space as sacred, even without the presence of rite or ritual.

Three sacred spaces have shaped my faith, my theology, and my outlook on life.

One is the sanctuary at my home congregation, a community that gathers each week to ask what it means to Welcome, Forgive, and Serve. Another is the campfire ring at Rock Island State Park, where I gather with good friends each summer to ask the big questions of life over beer, steak, and s'mores. The other is the pastor's office at Lutheran Campus Ministry, where I had so many meaningful conversations about the Lutheran tradition and vocation with my late mentor.

In my experience, these spaces were sacred not just because of rituals --- but because of the depth of conversations that occurred there. Each space facilitated the asking of the biggest questions of this life - in a way that wouldn't have been possible amidst the frenetic pace of our culture.

The digital age has already erased two of the boundaries that religious communities once held between the sacred and the profane.

Online worship has erased the boundaries used to mark worship spaces by making worship available in our living rooms. And apps that support spiritual practices like prayer and meditation have made these traditional aspects of religion more widely available. But by integrating these practices into daily life, these technologies have also erased the distinctions that once made these traditions sacred.

Now, AI systems like Chat GPT provide us with the means to ask the questions that were once the domain of sacred spaces. ChatGPT can help you make sense of the death of a loved one. It can advise on you on how your vocation is meaningful. It can give you language to explain the mysteries of faith to a small child.

AI generates answers to these great questions in mere seconds. And while it doesn't cite sources, I found ChatGPT's suggestions on vocational meaning to be compelling. I found its commentary on death to be thought provoking, if not hopeful. I found its guidance for teaching faith to small children to be clear, useful, and within the bounds of my own faith tradition.

What happens to faith when a chat bot so easily answers the big questions we once asked in sacred spaces? What happens to the spaces we thought of as sacred when AI becomes a spiritual director? Can we still find sacred spaces in a post-ChatGPT culture? To answer these questions, the church might look at two commitments for ministry in a digital age:

The church must facilitate the practice of asking questions in community. ChatGPT can provide a quick answer to a big, spiritual question. The church cannot rival the speed with which AI answers these questions. Nor, in many cases, can the church come up with answers that sound as confident. Still, the way that AI responds these questions is somewhat isolating. To answer a big question with out the involvement of a trusted interlocutor is to present a viewpoint that is incomplete and fragmentary. Conversations on being are richer as dialogues, not monologues. So while big questions may begin as monologues in a world of AI, our sacred spaces must convert them into shared conversation. If we develop the trust and the psychological safety to convene these conversations, then the sacred spaces of the church will be all the more important in a digital age.

Then, faith leaders must teach their communities to critically reflect and scrutinize texts. AI-generated content seems authoritative. It is well organized and easy to comprehend, even to the point where it could be considered "doctrinal." Yet the web is full of examples where AI fabricated answers or presented outright falsehoods. Inaccuracies are rampant. Its answers seem confident but they are hardly authoritative. This invites a return to the practice of textual scrutiny - or to use the technical term, hermeneutics.

We must equip our communities with the ability to wrestle with texts - not just the scriptures, but the confident-sounding outputs of computer technologies. More than all others, this might be the lifeskill that the church is best positioned to teach in a digital age. Regrettably, American Christianity seems less willing today to train its communities on hermeneutical scrutiny. Rather than teach interpretive skills, too many ministries and preachers seem content to offer the "Biblical view" or the "Christian answer." Too many of us see the church not as a place where texts are wrestled with, but as a vendor for inscrutable answers. If we develop the capacity to teach critical and reflective thought processes, if we are effective at teaching context, culture, and history to our communities, then the spaces that set apart our churches will be free to grapple with all sorts of texts - both those from the scriptures, and those from the chatbots.

If we fail to make these commitments and develop these habits, our sacred spaces may be decimated by ChatGPT. Who needs a pastor to give you vocational advice when OpenAI is available to you in all times and places?

But if we become skilled facilitators of life's biggest questions, we might just find that AI becomes something of a sidekick.

Rather than supplant the church as the location for these conversations, ChatGPT may spark curiosity and inspire confidence. AI may initiate conversations that then develop and come to fulfillment in Christian community. AI, then, becomes the doorway to the sacred spaces that define religion. It becomes a portal to conversations that are meaningful, life-giving, and set apart.

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@ryanpanzer is the author of two books on church in a digital age.

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Can AI Increase Church Attendance? It Might. But Not in the Way You Are Thinking.

This post is the third in a series on the intersection of Christianity and artificial intelligence. The previous post in the series, which explores how AI can help us to communicate and collaborate more effectively, is available here.

The holy sacrament of the altar... also has three parts which it is necessary for us to know. The first is the sacrament, or sign. The second is the significance of the sacrament. The third is the faith required with each of the first two. These three parts must be found in every sacrament. The sacrament must be external and visible, having some material form or appearance. The significance must be internal and spiritual, within the spirit of the person.

-Martin Luther, "The Blessed Sacrament of the Holy and True Body of Christ," 1519

At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, I heard Jim Keat say something profound that would come to shape my view of church online: "Virtual is not the opposite of real. Virtual is the opposite of physical. They are both real."

With these words, Rev. Keat provided a handy retort that could be deployed anytime someone questioned the validity of digital or hybrid ministry. For now, I still agree with Jim. Real Christian community is in fact convened and sustained in digital spaces.

Still I wonder how Rev. Keat's ideas might evolve in a post-ChatGPT culture. Artificial intelligence was an afterthought for most of our culture until November 2022. When we thought of digital ministry during the pandemic, we thought of online communities led by people we knew and recognized. Whether listening to a sermon on YouTube or reading a Facebook post devotion, we accessed content that was created by people we trusted.

Our pastors may not have been the best podcasters. Our directors of music may not have been the best video producers. But we trusted their digital creations because we trusted their creator, even viewing them as authoritative. Prior to 2022, interpretations of God's word, even those rendered digitally, had a certain fidelity. But when AI takes over our virtual experiences, to what extent is it "real?"

And herein lies the problem with AI tools, and the great challenge they pose to our idea of church. Anyone can prompt a tool like ChatGPT to create digital content on their behalf. This moment is the start of a challenge of authority, where all AI systems have the freedom to interpret scripture for themselves, and the power to project that interpretation as a definitive answer. In such a culture, words of any sort, including the Word of God, can and will be repeatedly contested. They can then copy and paste the output of those tools and claim it as their own work.

Suddenly, the blog post by our senior pastor is no longer his or her reflection on Romans chapter 8, but the output of a predictive algorithm.

Even the sermon manuscript that is read from the pulpit could be the copied words of a large language model.

For what ChatGPT lacks in theological validity it more than makes up for in coherence and clarity.

Is ChatGPT's take on Romans 8 proof-texting, or is it looking at the arc of Paul's entire body of literature?

Does this AI interpretation rely on a dialectic of Law & Gospel, or is it beholden to the American prosperity gospel? Are its reflections Lutheran, Catholic, Unitarian, or Agnostic? We cannot answer such questions. All we have are the words the tool produces - compelling, cogent words, devoid of citation or footnotes. In a digital ecosystem saturated with artificial intelligence, our virtual experiences may come to be replete with voices that are fragmentary, untrustworthy, and potentially even deceitful.

A post-ChatGPT culture may come to be defined by an eroded trust in words presented digitally. Even interpretations of scripture may come to stand on flimsy ground.

There are no easy solutions to this challenge. That is, no easy solutions other than to remain committed to a church that is instituted by both Word & Sacrament.

AI tools have the power to project an unreliable word.

AI tools cannot change or affect the sacraments.

They cannot dilute the physical elements of bread, wine, and water shared by analog communities around physical fonts and tables. Sacraments, the synthesis of God's words, physical signs, and the Spirit's faith, give life and salvation. When all our other words start to fail us, we can still place our faith in the words spoken around the font or before the table. When the authority of the words we read online is called into question, the validity of the words spoken by sacramental communities is retained.

Perhaps the unintended impact of AI on Christian ministry is that it will draw us back to old-fashioned sacramentality. It could well be that the further our digital technologies advance, the more our culture will react by seeking out the analog. The more AI accelerates, the more our culture will search for the sacramental.

In this emerging digital ministry moment, the church can still be inviting, connecting, and hospitable in digital spaces. But the unreliability of online voices will leave us wanting something more.

It is in the physical elements of water, wine, and bread, experienced while standing shoulder to shoulder with Christian communities, that we must come to put our trust. Just maybe this ancient expression of Christian community will prove to be a balm for a world inundated with unreliable, artificial words.

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@ryanpanzer is the author of two books on digital ministry.

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Book Review: Work Pray Code by Carolyn Chen

Charles Taylor, famed sociologist and author of "A Secular Age," argued that secularization is not a process of subtraction. Taylor writes:

Western modernity, including its secularity, is the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and related practices, and can’t be explained in terms of perennial features of human life.

In other words, secularization is not a product of our surrounding culture stripping away faith and religiosity. Rather, secularization is a product of positive construction, where our surrounding culture produces a new spiritual identity apart from the traditions of the church. And nowhere has this been more true than in the technology industry.

Carolyn Chen, author of "Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley,"

has observed that the tech industry has become a leading laboratory in this great spiritual reconstruction.

By tracing the stories of once-religious tech workers who relocated to Silicon Valley, Chen demonstrates the encroachment of the workplace into spheres once occupied by religion. The mechanisms of this encroachment are often described by Silicon Valley corporations as amenities, as enhancements to workplace culture. From meditation programs that teach "scientific Buddhism" to coaching offerings that promise "inner transformation," the tech industry has used these cultural offerings to displace the role once held by pastors, rabbis, and spiritual directors.

The once-religious emigrants that Chen describes are not rejecting Christian doctrine. They are not making an active choice to leave their upbringing in the church. Rather, they are shaped and molded by employers seeking to make the mundane into the transcendent. As our work becomes a source of our spiritual identity, we become more attached to and dependent on our employer. Chen's emigrants often look back on their religious past not with judgment or criticism, but with an acknowledgement that they have moved past their past spiritual selves.

When work becomes a spiritual journey, we approach it with an enhanced sense of purpose. We work harder, we produce more deliverables, we work longer hours. Chen is quick to point out that this transformation is taking place within a late capitalist frame. One wonders, while reading Chen's work, what will happen to the Google engineer or the Facebook account manager upon the next round of layoffs.

How will individuals who derived their spiritual identity from the workplace react when those same workplaces replace their jobs with AI? How will those who found transcendence through coaching and meditation regimes respond when their access to such programs is suddenly revoked? In a time where organizations are leaner and less committed to their employees, the juxtaposition of faith and labor has all the makings of a looming spiritual crisis.

Chen concludes her book by describing this transformation as a "cautionary tale." She asks:

"What kind of society do we become when human fulfillment is centered in the workplace What happens to our families, religions, communities, and civil society when work satisfies too many of our needs? Silicon Valley is a bellwether of what happens when we worship work - when we surrender our time, our identities, our resources, and even our cherished traditions in service to work. It is what will happen if we don't invest in building and sustaining social institutions and traditions that nurture community, identity, and purpose outside of work." (pg. 197)

As a sociologist, Chen asks these questions with a remarkable sense of clarity and urgency. The workplace has indeed encroached upon the spiritual sphere. Employers, not congregations, are forming faith identities. Chen has supplied the questions. It is time for the church to come up with the answers.

Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley, was published in 2022 by Princeton University Press.

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Ryan Panzer (@ryanpanzer) works in the technology industry. He received a master's in theology while working full time for Google. He now wonders whether the seminary or Google has had a more profound influence on his theology.

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