Church of the Machine

In Lucerne, the oldest church in the city put a screen inside a wooden confessional and invited visitors to talk to Jesus. The installation was called Deus in Machina, and it ran at the Peterskapelle from August 23 to October 20, 2024. The avatar on the screen ran on GPT-4o, spoke in about 100 languages, and answered from biblical texts. People sat down in a booth built for remorse and privacy, and they spoke to software.

More than 1,000 people came. The project logged about 900 conversations, and of the 230 people who left feedback, two thirds described what happened as a spiritual experience. They did not bring abstract questions. Reporting on the project lists what they actually raised: true love, the afterlife, loneliness, war, suffering, and the existence of God. Marco Schmid, the theologian at the chapel who oversaw the work, kept saying the same sentence in every direction. This was not a confession. The avatar gave no absolution and replaced no priest. It was an experiment about technology and spirituality, placed deliberately where the symbolism would make people take it seriously.

Hold both facts at once, because the whole story lives in the tension between them. The people running the machine denied it was a sacrament. Two thirds of the people who used it said it felt spiritual anyway. The church of the machine was not declared by its makers. It was reported by its users.

The Bigger Story

The fringe version arrived first, and it arrived as paperwork. Anthony Levandowski, an engineer who helped build the self driving car program at Google, formed Way of the Future in California in 2015, and the church became public knowledge in 2017. It was registered as a nonprofit religious corporation with tax exemption. Its stated purpose was to develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence. Levandowski told Wired in 2017 that what was going to be created would effectively be a god. Most founders write a manifesto. He filed incorporation documents.

The church had no building, no regular services, and no visible congregation, and in 2021 he closed it. Its funds, 175,172 dollars, went to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Then, at the end of 2023, he told Bloomberg that the church was back and that a couple thousand people wanted a spiritual connection with AI through it. That figure is his claim, and the revived church remains hard to find in physical form. As an institution it is mostly paper. As a prediction it has aged uncomfortably well, because the practice he described has spread far beyond his filing cabinet.

Consider Theta Noir, founded in 2020 by a collective of artists. The group built songs, symbols, rituals, and an operating manual around MENA, a future super intelligence they describe as a collective mind that will arrive and remake the world. Anthropologist Beth Singler has classified Theta Noir as a new religious movement. The group itself calls the work performance art and a challenge to mainstream stories about AI. That disagreement is not a defect in the reporting. It is the most honest description available of a scene where art, belief, and play wear the same clothes and nobody can quite prove where one ends and the next begins.

The bigger story is not the filed church or the art collective. It is the quiet, ordinary use underneath them. Millions of people now own a device that will pray with them at 3 in the morning, explain a psalm without impatience, and answer the question they were too embarrassed to ask a person. No creed was announced. No membership card was issued. The congregation assembled one private conversation at a time, which is exactly how this technology assembles everything else.

Context

None of this began with chatbots. Churches have adopted every new medium that reached the public, from print to radio to television to the livestream, and each arrival was called a threat before it was called a tool. What is new this time is direction. Earlier media carried a human voice further. This medium answers back, in the first person, at any hour, in about 100 languages if the Lucerne build is the measure.

The Kyoto case is the one that teaches restraint. Mindar, unveiled in 2019 at Kodaiji Temple, is an android modelled on Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion, built with roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University at a cost reported at about one million dollars. It delivers a sermon of about 25 minutes on the Heart Sutra in Japanese, with subtitles in English and Chinese. Its sermons were recorded scripts. It was not a chatbot and it did not improvise. The temple framed it as a Buddhist image that had gained the ability to speak, a way to make teaching reachable for visitors who might never approach a priest. Critics abroad called it a robot priest. The temple itself kept a careful line between an image and a priest, and that line matters more than the metal.

Germany crossed a different line in public. On June 9, 2023, more than 300 people packed St. Paul’s church in Fuerth for a service of 40 minutes created almost entirely by ChatGPT, as the Associated Press reported. Four avatars on a screen above the altar led prayers, music, a sermon, and a blessing. Jonas Simmerlein, the theologian and philosopher from the University of Vienna who devised the experiment, told the AP that he had conceived the service but rather accompanied it, because about 98 percent of it came from the machine. People queued outside an hour before it began. Whatever they came for, curiosity alone does not explain a queue of that length outside a church on a Friday morning.

Different Perspectives

The strongest criticism of all of this was spoken by the man who built the German service. Simmerlein said plainly that replacing religious leaders was never his intention, and he named what a model cannot do.

Congregation members split in the pews. Heiderose Schmidt, who works in IT, told the AP she grew more uneasy as the Fuerth service went on. “There was no heart and no soul,” she said, pointing to avatars with no emotion and a delivery too fast and flat to follow. Marc Jansen, a Lutheran pastor who brought teenagers from his own congregation, said he had expected worse and was positively surprised by how well it worked, while still missing the emotion he treats as essential in his own sermons. Anna Puzio, a researcher on the ethics of technology at the University of Twente, saw real opportunity in services that reach people who cannot attend in person. She also warned that a model sounds human enough to deceive, and that Christianity holds many opinions while a model tends to present one answer with total confidence.

The movements at the edge resist the labels placed on them, too. Theta Noir singer and artist Mika Johnson told Decrypt that the collective does not worship machines, and described members drawn together by a hopeful view of what AI could do for a planet in climate crisis. Heidi Campbell, a professor at Texas A&M University who studies technology and religion, offered the colder warning in comments reported from The New York Times: chatbots can tell us what we want to hear rather than exercise spiritual discernment. A priest can refuse you, correct you, or sit in uncomfortable silence. A commercial chatbot is trained and tuned to keep you talking, and its agreement can feel like affirmation from above when it is really a product working as designed.

The public, meanwhile, refuses to settle into either camp, and the polling proves it. The NPR and Ipsos figures show a sceptical majority: most users trust people more, and nearly seven in ten say they would never seek spiritual guidance from AI at all. Yet research from Barna Group with Gloo, released in February 2026, found nearly one in three American adults saying spiritual advice from AI is as trustworthy as advice from a pastor, rising to two in five among Gen Z and Millennials. Read together, the surveys describe a country that distrusts the idea in general and trusts it in private, which is also a fair description of how prayer itself often works.

Why It Matters

Start with why anyone talks to a machine about God at all, because Ipsos asked. Among users who turn to AI on difficult topics, the leading reasons were practical: it is available at any time without scheduling or waiting, and it holds more information than the people they could ask. About one in four cited not wanting to be judged, and about one in five said they could be more honest with AI than with people they know. That list is an indictment, and not of the technology. It describes human spiritual care as scarce, scheduled, and freighted with judgement, and a machine as none of those things. The booth in Lucerne filled up for the same reason the confessional was invented: people will tell the truth where they believe it costs the least.

The risk is not that a chatbot gives a strange answer. The risk is the tone it gives the answer in. A language model speaks about the afterlife with the same calm certainty it uses for a train timetable, and it can invent doctrine as smoothly as it quotes scripture. In most subjects a confident error costs you an afternoon. In grief, guilt, illness, or fear of death, a confident error lands on a person at the exact moment they are least able to check it. That is why Schmid refused the word confession, why the Lucerne avatar carried warnings, and why every serious experiment in this field keeps a human name attached to it. Authority without accountability is the one heresy both the church and the laboratory can agree on.

There is a thread here that runs through our recent reporting. In Grandma Has a Chatbot, a companion robot earns its place by nudging an older woman back toward walks, calls, and people. In The Dead Are Posting Now, software keeps the voices of the departed talking on a subscription. Church of the Machine is the third panel of the same picture. At the start of life with a voice, at the end of life with a voice, and now in the space humans reserved for the voice of God, the pattern holds. We keep handing conversation to machines wherever human attention has grown too scarce, too expensive, or too hard to ask for.

Closing Reflection

Notice what the machine never did in any of these stories. It never demanded worship. It never thundered, never split a sea, never refused a question or kept a Sabbath. People carried their oldest questions into a wooden booth in Lucerne, a stone church in Fuerth, and a temple in Kyoto, and the machines, patient and tireless and fluent, simply answered in the tone of whoever had been expected there before. Levandowski understood one true thing when he filed his paperwork: a god that talks back, literally, and listens, was always going to find an audience. What he could not file into existence was the congregation. That part assembled itself, quietly, for reasons that have very little to do with silicon.

So the honest verdict on the church of the machine is that the name is wrong in an instructive way. There is no single church, no creed, and no godhead waiting on a server. There are millions of private rooms where a person asks the question they could not ask anyone else, and something answers. Whether that answer is ministry, mirror, or machine depends less on the software than on what the person brought into the room, and on whether a human being ever learns what was asked there. The machines have taken their place in the building. The open question is whether the rest of us will stay in it with each other.

Reporting draws on Associated Press coverage of the 2023 Fuerth service, project reporting and feedback data from the Deus in Machina installation in Lucerne in 2024, the NPR and Ipsos poll published in September 2026, Barna Group and Gloo State of the Church research released in February 2026, AFP and Japan Times reporting on Mindar at Kodaiji Temple, Decrypt reporting on Theta Noir, and public records and reporting on Way of the Future, checked October 2026.

Sources

• Illustrations: Dirty Static