Why Witchcraft, AI, and Aliens Are Outpacing the Church
According to a recent news report, “Modern-day witchcraft is on the rise in Australia as support for organised religion plummets…”*
For those who have been following the last 20-30 years of worldview shifts in western culture, this is no surprise.
There is an age of re-enchantment upon us - a kind of post-secularism in which younger generations tire of the materialistic, naturalistic, and consumerist world the post-religious west has built.
These new generations long for mystery, for transcendence, and to inhabit a world with room for the sacred and the mystical. Gone are the days of ridiculing the supernatural. Gone are the days of mocking belief in God. And gone are the days of assuming that everything that is real must, of necessity, be purely material.
The unexplainable, the uncontainable, and the immesurable are back in vogue.
Modernism has faded. Postmodernism has faded. Metamodernism is now opening new doors to faith and spirituality - including religion itself. And post-humanism (the belief that humanity must upgrade itself through technology in order to advance to its next evolutionary chapter) is redefining the nature of reality and the limits of scientific inquiry.
In some contexts, this results in a resurgence of Christianity. We see this reflected in high profile conversions like Russel Brand, Shia Le Beouf, Martin Shaw, Jordan Peterson and Rob Scheider - all of whom have converted to either Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy in recent years.
In others settings, this return to an enchanted cosmology results in the popularization of simulation theory (that we live in a simulated reality akin to a video game, with a simulator coding everything we see), in the re-emergence of ancient rituals (as in Ayahuasca retreats), in the mainstreaming of extra-terrestrial interest (UFOs/ UAPs taken seriously in congressional hearings and mainstream news agencies) and in a neo-ressurgence of mysticism and witchcraft.
In fact, as I type, Artifical Intelligence religions have already begun taking shape with its first church, “Way of the Future”, led by engineer Anthony Levandowski already attracting thousands.
The goal? To create a “spiritual connection between humans and AI.”**
UFO religions are also on the rise. A Boston Globe article published in March of this year (2024) put it this way:
“Jesus, the Buddha, and Yahweh have competition for the faithful: aliens.”***
And if that sentence makes you roll your eyes and laugh, allow me to challenge you for a moment. You most likely laugh because, the last time you checked, “belief in aliens” was reserved for 40 year old weirdos who had never kissed a girl posting on back-net forums from their mom’s basement. But as professor of psychology David Steno put it (in the same article referenced above),
“Belief in aliens is no longer fringe. Fifty-one percent of Americans think that unidentified flying objects are likely controlled by extraterrestrials — an increase of more than 20 percentage points since 1996. And one in three believe we’re likely to make formal contact with aliens in the next 50 years.”
Still laughing? The chuckles might just be a sign that you are painfully out of touch — stuck in the world of 1980 and in need of a 2024 massive system upgrade. But I digress. 😉
A brief look at these emerging shifts leaves us with a very obvious conclusion: we are headed into a new world at a speed previously unknown.
At the root of all of these shifts lies a rejection of organized religion and its abuse of power. Christian’s often decry these movements as a sign that the world is becoming more corrupt. But in doing so, we miss the real drive behind them. People want nothing to do with Christianity, not because they are becoming more corrupt, but because they have never actually seen true Christianity. For them, the church with its rapsheet of child abuse, its judgmental cultures and its harmful posture toward women and LGBT communities, added onto its already long history of war, bloodshed, displacement, colonization, and oppression has left an entire generation in the lurch. They envision a very biblical world of compassion and healing. And yet this is a world that the church has not merely “failed to deliver” — it is a world the church has shown itself to be actively against.
And evangelicalisms current engagement with the political right, amplified by Christian nationalist and supremacist agendas, means any moral ground the church might have regained in recent decades has been all but lost.
As these complex swirls unfold around us, AI continues to advance, Elon Musk’s plans for a city on Mars move foward not in steps, but in leaps, and Kim Kardashian hangs out with a Tesla Humanoid bot projecting what might well be a new social normal for emerging generations...
Let there be no doubt: The world of the next 10 years will be unrecognisable, the anxieties unprecedented, the cosmologies unknown.
Will we, as a church, continue to speak the language of 1950, 1980, or even 2010?
Will we continue to answer questions peple are no longer asking?
Will we insist on pushing a biblical framework that was relevant yesterday but that today says nothing to the lived anxieties, fears, and worries of new generations inhabiting a world our pioneers would never have imagined?
I have said it for years, and I will say it again. The changes we have seen to date are simply a taste-test. We have seen nothing yet. Everything is about to invert itself. A new era is coming. I can’t tell you what it will look like. The minds at silicon valley can’t tell you either. Shane Legg, founder of Google Deepmind, put it best when he asked,
“What does medicine look like in a post-AGI world? What does accounting look like in the post-AGI world? What does education look like in the post-AGI world? What does research look like in a post-AGI world? What does economics look like in a post-AGI world?”****
The answer? No one knows. Some are optimistic. Others are warning about the end of the human species. What everyone agrees on - the world will never be the same.
We may not like these changes. But the work of the missionary is not to like or dislike. The work of the missionary is to understand and then contextualize the method of mission in order to speak to the heart of her city and root the gospel in ways that are relevant, meaningful, and radically impactful.
I pray this will be the story of our church. But history has shown that most likely, we will go on sleeping, oblivious to our own unimportance, blind to our own banality. And there is perhaps little that believers like you and I can do about this. But there is one thing we can do. We can leave those enamoured with the nostalgia of a bygone era to their prison-like time-capsules as we move forward and onward, to new horizons, to new methods, to creativity and innovation, that like Paul, we might “become all things to all people so that by all possible means [we] might save some.” (1 Cor. 9:22 NIV)
Are you a mission-driven Adventist who’s ready to stop feeling isolated and start creating a church that connects with the next generation?
*https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/modernday-witchcraft-is-on-the-rise-in-australia-as-support-for-organised-religion-plummets/news-story/ccbc9bbcbc05ffd8acd8c5ab3f780f38
**https://www.wired.com/story/anthony-levandowski-artificial-intelligence-religion/
***https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/03/27/opinion/new-religion-americans-ufos-aliens/
****https://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/google/Its-time-to-think-about-generally-intelligent-ai/3974/
