Religion is Essential to the Future Save page

staff   March 10, 2026

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If you care about outcomes, you can't ignore the most successful social technology in human history.

That technology is religion.

This might sound strange. We're used to thinking of technology as hardware, software, and engineering. But the most consequential technologies have always been social: language, law, markets, science. These are technologies for coordinating human behavior at scale, and they have shaped civilization far more than any individual invention.

Religion is the most powerful of them all.

What religion actually did

For the past century, many people have assumed religion would fade away. The "secularization thesis" predicted that as societies modernized, religion would decline into irrelevance.

This prediction has been spectacularly wrong.

But more importantly, it was based on a misunderstanding of history. When you look at what actually happened, religion didn't just coexist with the rise of the modern world. It created the modern world.

Christianity gave rise to modern science. From the 9th century through the 17th, it was Christian theologians and monks who developed the philosophical foundations for empirical investigation, systematic observation, and the scientific method. Kepler described his work as "thinking God's thoughts after him." Francis Bacon's scientific revolution was driven by the conviction that God created an ordered world that humans were meant to understand.

Christianity gave rise to the Enlightenment. The ideas of human dignity, individual rights, and universal moral concern didn't emerge from a vacuum. They grew out of centuries of Christian theological reflection on what it means for every person to be made in the image of God.

Christianity gave rise to the moral revolutions we now take for granted. The abolition of slavery, the development of human rights, the extension of dignity to the marginalized---these movements were overwhelmingly driven by people motivated by Christian conviction.

This is not a minor footnote. It's the central story of how the modern world was built.

The load-bearing wall

Here's the uncomfortable question: if Christianity created and sustained these things, what happens when you remove it?

This is the "load-bearing wall" problem. You can tear out a wall in a building without it collapsing immediately. But if that wall was supporting the structure, the collapse will come. The only question is when.

We are arguably watching this play out in real time. The values and institutions that emerged from Christianity---science, human rights, democratic governance, concern for the vulnerable---are increasingly treated as self-evident truths that need no foundation. But foundations matter. And the evidence suggests that these values are harder to sustain than we thought.

Religious communities consistently outperform secular ones on nearly every measure of social well-being: health, longevity, generosity, resilience, social trust, cooperation, and demographic sustainability. These are not minor effects. They are massive, well-documented, and consistent across cultures and centuries.

The social technology of religion does something nothing else can: it connects individual human action to an ultimate framework of meaning. Markets coordinate through incentives. Law coordinates through enforcement. But only religion coordinates through meaning---by connecting what you do today to a story about the nature of reality itself.

The Great Filter

The challenges ahead are immense. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, radical life extension---these are not just technical problems. They are alignment problems. And alignment is what religion has been doing for thousands of years.

In cosmology, the "Great Filter" refers to the unknown barrier that seems to prevent intelligent civilizations from surviving long enough to become visible to each other across the cosmos. What is that barrier?

The most likely answer is that intelligence itself is the barrier. Intelligence is the ultimate power. And unaligned intelligence---intelligence not oriented toward the good---leads to destruction. The smarter a civilization gets, the more capable it becomes of destroying itself.

This is exactly the problem that Christianity addresses at its core. The Christian story is fundamentally about the alignment of human will with ultimate goodness. It provides a framework for wielding increasing power with increasing wisdom---for growing in capability while growing in love, humility, and concern for others.

If you care about AI alignment, you need to understand how religions have aligned human behavior with long-term values for thousands of years. If you care about existential risk, you need to understand how religions have maintained civilizational continuity across catastrophes. If you care about the future of intelligent life, you need to understand the deepest source of human coordination, meaning, and resilience the world has ever known.

Not a fossil

Religion is not outdated. It is a living, evolving social technology---one that has repeatedly adapted to new circumstances, absorbed new knowledge, and generated new possibilities.

The futurists who predicted religion's demise made a critical error: they confused a particular form of religion with religion itself. They saw outdated institutions and assumed the underlying technology was broken. That's like seeing a steam engine and concluding that the concept of engines is obsolete.

Christianity in particular carries within it a deep logic of renewal---a conviction that the world is not yet what it should be, and that we are called to participate in making it better. This logic has driven wave after wave of transformation: scientific, moral, institutional, technological. And it is exactly the logic we need for the future.

The invitation

The Christian Transhumanist Association exists because we believe that faith supports the future, and the future fulfills faith.

We believe that the Christian story doesn't just tolerate science and technology---it demands them. The Creation Mandate calls humanity to understand and cultivate all of creation. The hope of renewal calls us to heal disease, overcome death, and extend life and flourishing to every corner of the cosmos.

If you care about outcomes, you can't afford to ignore the most successful social technology in human history. The future needs religion. The question is what kind.

We think it should be one that embraces science, technology, and the full scope of human potential---because that is what the Christian story has always been.

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