Posts Tagged ‘evangelism’
“All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust”*…
The Gen Z gender divide, especially as it relates to ever-more conservative males and ever-more liberal females, is widely remarked. (E.g., see here [gift article].) Ruth Graham explores that divide in a different dimension– one that may be fueling the political divergence…
… For the first time in modern American history, young men are now more religious than their female peers. They attend services more often and are more likely to identify as religious.
“We’ve never seen it before,” Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, said of the flip.
Among Generation Z Christians, this dynamic is playing out in a stark way: The men are staying in church, while the women are leaving at a remarkable clip.
Church membership has been dropping in the United States for years. But within Gen Z, almost 40 percent of women now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, compared with 34 percent of men, according to a survey last year of more than 5,000 Americans by the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute.
In every other age group, men were more likely to be unaffiliated. That tracks with research that has shown that women have been consistently more religious than men, a finding so reliable that some scholars have characterized it as something like a universal human truth.
The men and women of Gen Z are also on divergent trajectories in almost every facet of their lives, including education, sexuality and spirituality.
Young women are still spiritual and seeking, according to surveys of religious life. But they came of age as the #MeToo movement opened a national conversation about sexual harassment and gender-based abuse, which inspired widespread exposures of abuse in church settings under the hashtag #ChurchToo. And the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 compelled many of them to begin paying closer attention to reproductive rights.
Young men have different concerns. They are less educated than their female peers. In major cities, including New York and Washington, they earn less.
At the same time, they place a higher value on traditional family life. Childless young men are likelier than childless young women to say they want to become parents someday, by a margin of 12 percentage points, according to a survey last year by Pew…
… This growing gender divide has the potential to reshape the landscape of not just religion, but also of family life and politics. In a Times/Siena poll of six swing states in August, young men favored former President Donald J. Trump by 13 points, while young women favored Vice President Kamala Harris by 38 points — a 51-point gap far larger than in other generational cohorts.
It is too early to know if this new trend in churchgoing indicates a long-term realignment, said Russell Moore, the editor in chief of Christianity Today.
But he marveled at its strangeness in Christian history.
“I’m not sure what church life looks like with a decreasing presence of women,” he said, pointing out that they historically have been crucial forces in missionary work and volunteering. “We need both spiritual mothers and spiritual fathers.”…
Eminently worth reading in full: “In a First Among Christians, Young Men Are More Religious Than Young Women” (gift article) by @publicroad in @nytimes.
* J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
###
As we ponder piety, we might spare a thought for Aimee Semple McPherson; she died on this date in 1944. A Pentecostal evangelist and media celebrity in the 1920s and 1930s, she is best known for founding the Los Angeles-based Foursquare Church and for pioneering the use of media to build her following. She broadcast on radio (spiced with popular entertainment and stage techniques) to draw in both audience and revenue for her weekly sermons at Foursquare’s Angelus Temple, an early megachurch. In her time, she was the most well-known (and publicized) Protestant evangelist, surpassing Billy Sunday and other predecessors.
While McPherson certainly undertook her own promotion, her fame was ignited in 1926, when (a la Agatha Christie) she disappeared– in McPherson’s case for five weeks. The evangelist insisted that she had been kidnapped and taken to Mexico; many believed that she had “retreated” into a tryst with a male colleague. Indeed, she was investigated and charged by L.A. authorities with fabricating a hoax. That charge was never proved, though many still believe that she was in fact the architect of her own disappearance. In any event, the turmoil was national news– and supercharged her rise.
“Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise; when he closes his lips, he is deemed intelligent.”*…
A substantial– and important– look at a troubling current aflow in the world of technology today: Emily Gorcenski on the millenarianism and manifest destiny of AI and techno-futurism…
… Early Christian missionaries traveled the pagan lands looking for heathens to convert. Evangelical movements almost definitionally involve spreading the word of Jesus Christ as a core element of their faith. The missionary holds the key that unlocks eternal life and the only cost is conversion: the more souls saved, the holier the work. The idea of going out into the world to spread the good word and convert them to our product/language/platform is a deep tradition in the technology industry. We even hire people specifically to do that. We call them technology evangelists.
Successful evangelism has two key requirements. First, it must offer the promised land, the hope of a better life, of eternal salvation. Second, it must have a willing mark, someone desperate enough (perhaps through coercion) to be included in that vision of eternity, better if they can believe strongly enough to become acolytes themselves. This formed the basis of the crypto community: Ponzi schemes sustain only as long as there are new willing participants and when those participants realize that their own continued success is contingent on still more conversions, the incentive to act in their own best interest is strong. It worked for a while to keep the crypto bubble alive. Where this failed was in every other aspect of web3.
…
There’s a joke in the data science world that goes something like this: What’s the difference between statistics, machine learning, and AI? The size of your marketing budget. It’s strange, actually, that we still call it “artificial intelligence” to this day. Artificial intelligence is a dream from the 40s mired in the failures of the ’60s and ’70s. By the late 1980s, despite the previous spectacular failures to materialize any useful artificial intelligence, futurists had moved on to artificial life.
Nobody much is talking about artificial life these days. That idea failed, too, and those failures have likewise failed to deter us. We are now talking about creating “cybernetic superintelligence.” We’re talking about creating an AI that will usher a period of boundless prosperity for humankind. We’re talking about the imminence of our salvation.
The last generation of futurists envisioned themselves as gods working to create life. We’re no longer talking about just life. We’re talking about making artificial gods.
…
I’m certainly not the first person to shine a light on the eschatological character of today’s AI conversation. Sigal Samuel did it a few months back in far fewer words than I’ve used here, though perhaps glossing over some of the political aspects I’ve brought in. She cites Noble and Kurzweil in many of the same ways. I’m not even the first person to coin the term “techno-eschatology.” The parallels between the Singularity Hypothesis and the second coming of Christ are plentiful and not hard to see.
…
… The issue is not that Altman or Bankman-Fried or Andreesen or Kurzweil or any of the other technophiles discussed so far are “literally Hitler.” The issue is that high technology shares all the hallmarks of a millenarian cult and the breathless evangelism about the power and opportunity of AI is indistinguishable from cult recruitment. And moreover, that its cultism meshes perfectly with the American evangelical far-right. Technologists believe they are creating a revolution when in reality they are playing right into the hands of a manipulative, mainstream political force. We saw it in 2016 and we learned nothing from that lesson.
Doomsday cults can never admit when they are wrong. Instead, they double down. We failed to make artificial intelligence, so we pivoted to artificial life. We failed to make artificial life, so now we’re trying to program the messiah. Two months before the Metaverse went belly-up, McKinsey valued it at up to $5 trillion dollars by 2030. And it was without a hint of irony or self-reflection that they pivoted and valued GenAI at up to $4.4 trillion annually. There’s not even a hint of common sense in this analysis.
This post won’t convince anyone on the inside of the harms they are experiencing nor the harms they are causing. That’s not been my intent. You can’t remove someone from a cult if they’re not ready to leave. And the eye-popping data science salaries don’t really incentivize someone to get out. No. My intent was to give some clarity and explanatory insight to those who haven’t fallen under the Singularity’s spell. It’s a hope that if—when—the GenAI bubble bursts, we can maybe immunize ourselves against whatever follows it. And it’s a plea to get people to understand that America has never stopped believing in its manifest destiny.
David Nye described 19th and 20th century American perception technology using the same concept of the sublime that philosophers used to describe Niagara Falls. Americans once beheld with divine wonder the locomotive and the skyscraper, the atom bomb and the Saturn V rocket. I wonder if we’ll behold AI with that same reverence. I pray that we will not. Our real earthly resources are wearing thin. Computing has surpassed aviation in terms of its carbon threat. The earth contains only so many rare earth elements. We may face Armageddon. There will be no Singularity to save us. We have the power to reject our manifest destinies…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Making God,” from @EmilyGorcenski (a relay to mastodon and BlueSky).
See also: “Effective Obfuscation,” from Molly White (@molly0xFFF) and this thread from Emily Bender (@emilymbender).
* Proverbs 17:28
###
As we resist recruitment, we might spare a thought for Ada Lovelace (or, more properly, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, née Byron); she died on this date in 1852. A mathematician and writer, she is chiefly remembered for her work on Charles Babbage‘s proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine— for which she authored what can reasonably be considered the first “computer program.” She was the first to recognize that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and so is one of the “parents” of the modern computer.
You must be logged in to post a comment.