(Roughly) Daily

We used to relate to different spheres of our lives– and they to us– differently: we were consumers in the marketplace; citizens in the civic arena; worshipers in the spiritual; sudents in school; etc. We had expectations and obligations that were different, different in kind, from one to the next. The homogenizing logic of the marketplace is systematically taking over those other spheres… and we’re behaving– and being treated– more and more like consumers across them all. As this Wired article article from 1995 suggests, that’s been underway for a long time.

Case in point:

As of the end of last year, 63% of Americans identified as Christians; down roughly 12% over the last 20 years. As of 2024, 33% said they attended services in person at least monthly, with another 23% saying that they participated in virtual services at least once a month.

So it’s no surprise that churches are goosing their efforts to attract and keep worshipers, cultivating a more “experiential” (even “charismatic“) style– and turning to the same kind of CRM (customer relationship management) tools that Salesforce and others provide commercial ventures.

Alex Ashely reports on a purpose-driven (and purpose-built) vendor that means to enable churchs to “manage” their relationships with their parishioners in a way (and to an extent) that sounds more like Palantir than Salesforce…

On a Sunday morning in a Midwestern megachurch, worshippers step through sliding glass doors into a bustling lobby—unaware they’ve just passed through a gauntlet of biometric surveillance. High-speed cameras snap multiple face “probes” per second, isolating eyes, noses, and mouths before passing the results to a local neural network that distills these images into digital fingerprints. Before people find their seats, they are matched against an on-premises database—tagged with names, membership tiers, and watch-list flags—that’s stored behind the church’s firewall.

Late one afternoon, a woman scrolls on her phone as she walks home from work. Unbeknownst to her, a complex algorithm has stitched together her social profiles, her private health records, and local veteran outreach lists. It flags her for past military service, chronic pain, opioid dependence, and high Christian belief, and then delivers an ad to her Facebook feed: “Struggling with pain? You’re not alone. Join us this Sunday.”

These hypothetical scenes reflect real capabilities increasingly woven into places of worship nationwide, where spiritual care and technology converge in ways few congregants ever realize. Where Big Tech’s rationalist ethos and evangelical spirituality once mixed like oil and holy water, this unlikely amalgam has given birth to an infrastructure already reshaping the theology of trust—and redrawing the contours of community and pastoral power in modern spiritual life. The emerging nerve center of this faith-tech nexus is in Boulder, Colorado, where the spiritual data and technology firm Gloo has its headquarters.

Gloo is constructing a digital infrastructure meant to bring churches into the age of algorithmic insight.

The church is “a highly fragmented market that is one of the largest yet to fully adopt digital technology,” the company said in a statement by email. “While churches have a variety of goals to achieve their mission, they use Gloo to help them connect, engage with, and know their people on a deeper level.”…

… The company refers to itself as “a technology platform for the faith ecosystem.” Either way, this information is integrated into its “State of Your Church” dashboard—an interface for the modern pulpit.

Since its launch in 2013, Gloo has steadily increased its footprint, and it has started to become the connective tissue for the country’s fragmented religious landscape. According to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, the US is home to around 370,000 distinct congregations. As of early 2025, according to figures provided by the company, Gloo held contracts with more than 100,000 churches and ministry leaders…

… [In March] Gloo… unveiled a strategic investment in Barna Group, the Texas-based research firm whose four decades of surveying more than 2 million people underpin its annual reports on worship, beliefs, and cultural engagement. Barna’s proprietary database—covering every region, age cohort, and denomination—has made it the go-to insight engine for pastors, seminaries, and media tracking the pulse of American faith…

… Barna’s troves of behavioral, spiritual, and cultural data offer granular insight into the behaviors, beliefs, and anxieties of faith communities. While the two organizations frame the collaboration in terms of serving church leaders, the mechanics resemble a data-fusion engine of impressive scale: Barna supplies the psychological texture, and Gloo provides the digital infrastructure to segment, score, and deploy the information…

… Gloo is also now focused on supercharging its services with artificial intelligence and using these insights to transcend market research. At a September 2024 event in Boulder called the AI & the Church Hackathon, Gloo unveiled new AI tools called Data Engine, a content management system with built-in digital-rights safeguards, and Aspen, an early prototype of its “spiritually safe” chatbot, along with the faith-tuned language model powering that chatbot, known internally as CALLM (for “Christian-Aligned Large Language Model”). 

[Ashley describes the growth of Gloo (largely through acquisition), the advent and integration of biometric surveillance, and the Salesforce-like growth of third-party apps; he explores several use cases and raises the concerns– privacy and others– that arise in absence of any meaningful regulation or oversight…]

… With guardrails still scarce, though, faith-tech pioneers and church leaders are peering ever more deeply into congregants’ lives. Until meaningful oversight arrives, the faithful remain exposed to a gaze they never fully invited and scarcely understand.

In April, [Intel CEO until he was ousted last year, now Gloo’s executive chair and head of technology Phil] Gelsinger took the stage at a sold-out Missional AI Summit, a flagship event for Christian technologists that this year was organized around the theme “AI Collision: Shaping the Future Together.” Over 500 pastors, engineers, ethicists, and AI developers filled the hall, flashing badges with logos from Google DeepMind, Meta, McKinsey, and Gloo.

“We want to be part of a broader community … so that we’re influential in creating flourishing AI, technology as a force for good, AI that truly embeds the values that we care about,” Gelsinger said at the summit. He likened such tools to pivotal technologies in Christian history: the Roman roads that carried the gospel across the empire, or Martin Luther’s printing press, which shattered monolithic control over scripture. A Gloo spokesperson later confirmed that one of the company’s goals is to shape AI specifically to “contribute to the flourishing of people.”

“We’re going to see AI become just like the internet,” Gelsinger said. “Every single interaction will be infused with AI capabilities.” 

He says Gloo is already mining data across the spectrum of human experience to fuel ever more powerful tools.

“With AI, computers adapt to us. We talk to them; they hear us; they see us for the first time,” he said. “And now they are becoming a user interface that fits with humanity.”

Whether these technologies ultimately deepen pastoral care or erode personal privacy may hinge on decisions made today about transparency, consent, and accountability. Yet the pace of adoption already outstrips the development of ethical guardrails. Now, one of the questions lingering in the air is not whether AI, facial recognition, and other emerging technologies can serve the church, but how deeply they can be woven into its nervous system to form a new OS for modern Christianity and moral infrastructure. 

“It’s like standing on the beach watching a tsunami in slow motion,” Kriel says. 

Gelsinger sees it differently.  

“You and I both need to come to the same position, like Isaiah did,” he told the crowd at the Missional AI Summit. “‘Here am I, Lord. Send me.’ Send me, send us, that we can be shaping technology as a force for good, that we could grab this moment in time.”… 

Spiritual care and technology are converging across the country, reshaping the theology of trust: “When tech gets religion: How churches use data and AI,” from @technologyreview.com.

* Henny Youngman

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As we pray for guidance, we might recall that Henry VIII, King of England from 1509 until his death in 1547, known for his six marriages, attempted to have his first marriage (to Catherine of Aragon) annulled. His disagreement with Pope Clement VII over the issue led Henry to initiate the English Reformation, separating the Church of England from papal authority. He appointed himself Supreme Head of the Church of England and dissolved convents and monasteries– for which, on this date in 1535, he was excommunicated by (Clement’s successor) Pope Paul III.