August 2022

The Future of Christianity: Echoes of a Coming Global Church

The previous blog dealt with macro-trends. They help frame the future by establishing parameters that undergird the external common factors that all humanity must face. Now it is time to zoom in a little closer to our topic. Our task is to paint futures of the intersection between AI and faith. In this blog, we are looking at the faith side of the equation and primarily focusing on the future of Christianity.

With that said, much of what is said here could apply to other religions and even non-religious beliefs. In fact, with the rise of the nones, the latter may very well become a viable option for millions. In fact, one could see the rise of secular movements around human rights and social justice as an offshoot of progressive Christianity, albeit with severed ties to religion. That is, in projecting a future of Christianity, we may be touching on the future of spirituality that has transcends religion.

Global Trends

I would like to recognize the Global Christian History community for some help on this section. They pointed me to a wealth of resources that help us understand the development of Global Christianity while also pointing to some possible futures. They are also a great group for those interested in learning more about Global Christianity.

First, it is important to attend to statistics on the topic. While there are disagreements on the degree and speed of change, it is clear that the center of Christianity is moving away from Europe and North America towards the global South – Africa, Latin America, and Asia. In an interesting twist, the lands once evangelized by the North are now the ones leading growth and missionary efforts.

Photo by Riley Sullivan on Unsplash

There is disagreement, however, around whether Christian growth will keep Muslim growth in check or whether the latter will overtake it to become the largest religious group in the world. A Pew Research 2015 report points to a Muslim majority future in 2015 while Gordon-Conwell Center of Global Christianity points to a 2050 where Christianity retains majority status. Regardless of who is right, Christianity’s relationship with Islam will continue to be a defining factor in Africa, South Asia (excluding India), and the Middle East. It will also play an important role in Europe which is slated to be 10-15% Muslim in the coming decades.

African and Asian Paths

The African continent will continue to be an engine for growth and vitality for Christianity. A growing population and nascent movements will ensure a continuous spread of religious practice and fervor throughout the continent will ensure that one in 3 Christians globally will be there in 2045. Even more interesting though is how African Christianity will look like. Current trends show a tilt towards indigenous movements which are giving Christian practice a true African flavor.

I also wonder about its impact in the West as migrant patterns continue to bring in millions of African Christians to Europe and North America. Immigrant churches will play a pivotal role in connecting the vibrant Christian south with a post-Christian Western societies. Furthermore, the African presence is already shaping the Anglican communion as the recent boycotts of Lambeth 2022 show.

The story in Asia is mixed with growing representation in countries like South Korea (Protestant) and the Philipines (Catholic). The biggest question mark is the future of Christianity in China. Will we see the continuation of a dual system of official and underground churches or will the government allow the latter to come out of the shadows? Either way, Christianity will continue to be an influential social force in this global power.

A Tale of Two Americas

The American continent(s) will likely follow diverging paths. North America’s decline in Christian religious identification is likely to continue if not even accelerate. There is some uncertainty here. Consider that in 2015, Pew Research predicted that 66% of people in the US would identify as Christians in 2050. A more recent 2021 PRRI estimate shows it at 69% in 2020! Certainly differences in methodology and margin of error. With that said, it is not unreasonable to assume that religious identification with Christianity is on an accelerated decline.

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash

With that said, Christianity will continue to be a significant religious and political force in the United States for decades to come. However, the uncertainty is around whether the US will look more like Canada (55% Christian) or the American South (76% Christian). The deciding factor here will be more on the non-White minorities which by then will comprise the majority of the population.

As we look south of the Rio Grande, the factors are less about Christianity in general but the shift from Catholic to Protestant Christianity. In Brazil, for example, Protestants (Evangelicals) will likely surpass Catholics by the early 2030’s to become the largest religious group in the nation. That is a significant shift in the region that boasted a Catholic identity for nearly 500 years. It has significant political and social ramifications that we are yet to fully comprehend. For now, it suffices to say that evangelical support for Bolsonaro was decisive in the 2018 presidential election.

A Technology-Enabled Future

Photo by Ashkan Forouzani on Unsplash

Above all, the rise of nones globally will be a defining factor for not just Christian identity but the nature of Christian worship (liturgy). A strong current against established religious organizations will give way to new expressions of the faith. The ubiquity of technology and its potent ability to establish connections independent of geography can foster innovation. That is, maybe the most interesting trends in Christianity will be less about numeric adherence and more about the transformation of faith practices. This movement represents a shift away from local congregations to a global spirituality that is shared in small groups mediated through telepresence technologies.

What will that look like? I recently attended a webinar that may spell a path for things to come. It was hosted by the New Wine Collective, an emerging group promising to re-think church. While more details are forthcoming, this looks like an app-enabled way of building face-to-face Christian community. This is not simply a “Facebook church” but more of a way to use technology to enable offline gatherings. Could we call this a personalized church model? Only time will tell. I am very curious to see where this goes.

One thing is certain, the future of Christianity will be more entangled with the development of emerging technologies in the decades to come. We have yet to conceive of metaverse-enabled liturgies. Could 5 G-enabled liturgies where a priest handles the sacrament remotely count as in-person mass? Don’t get me wrong – traditional church buildings will still exist for a long time. They will just be less essential for the life of faith.

Climate Change and Geopolitics: Macro-Drivers of the Future

In the last blog, we introduced scenario planning as an established academic and business practice for framing the future. The practice helps us break out of fixed thought patterns and step into a growth mentality that envisions multiple options for the future. The first step in this scenario planning journey is to pick the most important macro drivers that will define the parameters of the future. There are many options here such as economics, climate, geopolitics, technology, or social change. Before we get there, some preliminary thoughts on how we got here are in order.

Preparing to Imagine

At AI Theology we are in the business of imagining the future. In fact, in our recent meetings we established our mission statement as the following:

To forge a community of lifelong learners who will imagine theological AI futures that promote the flourishing of all life.
AI Theology mission statement

That is, we are above all a lifelong learning community. We look at the future with an open mind and stare at it as an organism rather than an individual. We believe we hear God better when we do it together. By expanding the table of conversation, including voices once shut out, we can finally hear the Spirit’s whisper from the margins.

Yet, we also have centered our task, our work to do, on imagination. What? You read that right, our number 1 job is child’s play – the skill we unlearn with adulthood. We believe that imagination is one way we can express the indwelling divine breath into form. As a form of embodied creativity, just like faith, imagination brings forth what was not there before.

Photo by J. Balla Photography on Unsplash

Scenario Planning as the Scaffold for Creativity

As you may suspect, our goal in pursuing scenario planning is not for the survival or thriving of an institution, instead, it is creative. We seek to imagine futures based on these scenarios we come up with. Furthermore, we seek to express them through relatable stories and through explanatory prose.

Our goal is not to create strategic plans but to elicit inspiration and action towards preferred collective futures. One of the biggest failures of technological development and theological thinking in our time is one of imagination. Straightjacketed by rigid religious dogma or agendas seeking perpetual profit, we produce more of the same even as needs and capabilities change. The failure of imagination is what leads us back into reclaiming a lost past rather than building a future anew. In this journey of transformation, we must first awaken to imagination.

Yet, this is not a free-flowing process devoid of structure and order. Discipline and creativity are not opposites but instead can work together to forge masterpieces. Hence, in the spirit of integration, we look to business practices, often tied to profit-making objectives, and turn them into a platform to build dreams about the future. In our case, we believe this will take shape in the form of fiction and non-fiction content about the future. We want to engage in scenario planning for painting realistic pictures of what the future could look like.

Setting the Foundations of a Future Canvas

If we are serious about imagining the future with the help of scenario planning, the first step is deciding on two main variables that will decide the parameters for our future. I would like to call them “macro-drivers” of the future. They are general enough to cut across multiple areas but also intelligible enough to be understood in simple terms. They don’t cover all areas of life but are big enough to set the terms upon which humanity builds their future.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

For example, while one may not have foreseen in the early 1900s, growing nationalism would set the terms for the rest of the century. In the previous century, industrialization and colonization were defining macro drivers. These are not events but more like themes. They capture the gestalt of an age.

If we look at our present and the near-term future (20 years from now), which macro-drivers are setting the terms for what is to come? You may have guessed it but after some deliberation, we are currently settling on climate change and geopolitics. While these are important now, we expect them to become all the more defining in the next two decades.

The Climate Wager

Human driving warming of the earth is undoubtedly the challenge of our times. This is a pressing issue now and is only expected to loom larger in our collective psyche. It is an interesting variable because it is not dependent on a few actors, like political leaders, but represents the compounded effect of our relationship with the more-than-human world. It depends on us but also on how nature reacts. Both sides are extremely hard to predict but we can at least make scenarios based on agreed-upon temperature markers.

You might have heard about the 1.5C challenge nations put forth as a threshold they would like the planet to stay in by 2100. What you may not know is that we are already at 1.1 and at a rate of 0.2 warming per decade, we would reach this temperature by the early 2040s. That is, the goal for 2100 may come 40-50 years earlier! Naturally, when thinking about scenarios on climate, one of them see the earth reaching 1.5 or even 1.7 in 20 years – the pessimistic scenario. On the other end, would be to trust that changes implemented now will accelerate to curb that to something more like 1.3C. The variation seems small but it makes all the difference.

Climate change represents a marker and metric of how well humanity works with the earth to sustain life. Given the multiple warnings from scientists and the challenges we are already experiencing, I believe climate must be part of every exercise considering the future. It is the container, the stage setting the conditions in which we will live (or not) our future lives.

Globalism vs Nationalism

Geopolitics is another macro-driver of the future. It represents the combined impact of national political decisions. One could say that geopolitics will be a by-product of climate impact. There is some truth to that, especially over the long term. However, in this case, the macro-driver really is how nations cooperate with each other to face planetary challenges. That is, will they seek to work together toward shared goals (globalism) or prefer to protect their own interests first (nationalism).

A recent example would be COVID-19. On that occasion, national responses leaned mostly toward globalism. There was unprecedented sharing of information, vaccines, and cooperation as a way to mitigate the worse of the pandemic. Even with the significant cost in human lives, globalism ensured worst scenarios did not occur. This is, however, not a guarantee for the next two decades.

The Economist published a seminal article, The New Political Divide in 2016 that expressed this choice well. It argued that the central political question would no longer be between left and right (capitalism vs socialism) but between open and closed societies. This was a remarkable statement considering that it preceded Trump’s electoral victory and the rise of nationalists in other countries such as Brazil and the Philippines. This debate is far from over and it would be a mistake to interpret Trump’s defeat in 2020 as a decline of nationalism in geopolitics. Political candidates may change but the allure of isolationism and parochial politics will continue

Conclusion

There are many others but we thought we would start with these two to set the canvas for the stories we are to create. As we mentioned before, the point here is not to “get the future right.” We are not just extending these trends to build one future. Instead, we are looking at them for a range. That is, what would it look like if we actually are able to slow global warming? What does it look like if it accelerates? How will a nationalistic world look? What happens if globalism reigns supreme? We believe the future will lie somewhere in between these ranges, yet preparing for its extremes is a good strategy.

While our focus is on the future AI and faith, we believe that climate change and geopolitics will be defining parameters. Think of it as a canvas, the prevailing background upon which the future of AI and faith will be painted. By doing so, we acknowledge that technology and religion do not happen in a vacuum but are as much drivers as recipients of their surroundings.

Painting Alternative Futures: Scenario Planning for AI and Faith

In the previous blog, I introduced the new project AIT is embarking on and we invited the reader to start thinking about the future by looking first at the past. We now turn to scenario planning as a way to prepare for the future of AI and Faith. For those curious about this, Future studies is an academic field that has developed solid business practices in the last 50 years. I even considered pursuing a degree in it in my early 30’s but that’s a story for another day. The main point here is to mine some of these practices to see what could be useful as we engage in a project to imagine alternative futures for AI and faith.

What is Scenario Planning?

A common foresight practice for large institutions to engage in is scenario planning. In the 1970’s Royal Dutch Shell corporation leadership wanted to engage in a robust process to prepare for an uncertain future. While the company already employed forecasting techniques for short-term planning, leaders felt the need for a different approach as they looked into the mid and long-term future. They turned to a practice developed a decade earlier by the Rand corporation to help them imagine new futures.

Instead of spending too much energy trying to predict the future, the leadership group sought to create plausible scenarios. That is, instead of simply extrapolating current trends, they wanted to paint pictures of possible futures at a conceptual level. Their point was not to “get it right” but to challenge executives to consider multiple alternatives.

In the early ’00s, I participated in one of these sessions with my employer. It was an exciting experience for a young professional and probably one of the reasons I got hooked on future thinking and what inspired me to consider scenario planning for AI and faith. On that occasion, the group chose 2 main variables that would define our scenarios. Then, plotting in a graph, we would create 4 scenarios that would alternate high and low for each of the variables. Each quadrant would have a catchy name that described the combination of the two variables for each scenario as illustrated in the picture below:

In essence, scenarios are nothing more than narratives about the future. They are not striving for accuracy but must be compelling, plausible, and memorable. This way, they can play an important role in painting a picture of the future that the decision-maker can prepare for.

Why Focus on Multiple Futures?

Looking at the chart above can be overwhelming and it begs the question: why build multiple futures? Wouldn’t that create more confusion over what to do next? That’s a fair question to anyone encountering this practice. Yet, there is a strong reason for doing so. Futurist Amy Webb explains it this way:

It’s about flexibility. Most people and organizations are very inflexible in how they think about the future. In fact, it’s difficult to imagine yourself in the future, and there are neurological reasons for that. Our brains are designed to deal with immediate problems, not future ones. That plus the pace of technology improvement is becoming so fast that we’re increasingly focused on the now. Collectively, we are learning to be “nowists,” not futurists.

Here’s the problem with a “nowist” mentality: when faced with uncertainty, we become inflexible. We revert to historical patterns, we stick to a predetermined plan, or we simply refuse to adopt a new mental model.
Amy Webb – interview for the World Economic Forum

Thinking through alternative options forces us out of our short-term mentality. It also breaks us out of pre-conceived ideas based on the past about how the future may unfold. In short, scenario planning undercuts the tendency to predict the future putting the focus instead on the range of possibilities.

Who should engage in this practice?

By now, it should be clear why large organizations are already embedding this practice into their planning cycle. Yet, is that limited to large institutions? Should smaller entities or individuals consider this practice? I would contend the answer is a resounding yes. In a world of increasing uncertainty, there is a growing incentive for democratizing scenario planning.

Photo by Samantha Gades on Unsplash

Certainly, in the field of AI and faith, there is a pressing need for considering alternative futures. It would not be prudent to assume AI adoption or even the make-up of the faithful will remain constant. Communities of faith are still reeling from the disruptive effects of the COVID-19 crisis. AI development and adoption continue to march on at neck-breaking speed. Just between these two factors, the possibilities are quite numerous not even considering the uncertainties around climate change and geopolitics.

In a fast-changing world, we need to reject the dichotomy of resorting to old thinking patterns or accepting change in passive resignation. There is a third way which is preparing for possibilities with courage, caution, and hope. That is why AI theology is engaging in scenario planning discussions to paint alternative futures. This is how we can best serve church, industry, and academia.

Stay tuned!

Let’s Talk About the Future of AI and Faith

AI Theology is embarking on an exciting new project about the future. In the next months, we’ll be exploring how faith and AI will interact decades from now. Through research, dialogue, speculation, and prayerful reflection, we hope to paint plausible pictures of what may be ahead of us. More to come on that.

You might wonder why even engage in such pursuit.

Here is one reason:

“Those who think about the future can shape it while those who do not only react to it” (Insta post)

Now that I got your attention, let me flesh this out a bit further. In the last few months, I have been discussing what AIT was about with the advisory board. We wanted to take time to re-group and re-think priorities. Like any endeavor, we have limited time and resources. Hence, choosing what to focus on is crucial if we are to have any chance of being effective.

What we realized is that any discussion about emerging technologies is inevitably a dialogue about the future. While AI technologies present daunting challenges for our time, this is little compared to where it is taking us as a society. By playing out current possibilities in decades to come, we can offer a clearer picture of the dangers and opportunities of AI so we can instigate action in the present. In a digital environment where attention is measured in milliseconds, it is time we recover the long view.

Looking into the Past for Clues

If you think this is a daunting task, you are not alone. Often, we can barely plan what to eat for dinner. Imagine looking 20 years out! At first, it seems overwhelming if not a pointless exercise. Yet, stay with me for a bit.

A good starting point, albeit imperfect, is projecting your memory back. Do you remember what life was 20 years ago? Some of you weren’t even born or were too young to remember. Others may feel a rush of nostalgia for a time long gone.

Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

I, for one, (age alert ahead) remember very well where I was and what I was doing in 2002. It was a pivotal year when I graduated from college, got married, and started working for the same bank I still work for today (2 mergers later). What a year! One that would define the course of my life for decades to come.

As I reflect back on my younger self, I wonder what would surprise that 22-year-old if he could join me in 2042. Which technology would wow him the most and which one would horrify him? Certainly, he would be excited to learn that video calls on a handheld device were now possible. For somebody who dated 4 years long-distance that would have been a game changer! While cel phones already existed then, they were as dumb as they go, barely allowing you to make phone calls.

This is not just a trip down memory land but a way to calibrate our thoughts to the perception of change over time. That is, considering how our younger self would experience our present not only helps us understand what has changed but most importantly, how fast things have changed. The rate of change is key if we are to think about the future. Getting a sense of the rate of change is probably the best takeaway from this exercise in order to engage with the actual future projection we originally intended to do.

Peering into the future

Older version of me created by the Face app

Who is the wise older man in the right? Well, this is AI’s prediction of what I will look like in the future. Not bad, huh? I am not sure I can pull the beard off since the best I can do today are scattered patches of hair throughout my face. With that said, I am impressed with how realistic the picture looked.

If AI can draw such a compelling future of my looks how about if I ask it to tell me more about the world in 2042? Well, that’s what I did. Using Open AI GPT-3 language model, I typed in the prompt: “What will the world look like in 2042?”

Here is its response:

In 2042, the world will be a very different place. Technology will have advanced significantly, and humanity will have made great strides in solving many of the problems that plague us today. Poverty, hunger, and disease will be largely eradicated, and global warming will be under control. People will be living longer, healthier lives, and we will have colonized other planets. The internet will be even more omnipresent than it is today, and we will be able to communicate with each other instantaneously no matter where we are in the world. We will have flying cars, and robots will be a part of everyday life. The world will be a much more peaceful and prosperous place, and it will be an exciting time to be alive.

Ok, AI – dream on! That was both too general and too optimistic for my taste. No doubt, AI has a long way to go before it can give us a comprehensive picture of the future.

How about you?

What would your 20-years-younger-self notice about today? What would surprise him or her?

When you project yourself forward 20 years, considering the rate of change of the last 20 and keeping it mostly constant, what do you see?

What world do you visit?

Drop your answers in the “send us a message” section on the right or in our FB community

We would love to hear from you.

Month: August 2022