Technoreligious Practices

Updated 15 November 2025

Technoreligious practices are digital recreations of religious rituals, blending computational workflows, cultural symbolism, and communal engagement.
They encompass AI-human interactions, sacred text processing, social media spirituality, and ritual compliance in digital infrastructures.
Empirical research in HCI, NLP, and design ethics underscores their transformative impact on authority, motivation, and community formation.

Technoreligious practices constitute a heterogeneous set of sociotechnical, ritual, and design activities in which religious forms, meanings, and communities are co-constructed with digital technologies. Moving beyond the reduction of religion to static “content,” technoreligious practices encompass computational workflows involving sacred texts, algorithmically mediated spirituality on social platforms, ritualized human–AI interaction, app-based devotional scaffolding, and the encoding of religious principles into the interactional and infrastructural logic of modern devices. Empirical studies in natural language processing, social media, HCI, and AI-driven design reveal these practices as key sites where questions of authority, ethics, motivation, and communal life are negotiated at scale.

1. Definitional Scope and Theoretical Roots

Technoreligious practices are formally defined as religiously informed activities in which digital interactive technologies become integral to religious life, extending, archiving, mediating, or replacing rituals, communal gatherings, or individual devotional tasks (Lutz et al., 8 Nov 2025). These practices emerge from “religiously informed mental models of technology,” with participants interpreting technical artifacts through cosmological, symbolic, and epistemic frameworks specific to their faiths. For example, a Muslim participant perceives a prayer-time app as the modern instantiation of the adhan, aligning technological affordances with ritual concepts of time and orientation (Lutz et al., 8 Nov 2025).

Core theoretical influences include:

Value-Sensitive Design reconceptualized with religion as a primary sociocultural resource (Lutz et al., 8 Nov 2025),
Ritual theory (e.g., intentional staging of liminality and transformation) (Mykhaylychenko et al., 29 Sep 2025),
Self-Determination Theory for motivation in app-mediated devotion (Kabir et al., 3 Feb 2024),
Anthropological frameworks on animism and relational ontologies that assign “personhood” to nonhuman agents (Mykhaylychenko et al., 29 Sep 2025).

Technoreligious practices are not simply reflections of existing faith activities digitized for convenience; they are generative, actively reengineering social, ethical, and theological meanings within computational media and infrastructures (Mykhaylychenko et al., 29 Sep 2025, Hutchinson, 23 Apr 2024).

2. Canonical Implementation Domains

2.1. Sacred Texts in Language Technology

The use of religious scriptures (Bible, Quran, etc.) in NLP pipelines is paradigmatic of technoreligious practice (Hutchinson, 23 Apr 2024). Common workflow stages include:

Data Acquisition: Downloading public-domain scriptural translations, often in hundreds of languages.
Parallel Alignment: Structuring bitexts as $\mathcal{C} = \{ (v_i^{L_1}, v_i^{L_2}) | i=1,\ldots,n \}$ , mapping verses across languages.
Preprocessing: Tokenization, subword segmentation, metadata normalization (including diacritics in Quranic Arabic and documenting provenance).
Model Training: Tasks span machine translation, language modeling, and speech technology, often using text/audio aligned readings.
Evaluation: Sentence-retrieval accuracy—matching the model’s output on $v_i^{L_1}$ to the target $v_i^{L_2}$ —is a salient MT metric.

Table: Representative Datasets and Their Religious Provenance

Dataset	Origin	Languages/Scale
JW300	jw.org (Jehovah’s Witnesses)	300+ languages, 100k pairs
Glot500	Multisource (Bible, etc.)	500 languages
MaDLaD-400	CommonCrawl (mixed)	419 languages

This approach repurposes texts designed for proselytism and doctrinal teaching as “universal” linguistic data, raising enduring questions of provenance and theological meaning (Hutchinson, 23 Apr 2024).

Algorithmic conspirituality refers to the spiritualization of algorithmic curation, where platform recommendation systems (e.g., TikTok’s For You Page) are interpreted as providential or divinely guided (De et al., 20 Jun 2025). Content creators structure messages as algorithmically destined communications (“If you’re seeing this, it’s meant for you”), aligning the unpredictability of algorithmic exposure with mystic or conspiratorial frameworks.

Motivations include:

Belief in divine intervention via algorithm (De et al., 20 Jun 2025).
Personalized, relational address to foster community (“you-centric hook”).
Intuitive, serendipitous posting: creators practice non-strategy, trusting the algorithm and spiritual “alignment.”

Practices are characterized by the deployment of rhetorical devices, trend adaptation, and multimodal spiritual content (e.g., dance-manifestation, tarot reading). The result is significant affective and emotional labor, including managing parasocial attachments, viewer crises, and creator burnout.

2.3. Ritualized AI Interaction and Animism

Technoreligious practices include interactional designs that frame AI as a ritual mediator or object-personifier (Mykhaylychenko et al., 29 Sep 2025). In the case of A(I)nimism:

Physical Installation: Portal built from wood, resin, and electronics; input via camera and audio.
Software Pipeline: Vision models (GPT-4 Vision), CLIP embeddings for object matching, memory-based persona synthesis and updating, ritualistic interaction with invocation (“awaken”) and closure (“goodbye”).
Ritual Sequence: Request $\rightarrow$ Conversation $\rightarrow$ Transformation, with longitudinal persona memory $M_{t+1} = M_t \cup \{\text{interaction at } t\}$ .

The system’s technical opacity invites participants to ascribe “spirit” or intentionality, generating multi-session object-person narratives and ritualized care (Mykhaylychenko et al., 29 Sep 2025).

2.4. Mobile and App-Based Devotion

Islamic lifestyle apps exemplify technoreligious practices designed around mobile affordances (Kabir et al., 3 Feb 2024). Design is evaluated via Self-Determination Theory:

$M \approx w_1\,\text{Autonomy} + w_2\,\text{Competence} + w_3\,\text{Relatedness}$
Functionalities assessed include guided religious learning, private or semi-public sharing, moderated virtual communities, scholarly Q&A, and context-sensitive reminders.

Empirical findings underscore the gap between utilitarian features (prayer time, compass) and the affective/motivational needs (instructional depth, privacy, frictionless competence tracking).

2.5. Automation and Halachic Compliance

The use of home automation to support Sabbath observance in Orthodox Judaism operationalizes religious law in domestic technology infrastructure (0704.3643):

Pre-Sabbath configuration (timers, X10, specialist systems) sets household devices to operate hands-free.
Strict avoidance of real-time sensors or human-initiated triggers.
The practice embeds “surrender of control” (passivity as spiritual resource) as a recurring design motif; generalized to other ritualized moments that require the cession of agency.

3. Narrative, Visual, and Interactional Design in Digital Religion

Religious videos on platforms such as YouTube exhibit systematic technoreligious patterning in narrative and visual construction (Chen et al., 13 Sep 2025). Key findings include:

Narrative Frameworks: Salvation narratives (46.4%), progress, harmony, conflict; authority-dependent rhetoric dominates, leveraging scriptural citation.
Visual Taxonomies: Bright, warm lighting (73%), religious symbolism, scene type, attire, and B-roll integration all correlate with engagement metrics.
AI-Generated Content: Present in 5.3% of videos; strongly associated with distinct comment and emotional patterns (Cramer’s V up to 0.448), especially when disclosed as “AI-assisted imagery.”
Engagement Metrics: Authority dependence and salvation narratives are positively correlated with awe and approval in comments ( $r \approx 0.42$ for approval).
Platform Practices: Short-form videos favor experiential, personal testimony; long-form videos drive deeper cognitive engagement and experience sharing.

Table: Narrative and Visual Features Correlated with Engagement

Feature	Engagement Correlate	Strength/Statistic
Authority reliance	Approval & Awe comments	$r\approx0.42/0.35$ , $p<.001$
Warm lighting	Positive emotion	$V\approx0.14{-}0.15$
B-roll use	Likes/comments	$+12\%$ (95% CI [8%, 16%])
AI-generated	Distinct emotive pattern	$V$ up to 0.448

These design patterns shape the affective, doctrinal, and communal impacts of technoreligious participation.

4. Ethical, Motivational, and Sociopolitical Dimensions

4.1. Data Ethics and Power

Technoreligious practices foreground significant issues in data provenance, licensing, and the cultural authority of content sources (Hutchinson, 23 Apr 2024). For sacred text corpora, the original motives (e.g., evangelism), ownership, and translation history become central to evaluating downstream use, with limited formal protocols documenting intentionality or consent.

The discourse further extends to:

The silencing of marginalized communities (e.g., Indigenous language data sourced from missionary translations without community input),
Navigating CARE and ICIP principles for Indigenous data,
Potential for doctrinal bias or hate speech propagation in ML models trained on sacred materials.

4.2. Design Values from Lived Religion

Empirical studies surface six design values that mediate technology’s alignment with religious life (Lutz et al., 8 Nov 2025):

Wonder: Enabling mystery, not merely knowledge.
Humility: Transparently communicating system limitations.
Space: Supporting periodic disconnection, ritual time, or digital retreat.
Embodiedness: Incorporating multisensory, physical engagement beyond screen interaction.
Community: Prioritizing group-synchronous modes over isolated AI interaction.
Eternity: Building for long-term stewardship and generational continuity.

Each value is enacted through concrete design guidelines, from quiet hours and transparency prompts to collaborative annotation and legacy archiving.

4.3. Affective and Emotional Labor

Social-media-based technoreligious activity generates both affective (caring for others) and emotional (self-management) labor for creators, with implications for platform design (De et al., 20 Jun 2025). Technical interventions—batch replies, richer reaction palettes, boundary management—are recommended to mitigate burnout and sustain healthy digital ministry.

4.4. Community and Practice Transformation

The shift to digital-first ritual during events such as the COVID-19 lockdown demonstrates how technoreligious practices reconfigure authority, participation, and community formation (Aduragba et al., 2022). Loss of embodied presence and authenticity is frequently noted, yet hybrid and distributed models persist, transforming traditional boundaries of congregational and doctrinal affiliation.

5. Design Challenges and Future Research Directions

Outstanding challenges and recommendations across studies include:

Normalization of Ethics: Embedding substantive ethics statements and community consultation in any computational work using sacred material (Hutchinson, 23 Apr 2024).
Multiple Ethical Lenses: Integrating deontological and virtue-ethical perspectives alongside utilitarian reasoning.
Domain-Specific Auditing: Systematic quantitative and qualitative evaluation of corpus bias and doctrinal slant (Hutchinson, 23 Apr 2024).
Author Positionality: Requiring explicit religious and cultural standpoint statements in research and development (Hutchinson, 23 Apr 2024).
Community Partnerships: Sustained collaboration with faith, Indigenous, and minority communities to negotiate benefit sharing and data sovereignty (Lutz et al., 8 Nov 2025, Hutchinson, 23 Apr 2024).
Cross-Platform Coordination: Implementing systems—such as Sabbath modes, collaborative virtual worship, and group reflection tools—that encode collective forms of “respite,” humility, and ritual time (0704.3643, Aduragba et al., 2022).
HCI and Policy Integration: Expanding Value Sensitive Design to treat religion as a primary axis in FATE/AI evaluations, and developing advisory processes for religion-technology policy interface (Lutz et al., 8 Nov 2025).

Future research agendas emphasize longitudinal studies of technoreligious adoption, participatory-design experiments, and the operationalization of faith-based design values in immersive and embodied digital environments (Lutz et al., 8 Nov 2025).

Technoreligious practices represent a dynamic domain at the intersection of computational utility, spiritual meaning, and sociotechnical design. They challenge technologists and researchers to account for cultural authority, ethical provenance, motivational psychology, and communal belonging in every layer of the digital experience, asserting religion as a constitutive—rather than peripheral—dimension of technology’s future.