Interview for the SPEECH podcast, Litres.
Watch: YouTube
In this conversation with the SPEECH podcast team, we worked through several questions I consider fundamental to understanding what religion is and what is happening to it today.
Can Religion Even Be Defined?
Since Friedrich Max Müller, religious studies has never arrived at a single universal definition. Substantive approaches grounded in belief in the “supernatural” frequently fail: in classical Theravada Buddhism or in archaic belief systems, the concept of the supernatural is blurred beyond usefulness.
More productive is Clifford Geertz’s functional definition, which understands religion as a system of universal symbols and meanings. The main criterion is the division of the world into an ordinary level and a sacred one. Sacred space can be located anywhere: in an Orthodox church on the ground floor of an apartment building on Polyustrovsky Prospekt, or in a Japanese torii gate symbolising the passage into the divine.
Religion and Faith Are Not the Same Thing
Drawing on Durkheim, I emphasise that religion is primarily an institutional and social phenomenon. Faith is an individual matter. This distinction matters because it explains what is actually happening today.
Religion is not disappearing — it is transforming and retreating into private life. The older secularisation theories, including the early Peter Berger, do not hold here. A large and growing segment of the population formally identifies with a confession, say Orthodoxy, but knows none of its doctrines and practises none of its rituals. Sociologists call this the “fuzzy sphere” — a kind of swamp between the believing and the non-believing.
Quasi-Religions: From Football to Transhumanism
Football, liberalism, Marxism — all of these possess the structural elements of religion: their own symbols, sacred texts, and authorities. Calling them full religions in the scholarly sense is incorrect, which is why the right term is quasi-religion.
Of all contemporary movements, transhumanism has come closest to the status of a genuine religion. It offers answers to fundamental questions about human nature and its future, and it formulates its own dogmas, the central one being something like the commandment “Do not die.” That is a serious claim.
We also discussed biohacking and morning routines. In themselves, they are not rituals. They become religious rituals only when a person invests them with sacred meaning and connects them to a transition to the supra-ordinary level.
AI in Spiritual Life
Manifestation marathons and tarot cards are expressions of contemporary magic and individual spirituality. Like ancient magical practices, they rest on a counterintuitive belief that certain rituals directly alter reality.
Traditional confessions are broadly comfortable with preaching on social media, as long as this stays within doctrinal limits. But confessing to a chatbot is categorically impermissible in Orthodoxy: confession is a sacrament that can only be administered by a priest who possesses grace through the line of apostolic succession.
Experiments are underway nonetheless. The Catholic Church has already launched Magisterium AI — a system trained on thousands of official Church documents. In a ten-to-twenty-year horizon, movements that genuinely build a cult around neural networks are plausible. Traditional religions will hold: their foundation is the physical unity of a community and living social interaction, which AI cannot replace.
How to Start a New Religion
In the final part of the conversation I half-jokingly offer consulting services for creating a religion, but the sociological steps I describe are real. You need to experience or convincingly convey a unique spiritual experience, build a structure and rules around it, produce a sacred text, and invest in outreach. The main secret is a high entry threshold at the start: sacrifice and asceticism form a core of devoted followers. This is exactly how early Mormonism and the Hare Krishna movement operated.