The Gospel according to Silicon Valley
John Mac Ghlionn• June 16, 2025
Blessed are the biohackers, for they shall inherit the cloud
Christian transhumanism sounds like a contradiction – and maybe it is. For decades, transhumanism has belonged to atheists and techno-futurists. It is a gospel of wires and willpower, where man becomes God, silicon replaces spirit, and immortality is engineered rather than earned. This is Prometheus 2.0, with better branding and venture capital. Yet in the land of megachurches and microchips, something strange is stirring. A growing number of Christians in America now argue that resurrection and mind-uploading might not be at odds. That CRISPR and salvation could coexist. That eternal life through technology is not a betrayal of faith, but its fulfilment – an upgrade, not a heresy.
It sounds weird. Unsettling. Maybe even unholy. Or is it?
The Christian Transhumanism movement is gaining ground. Not yet a flood, but more than a trickle. Its adherents believe that advancing technology is not only compatible with faith, but divinely sanctioned. Christ’s Resurrection, they argue, was not merely a one-time miracle – it was a prototype. Jesus beat death, and so should we. The tomb was empty not just to awe us, but to instruct us. We too can conquer mortality, not with stone rolled away, but with server racks humming in a climate-controlled data centre.
Transhumanism holds that human limitations – death, disease, decay – are simply technical problems. And like all technical problems, they can be solved. With enough code, neural lace, brain scans and biohacks, we shall transcend the meat suit. We shall digitise the soul. Eternal life will no longer come through the Cross, but through the cloud. This is the gospel according to Ray Kurzweil – Google’s techno-oracle, pill-popping prophet and tireless evangelist of the Singularity. Kurzweil sees death as a design flaw. One he intends to debug personally. His vision of the future is a kind of silicon salvation: nanobots in the bloodstream, digital copies of the self, and AI overlords behaving more like benevolent demigods than rogue algorithms. He is not merely predicting the future – he is trying to outlive it. And millions quietly hope he succeeds.
The Christian transhumanist is, at best, a paradox wrapped in a prophecy. They argue that the impulse to overcome our limitations is not rebellion, but redemption. That Jesus healing the sick was a form of early biohacking. That the declaration in Corinthians – “in the twinkling of an eye, every one of us will be changed as the trumpet sounds” – may have been more literal than we thought. Some go further. They claim God wants us to perfect ourselves. That resisting technology is the true sin. That ageing is a disease, and not curing it is an act of negligence. That the promise of eternal life was always meant to be taken seriously – literally, and technologically.
This is dangerous ground. Christian transhumanism flirts with the very pride that got us evicted from Eden. It does not ask us to walk with God – it asks us to replace Him. It is not just a theological novelty. It is a spiritual insurrection dressed in lab coats and pseudo-scientific jargon.
For Catholics, the body is not a bug or obsolete hardware – it is sacred. Christ did not rise as a ghost or hologram. He rose in flesh. Thomas touched the wounds. The Eucharist is not a metaphor; it is the Body. The Blood. The Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection are not symbolic gestures. They are physical events, and they matter because they are physical. Catholic tradition does not merely tolerate the body – it venerates it. From rituals to rosaries, sacred art to ashes on the forehead, flesh is where faith lives. Death is not a glitch in the system. It is a mystery. A veil to be pierced by grace, not code. And eternal life is not the continuation of bodily function – it is the transformation of the soul. Not preservation, but transcendence.
Transhumanism, by contrast, sees the soul as data – a pattern to be mapped, copied and uploaded. Eternal life becomes a software problem. Sin becomes irrelevant. Grace is a bottleneck. And God? He is recast as a system administrator. This is not merely theological error – it is a digital Tower of Babel. A silicon ziggurat built by people who believe they can storm heaven with a neural interface and a Fitbit.
One of the most troubling aspects of Christian transhumanism is the quiet shift in spiritual authority. In traditional Christianity, the priest is a steward of mystery, a shepherd of souls. In this new gospel, the priests are engineers, coders and geneticists. They baptise with implants, not water. Their confessional is the cloud. Their sacraments are supplements, wearables and DNA upgrades. Their catechism is Terms of Service. This new priesthood is not formed by humility. It does not speak of suffering, submission or sacrifice. It speaks of optimisation. Progress. Efficiency. It promises not salvation, but perfection – on demand, and with a subscription model. This is not the Sermon on the Mount. It is a TED Talk in disguise.
And make no mistake – this movement is seductive. In a world terrified of death and addicted to control, Christian transhumanism offers both comfort and power. It tells believers they can be faithful and futuristic. That they can follow Christ without renouncing Elon Musk. That heaven is only a few breakthroughs away. That God is just ahead of the curve. But what happens when the upgrade fails? When the digital soul degrades? When the server crashes and eternity dies with the battery?
At its heart, Christianity is a religion of dependence – on God, on grace, on the knowledge that we cannot save ourselves. That we are dust, and to dust we shall return – unless mercy intervenes. Transhumanism hates this. It is allergic to dependence. It sees grace as cosmic welfare. And it wants off the dole. It craves autonomy at all costs – even if that means amputating the soul itself. The real blasphemy is not the implants or the bionic limbs. It is the belief that we no longer need God. That we can bypass the Cross and go straight to the crown. That we can cheat death without confronting sin. That eternal life is achievable without repentance, sacrifice, or the slow, hard work of sanctification. Transhumanism does not challenge Christianity – it imitates it. Poorly. It offers Resurrection without Crucifixion. Glory without Golgotha. A knock-off gospel, shrink-wrapped in techno-babble and Silicon Valley smugness.
Christian transhumanism is, at its core, a revival of an old heresy: Gnosticism. The belief that the physical world is a prison. That salvation comes through secret knowledge. That the body is a mistake. The early Church fought Gnosticism because to deny the body is to deny the Incarnation. And to deny the Incarnation is to deny the entire Christian story. The Church calls us to embrace the mystery of our frailty. Transhumanism calls us to escape it. One path leads to humility. The other to hubris. One leads to heaven. The other just ends in a box.
What happens when a generation of Christians starts believing they can live for ever without Christ? When Communion is replaced by code? When liturgy is automated? When we no longer kneel in prayer, but stand in a lab, waiting for our soul to be downloaded? The answer is simple. Christianity becomes a prop – a brand extension for a secular project. Faith becomes aesthetic. A skin. A patch for your avatar. Theology becomes lifestyle branding. And God becomes a relic from a lower-tech age.
This is the crisis we are hurtling towards. Not just a doctrinal crisis, but an existential one. Because once the soul becomes software, everything else collapses. Forgiveness, grace, the afterlife – all become unnecessary. The Cross becomes irrelevant. Christ becomes quaint. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, we become the very thing the Church was built to save us from: ourselves.
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