God and Technology with Heidi Campbell

About this episode

Heidi Campbell discusses the intersection of technology and religion, exploring how religious communities adapt to technological changes.

Can technology save us? That question has been asked since the Industrial Revolution, and Heidi Campbell has spent 30 years studying how religious communities keep answering it. In this conversation, she walks through her Religious Social Shaping of Technology framework, showing that even the most conservative groups do not reject technology outright but filter it through their core values and authority structures. From the kosher cell phone in Israel to Zoom communion during the pandemic, the research reveals a consistent pattern that most popular narratives get wrong. The conversation then turns to AI, where Campbell draws a sharp line between knowledge and wisdom. GPTs can organize information; they cannot interpret or embody it. She explains why religious AI chatbots inherit hidden biases from their construction, why the field's failure to distinguish between predictive, generative, and agentic systems is its biggest blind spot, and why the internet has shifted from a supplement to a substitute for religious life, especially among Gen Z. She closes with the recalibration that has redefined her own career: for a growing number of people, the first port of call for religion is…

People in this episode

Host: Tiago Vasconcelos

Guest: Heidi Campbell

Topics covered

• technology and religion
• AI and ethics
• social shaping of technology
• religious communities
• digital religion

Keywords

• technology
• religion
• AI
• social shaping
• digital community
• Gen Z
• bias in AI

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Chabad, Evangelical Christians

Products: kosher cell phone, Zoom

Places: Israel, Gen Z

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