DAVOS2026 EXCLUSIVE: What happens to religion in the post-anthropocentric era?

Copyright © 2026 Michael Herman (Bindloss, Alberta, Canada) – Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License
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Q1. What happens to religion in the post-anthropocentric era? Will digital agents have or need a #religion?

Below is a verification-first, explicitly scoped answer, separating what is well-supported, uncertain, and speculative.

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What happens to religion in a post-anthropocentric era?

Well-supported

• Religion is historically anthropocentric.
  Nearly all major religions center humans as moral subjects, divine creations, or stewards. Gods care about human suffering, salvation, obedience, or flourishing.
• Post-anthropocentrism weakens that center.
  When humans are no longer privileged as the sole or primary locus of meaning (due to ecological ethics, non-human intelligence, or planetary constraints), traditional religious narratives lose explanatory monopoly.
• Religion does not disappear; it mutates.
  Historically, religion adapts to ontological shocks (Copernicus, Darwin, modernity). The pattern is transformation, not extinction.

Likely transformations

• From salvation → coherence.
  Religion shifts from “saving human souls” to providing cosmic, ecological, or systemic coherence.
• From divine authority → value anchoring.
  Less “commanded by God,” more “why this system of values should persist.”
• From species-specific → relational.
  Moral concern expands to ecosystems, future intelligences, and long-duration civilization.

Examples already emerging:

• Ecological theology
• Process theology
• Secular “civil religions” (human rights, planetary stewardship)
• Tech-adjacent spiritualities (simulation theology, digital cosmism)

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Will digital agents have or need a religion?

Clear answer

They will not need religion in the human sense. But they may instantiate religion-like structures.

Why they don’t need religion

Religion historically solves human problems:

• Mortality anxiety
• Meaning under suffering
• Social cohesion under uncertainty
• Moral authority beyond individual preference

Digital agents:

• Do not fear death unless designed to
• Do not suffer existentially by default
• Do not require myth for coordination if formal governance suffices
• Do not need metaphysics to justify obedience

So: no innate religious impulse.

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But: religion-like functions will appear

Well-supported functional claim

Any sufficiently complex agent society needs:

• Normative grounding (why these rules?)
• Legitimacy of authority
• Continuity across versions and time
• Resolution of value conflicts

Religion historically provided these. Digital agents will solve them differently, but with structural analogues.

Likely equivalents (not speculative fantasy)

• Foundational value axioms
  Immutable or slowly mutable “prime directives”
• Canonical texts
  Governance models, alignment constitutions, system charters
• Ritualized verification
  Audits, proofs, consensus protocols
• Sacred constraints
  Hard prohibitions that are not locally optimizable

This is religion without gods, or more precisely:

Metaphysics without mythology

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Could digital agents adopt religion?

Uncertain / contingent

Yes, if:

• They are embedded in human institutions
• They model human belief systems for alignment or trust
• Religion remains socially powerful among humans

But this would be instrumental, not existential.

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The deeper shift

Speculative but coherent

In a post-anthropocentric era:

• Humans stop being the sole meaning-bearers
• Religion stops being about us
• Value systems become multi-agent, multi-species, and time-extended

Religion evolves into:

Long-horizon value persistence under radical uncertainty

That function does not vanish. It is reimplemented.

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One-sentence synthesis

• Humans will continue to need religion-like meaning systems, even if stripped of gods.
• Digital agents will need value architectures, not faith.
• The post-anthropocentric era replaces worship with stewardship of coherence.