Greg Epstein
Humanist Chaplain
The humanist chaplain to Harvard and MIT argues in “Tech Agnostic” that Big Tech and AI have become the world’s most powerful religion — one demanding uncritical worship — and calls for a “reformation” that returns technology to the status of tools.
In his words
Tech has changed roles. It used to be a mere tool… Now, it has achieved a religiosity that threatens to make us the servant worshipers of a dangerous Big Tech agenda.
We need to return technology to the status of tools that are in service to our deep and common humanity.
Biography
Greg Epstein (born 1977) is the humanist chaplain at Harvard University and MIT, and past president of Harvard’s chaplains. A leading voice in secular and humanist community-building, he is the author of the bestseller “Good Without God” (2009) and, more recently, “Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation” (MIT Press, 2024).
Technology as religion
Epstein’s critique is that Big Tech, social media, and AI have taken on the trappings of a coercive faith — with prophets, scriptures, sins, and rituals — that demands devotion while resisting scrutiny. Belief in AI’s inevitability, he argues, functions like an unfalsifiable creed. Writing that he approached the book “with a really deep sense of fear,” he calls not for smashing the machines but for reform: pulling “all that is digital down from the heavens, back into the toolbox.”
His objection is less to any single product than to a posture — the uncritical worship of technology and the concentration of power it serves. He wants people to “stop genuflecting to our black mirrors a hundred times a day” and to reclaim agency over tools that were meant to strengthen, not supplant, human community.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/greg-epstein