God 2.0 - Imagining a Religion of the 21st Century

Earlier this week, on my way to work, I was stopped by a man in his thirties who smelled of alcohol and looked like he hadn’t slept all night. For context, this was around noon. He asked if I believed in God, then told me how much better his life had become since he started going to church.

Despite his current condition not exactly radiating "life transformation," I believed him. He wasn’t lying. In his own way, he was describing something real.

We spoke for twenty minutes, a surprisingly philosophical exchange, though I’m not sure how much of my reasoning reached him. In his state, he struggled to understand how I could believe a God of some sort probably exists, while at the same time seeing religion as a human-made construct.

Still, I walked away grateful for the conversation. It was a refreshing change of pace. Religion isn’t just about explaining the universe. It’s also about what it does for people; binding them together, preserving wisdom, and shaping the behaviors that keep a culture alive.

And in the 21st century, I’m beginning to wonder if we might need it more than we think.

Culture as a Darwinian Battlefield

Before diving into religion itself, it’s worth zooming out to culture as a whole.

Cultures evolve through natural selection, just as individuals do. Where a person is defined by a collection of genes, a culture is defined by a collection of memes. I'm using “meme” here in its original sense: any idea, behavior, or norm that spreads from one mind to another. In this sense, the Darwinian principle of “survival of the fittest” applies as much to the superorganisms we call cultures, and their memes, as it does to organisms and their genes.

In evolutionary terms, a “fit” culture is one that efficiently converts its resources into offspring. When one culture outperforms another in this regard, it spreads, while the less efficient culture either dies out through competition or sees its followers convert to the more dominant culture. This process of cultural evolution can happen far faster than biological evolution. Memes don’t need generations to spread; they can rewrite a society in a matter of decades.

By this measure, Western societies are, right now, arguably the least “fit” cultures in all of human history. We are richer than ever in resources but we are the worst society ever at converting those riches into offspring. Evolution does not care about our GDP, or our education levels. It cares about who shows up for the next round. And on that front, our culture is on track for extinction. Whether that happens because we simply fail to reproduce while other cultures with different value systems do, or because we as a people end up converting to different memes that are better at producing offspring, is practically irrelevant. The result is the same: the future will belong to a people with a different set of values.

Given this is a piece on religion, it’s important to note that religion is not the only factor here. As a culture, we have tossed a lot of conservative ideas aside and labeled them relics of times gone past. But the truth is that those norms survived through millenia of cultural selection. They were stable for such a long time because they worked. This doesn’t mean we should blindly regress, but it does raise a question: in our rush to innovate socially, have we overshot the equilibrium that once made our cultures sustainable?

For the sake of this essay, I’ll leave most of those cultural shifts aside and focus on religion. The data here is clear: religious groups reproduce at higher rates than secular ones. Which raises a fascinating question: why does natural selection favor the religious? What is it about belief that gives a culture an edge in survival?

The Evolutionary Toolkit of Religion

Here’s the core idea: an action that looks irrational from the perspective of an individual can be entirely rational from the perspective of a group.

From a Darwinian and Durkheimian perspective, behaviors that strengthen the group, even at an individual cost, can persist, because groups that adopt them tend to outcompete those that don’t.

Religion, in this view, isn’t merely about belief. It’s a cultural technology, one that has historically equipped human groups with a powerful set of survival tools:

Invisible Governance

Belief in an all-seeing deity can function like a cost-free surveillance system. If people genuinely think they’ll be punished for cheating, stealing, or free-riding, even after death, they’re less likely to do it. This creates high-trust, low-corruption communities that can outcompete looser, purely secular groups, where individuals are freer to exploit the system.

Stronger Community

Regular congregations and shared rituals align behavior and strengthen group identity. Synchronized practices, whether prayer, song, or ceremony, foster solidarity, making members more likely to help one another in times of need and to defend shared property and values. Additionally, when a society shares the same moral framework, it spends less time bargaining over its social order and more time working together.

Sacrificial Mobilization

By promising great rewards in the afterlife, religion can inspire individuals to sacrifice personal comfort for the good of the group. Whether it’s charity, enduring hardship, or even risking one’s life, these behaviors, irrational for the individual, become evolutionary assets for the culture that can harness them.

Existential Meaning

Religion frames suffering within a larger narrative, transforming hardship into purpose. In times of crisis, this shared sense of meaning helps prevent societal collapse. Groups that can endure famine, war, or catastrophe without fracturing are groups that persist.

Demographic Engine

Religious doctrines often sanctify family formation and reproduction, while demonizing extramarital sex and contraception. These cultural norms ensure population continuity and healthy family structures for raising children, which in evolutionary terms, translates into long-term survival.

Intergenerational Memory

Religions serve as cultural time capsules, preserving the lessons, survival strategies, and values that allowed previous generations to endure. By embedding these principles in ritual and doctrine, they pass them forward, ensuring that wisdom is not lost with the death of any single generation.

The reason that the premodern world was so obsessed with religion and culture is that all the societies that weren’t were outcompeted and died out.

Has the Environment Changed?

When thinking in evolutionary terms, it’s critical to ask whether the environment has changed, because if it has, then the selection pressures acting on us have changed as well. This question determines whether old adaptations remain useful or become obsolete. So, with respect to the tools we outlined above, has the environment changed?

When it comes to surveillance, I believe the need for religious belief is outdated. Our modern state and its institutions have taken on the burden. And with the rise of the Network, even the smallest aspects of daily life are starting to be monitored externally. For example, in 1825 a gentleman taking a ride in the back of a horse carriage might behave respectfully because of a fear of god, but his descendant in 2025 behaves respectfully in an uber, because of a fear of getting a 1 star rating. The former is being governed by God, the latter by the Network. We can create high-trust societies even without God now.

When it comes to intergenerational memory, the picture is less clear. In theory, we no longer need religion to preserve knowledge, we have vastly more efficient ways of storing and distributing information. Ideally, a scientifically literate society should be able to navigate reality more effectively than one anchored in myth. But in practice, science and data are endlessly malleable; they can be weaponized to support any narrative. Perhaps, then, there is still a role for religion, not as a source of literal truth, but as a stabilizing force that guards against cultural amnesia. On this one, I remain undecided.

However, when it comes to community, sacrifice, meaning, and demographics, I don’t believe we have developed any “cultural technology” more effective than shared, deeply enforced norms. These are the elements that bind groups together, motivate selflessness, and ensure continuity. And while these norms don't need to be brought back in their older, rigid forms, a modern reinterpretation seems necessary to me.

What Does God Look Like in the 21st Century?

Before imagining what form religion might take in the coming decades, it’s worth noting a curious pattern: throughout history, a society’s conception of God tends to mirror the most powerful force shaping that society, but elevated to a divine consciousness.

In the ancient world, when nature was the dominant and terrifying force, gods were elemental. They commanded the seas, hurled lightning, and brought the rains. Later, as civilization centralized and law and order became the primary organizing force, God evolved into a cosmic legislator, a sovereign ruler in the sky, issuing commandments and judgements. When reason and the Enlightenment reshaped society, God became a rational architect who set the universe in motion according to natural laws.

Now, as we enter the 21st century, where the most powerful force is likely to be the internet, it is likely that our concept of God will once again evolve. I believe we will begin to see the divine less as a distant ruler and more as an all-encompassing, networked intelligence, an omnipresent field of connection, order, and meaning. In this view, each individual is like a node within this vast network, and together, through our shared consciousness and interlinked existence, we exist as an inseparable part of God’s living consciousness itself.

The Vision for a 21st-Century Religion

We now have the pieces to outline a speculative vision of what religion might look like in the coming decades. As our current Western norms and values continue to erode our cultural resilience, driving us toward demographic collapse, isolation, and meaninglessness, I believe we will eventually hit a point of collective recognition. When that happens, there will be a cultural course correction, and it's likely we will see a comeback of religion at that point. Because our civilization was built upon Christian values, it is likely that we will rebuild on top of that foundation.

Given the needs of our time, I could see the governance and surveillance function of religion stripped away. What would remain are the deeper cultural technologies of religion: intergenerational wisdom, community, sacrifice, meaning, and demographic renewal.

In my head, I see a sort of amalgamation of Stoicism with Christianity. This “Stoic Christianity” would merge the moral narrative and symbolic depth of Christianity with the rational, self-mastery-driven discipline of Stoicism. The result is a faith not of fear or compliance, but of voluntary alignment with something greater.

Key Differences:

• Traditional Christianity: Do good because God demands it.

• Stoic Christianity: Do good because it aligns you with God, of whom you are a part.

• Traditional Christianity: Existence is a test, behave or face punishment.

• Stoic Christianity: Existence is a gift, repay it through honor and virtue.

• Traditional Christianity: Your task is to please God.

• Stoic Christianity: Your task is to master yourself, and create reason and harmony in the world, for you are a part of God.

• Traditional Christianity: After death, you will be judged by God.

• Stoic Christianity: After death, you will merge back into God.

The way people enforce cultural norms will still rely on social pressure, shame, and status incentives, just as it has for millennia. What changes is the “why.”

Instead of “God is watching,” the narrative becomes: “Live with honor because you are inseparable from the divine order itself.”

This shift reframes morality from an external command to an internal commitment. It would give people a shared story, while avoiding the punitive elements that have lost their credibility in the modern world.

Conclusion

I know that some will have a visceral reaction to the idea of stricter, more religious norms making a comeback. It feels regressive. It feels like a step backward. But before dismissing it outright, it’s worth asking a simple question: If not this, then what?

If we accept the core assumption of this essay, that our current cultural trajectory is unsustainable, that our cultural memes are edging towards extinction, then whatever eventually replaces them will almost certainly be stronger in the areas of community, sacrifice, meaning, and demographics.

So if not religion, what other mechanisms could accomplish this? And are they really preferable?

If you remove religion from the equation, the only historical forces capable of binding millions of people together in deep, sacrificial unity have been fascistic or hyper-nationalistic ideologies.

And I, for one, would rather live in a culture united by shared faith than in a culture organized around blind allegiance to an autocratic leader or a single political movement. Religion, for all its flaws, builds upward. Nationalism and fascism build inward, or worse, downward.

This is why I see a 21st-century revival of religion on the horizon. Not as superstition clawing its way back from the grave, but as a pragmatic cultural technology rediscovered and retooled for a new era.