Pacific Ecotones of Faith: Digital Place, AI, and Gen Z Religion

Asian North American religious life is increasingly shaped within AI-mediated digital places structured by algorithmic platforms, social media, and generative technologies. For Generation Z in particular, these environments function as sites of moral formation, belonging, and authority that extend across the Pacific. This paper examines how transpacific Asian and Asian American Christian communities in the United States and Hong Kong negotiate these digital places and what these negotiations reveal about Asian North American religious futures. Drawing on qualitative interviews with Gen Z participants and religious leaders, the paper analyzes how AI-shaped digital life reshapes ethical discernment, communal authority, and intergenerational relations under conditions of migration, racialization, and political precarity. Conceptually, the paper advances “digital place” as an analytic for transpacific Asian North American religious studies, illuminating how religion is reconfigured through technological circulation rather than bounded national contexts.