Religious traditions hold complex relationships with futurity in tension--often mediated by their engagement with science. As part of the 2026 presidential theme of Future/s, this panel considers ways religious thought is marshaled to critique, resist, or reconfigure emerging technoscientific horizons in modernity.
This paper examines a paradox at the intersection of technology, religion, and political imagination: Eastern Orthodox influencers in the United States who utilize digital media infrastructures to propagate an explicitly anti-modern vision of Christian civilization. Drawing on science and technology studies, political theology, and media theory, we analyze how these influencers synthesize patristic sources, conspiracy epistemologies, and geopolitical commentary to articulate a vision of the future that is imbued with “trad” aesthetics and anti-capitalist economic formations while also being eschatologically charged. Their use of technology is neither incidental nor contradictory in their own framing—rather, digital media becomes a weapon seized from the enemy, a temporary instrument for building the conditions under which technology's dominion might be refuted. We argue that trad futurism represents a form of religiously-motivated technological ambivalence, complicating simple Luddite or anti-modern categorizations by embedding technological critique within a constructive, if deeply illiberal, vision of future human flourishing.
This paper analyzes radical renunciation of science and technology through the lens of Philip Sherrard (1922-1995). Sherrard, a poet, theologian, and translator, was a convert to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and is most known in Greece for his introduction of modern Greek literature to the west. In the 1970s, increasingly concerned about the environmental crisis, he abandoned modernity and built a primitive haven on the Greek island of Evia—a home without electricity, phones, heating, air conditioning. However, beyond Orthodoxy, much of Sherrard’s thinking was influenced by the shadowy world of the Traditionalist School. But where many Traditionalists tend towards right-wing extremism in response to environmental destruction and technological dehumanization, Sherrard charted an alternate path through pacifism and a unique brand of theologically-motivated technological asceticism. While his response to climate change is not sustainable, it raises serious questions about the intersection of ecological despair, anti-modernism, and right-wing extremism.
Since the 2022 release of ChatGPT, writers have been among the most vocal sources of resistance to AI. Some have been drawn into a broader and deeper form of tech-resistance. This paper poses a critical question: can anti-tech resistance guard, or protect, the process and practice of writing? The paper examines the work of British writer, “recovering” environmentalist, and recent convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, Paul Kingsnorth who offers a scathing critique of the modern dream of progress. Progress has become, for him, a form of totalizing technological capture that he names the Machine. The paper argues that primitivist critiques like Kingsnorth’s suffer from a genealogical amnesia that leads them to misunderstand their own resistance and takes for granted the technologies (like writing) that support it. In conversation with Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul, the paper argues that writing should instead be guarded as a form of technological inheritance.