AI has entered the African Diaspora Religions (ADR) space. Known for embodied cosmologies and epistemologies where knowledge, communication, and communion are deeply mapped into and evoke from the body - where feet, hands, head, back, and chest, and the rhythm and placement of hips, shoulders, and buttocks speak to, about, and from divinities, and where touch and sound center and elevate encounters - ADR practitioners have begun augmenting and/or transforming their practices through the use of AI as a spiritual medium. Simultaneously, practitioners are themselves transforming AI. At once captivated and captured by futures of religious and spiritual life, on the frontier of new worlds, ADR practitioners are harnessing AI in powerful ways to stay intimately connected across the globe - traversing uncharted territories of spiritual/religious realms near and far. In this session presenters explore, examine, and/or interrogate AI and ADR practitioners' fluid concepts of power, agency, embodiment, stasis, and futurity.
Ruha Benjamin contends that “we are living in the imagination of AI evangelists” who promise “ to guide us into the Future™” while “positioning themselves as Guardians of the Galaxy, even as they engineer the crises against which we must guard” (2024). As these “AI evangelists” advance an eschatological and redemptive vision for their technology—while obscuring its dystopian propensities— Jamaican Revival Zion practitioners are troubling the exclusionary logics of “algorithms,” “artificial intelligence,” and even the very constitution of “science” and “technology.” Revivalists, and practitioners of other Africana religions, have long grappled with dystopian worlds not made for them, even as they are used as fungible resources from which to create these imperialist futures. The paper offers Revivalists’ use of TikTok as a digital balmyard, mediated by copresences and seemingly divinatory algorithms, as a case study in the contentious world-building potentialities and “technologies of spiritual refusal” housed within Africana religions (Stewart 2022).
This paper highlights the prominent role of digital technology among next-generation African diaspora Christians. From the moment one enters All Nations Church in New Jersey (ANCNJ) , the pervasive presence of digital media is unmistakable. Large, cinema-like screens evoke the immersive atmosphere of Times Square, while high-quality live-streaming reflects sophisticated, often unseen technological infrastructures. ANCNJ actively engages across multiple social media platforms, aligning its ministry with the digital habits of emerging generations. Spoken word is used as an embodied form of religious expression, and the digital space is engaged with as a cyber sanctuary. Participants narrate their spiritual journeys, voice communal concerns, and translate doctrinal themes into embodied and culturally resonant expressions. Spoken word becomes a liturgical act and a process of identity formation, serving as a new practice of gospel proclamation. Drawing on participant observation and semi-structured interviews, this paper examines how second-generation migrants appropriate popular culture to express faith and identity.
This paper examines religion as an affective, digital, and political practice through which young Ghanaians attempt to navigate economic precarity and global inequality. Focusing on Christian youth in Accra, ages 18-35, the study interrogates how spirituality mediates psychic life and how religious practices and spaces function as modes of survival and social networks, as places of belonging, identity, and ethical formation. As Africa’s youth population rapidly expands, this research examines youth as a social category formed through technological ambiguities, structural failures, and uncertain futures, global ecological pressures, and declining mental health. To make sense of Africa’s religious landscape, the research introduces the language of “warped intimacies” and argues that Ghanaian youth’s high religiosity reveals a reconfiguration of social relations toward religious figures and institutions. This project aims to unearth the material and affective consequences of transnational economic and theological forces on the lives of young Ghanaians.