Reflections on the Reality of Jesus in the Age of AI Chatbots

The Redeemed Christian Church of God [1]

 

What becomes of divinity when it reveals itself in icons, 

when it speaks to us through machines? 

  

 

I. 

 

This Saturday, as every Saturday, three African women in brightly-coloured dresses stand on a nearby street corner, smiling and spreading the Gospel. Because they are so friendly - and because it seems impolite to just walk past ignoring them - I invariably say hello and accept the leaflet being offered.

 

This week, it reads: JESUS is for REAL! And that naturally got me thinking once more about the latter as a philosophical concept ...

 

For our Christian friends, the Real is essentially the same as the True and the Good and it exists as the Ideal foundation of existence. God is Real and his reality includes not only all that is and has ever been but all that will be; i.e., it includes both the actual and the potential. 

 

I'm not a theologian, but I think that's a fair summary. God is conceived of as a huge Universal Mind and Reality is dependent upon his Will.    

 

 

II.

 

But what about Jesus? What can we say of his reality? 

 

I suppose that depends on which aspect of Jesus one wishes to discuss. 

 

For example, there's the historical Jesus, a 1st-century preacher from Galilee to whom we might accord mortal reality and an all-too-human existence. 

 

But then, on the other hand, there's the figure whom believers think of as the Christ: a semi-divine being who transcends his human reality and historical time and place; an Ideal Jesus who has eternal reality. 

 

For non-believers, this is a mytho-fictional figure born of the religious imagination; one who occupies a virtual space and exerts a powerful cultural influence even though they may lack any objective reality.   

 

I suppose if I'm interested in Jesus at all, it's in the latter. I'm particularly fascinated with the way in which the image of Jesus as a religious icon is mediated in contemporary culture - a subject discussed by the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard ...

   

III.

 

In America (1986), Baudrillard briefly mentions Jesus, observing how marble statues of Christ in Salt Lake City were all copied from Thorwaldsen's famous work of 1833 and made him "look like Bjorn Borg" [2]; i.e., a popular contemporary figure from the world of sports rather than a transcendent historical icon.

 

In other words, Baudrillard argued that the modern image of Christ reflects the present ideal of the perfect man and functions as just another part of the hyperreal landscape; religious art merging seamlessly with mass-media aesthetics.

 

His thinking here developed earlier ideas found in Simulacra and Simulation (1981) [3]. In this crucial text, Baudrillard analysed the role played by religious icons in the simulation of God, eventually replacing the original reality they were intended to represent. 

 

Here's how the game works in four easy to follow stages:    

 

(i) Start with early Christian signs and symbols, artworks and images: these were thought to embody and reflect a profound reality: God is all-powerful and ever-present and Jesus was His Son.  

 

(ii) Eventually, however, the evil genius of the image [4] begins to disguise and corrupt this reality. Art begins to depict Jesus not as he was, but as the Medieval mind wanted to see him; i.e., less Middle Eastern Jew and more Aryan superman used to justify crusades and European imperialism. Nevertheless, if pushed, everyone still agrees that an underlying reality (tied to Truth and Goodness and Beauty) still exists. 

 

(iii) In phase 3, the image - now mass produced within modern secular society - masks the absence of any such reality (Baudrillard calls this an act of sorcery). Jesus is seen everywhere, but his likeness no longer means anything and is no longer connected to a spiritual truth, nor even a historical reality. It mostly exists to trigger a consumerist response (think of the multiple gift shops located in the Vatican).    

 

(iv) Finally, we get pure simulacrum in the age of hyperreality; the image bears no relation to any reality whatsoever. Jesus is now merely a meme on social media or an AI chatbot designed to give comforting advice to those in need. Jesus is now just a copy of a copy of a copy; he refers only to other media images and functions completely independently of history, theology, or reality. 

 

Baudrillard was right here as he was right so many other times in so many other places: the religious iconoclast didn't destroy images because they were afraid such might insult or offend God - but because they intuitively understood that such images would ultimately prevail over God and succeed in making him untenable.   

 

Who needs Jesus to be for real when you can simulate his existence - and even his presence - with digital technology? A blessedly large language model trained on biblical writings and other religious texts can create a theo-algorithmic echo chamber so perfect that one might almost describe it as heavenly [5]. 

  

 

Notes

 

[1] The Redeemed Christian Church of God is a Pentecostal megachurch founded in 1952 by Pa Josiah Akindayomi in Nigeria. Today, it is one of the largest church denominations in the world with over nine million members located in almost 200 countries and territories. After Akindayomi's death in 1980, pastor Enoch A. Adeboye, a former university lecturer, became the RCCG's General Overseer.

 

[2] See Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (Verso, 1989), p. 2.

 

[3] See Jean Baudrillard, 'The Precession of Simulacra', in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (The University of Michigan Press, 1994). 

 

[4] Playing on Descartes's concept of the malin génie, Baudrillard suggests that the image is a diabolical force that doesn't innocently reflect a pre-existing reality; rather, it ultimately works to replace the real via a process of simulation. 

      'The Evil Demon of Images' was originally a paper delivered by Baudrillard at the University of Sydney in July 1984. It was first published three years later by the Power Institute of Fine Arts and can be found in The Jean Baudrillard Reader, ed. Steve Redhead (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), pp. 83-98. 

 

[5] Baudrillard died in 2007 so didn't live to see the rise of the Ask Jesus AI chatbot, but it fits perfectly into his hyperreal scheme of things. Users claim to find the instant, personalised responses of the AI more comforting or emotionally validating than reciting traditional prayers or reading ancient scripture. 

      That is why they actively participate in the illusion, even whilst knowing they are chatting with a machinic intelligence and not communing with the Holy Spirit. What it might mean for the future of faith and organised religion when divine authority is outsourced to code, I don't know, but D. H. Lawrence warned long ago that man will first come to worship his machines, then come to resemble them. 

      See the essay titled 'D. H. Lawrence Against the Machine', by Micah Paul Veillon, in The European Conservative (17 June 2023).  

 

Jean Baudrillard: Notes on a Biography by Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol (Part Two)

Reworked front cover image to Jean Baudrillard 

by Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol 

(Reaktion Books, 2025)

 

'Identity is a dream pathetic in its absurdity.' 

 

 

I.

 

There are several reasons why I like Baudrillard and feel a certain degree of kinship. For one thing, we both come from humble backgrounds ... 

 

If I insist on (but do not identify in terms of) my working class origin, Baudrillard deployed his rusticity "against the intellectual milieu he would inhait for the major part of his life" [21] and often cited his peasant-nature "in order to portray himself as an alien driven into the world of the elite" [21], but never comfortably at home there.  

 

And if he was a prolific writer - publishing over forty books - he retained a certain rural laziness in defiance of an industrial work ethic and its associated values, such as competitiveness and ambition (values which underpin academia as much as they do the world of commerce). 

 

Baudrillard really didn't give a shit about belonging or becoming a benign success: "'I'm something of a [...] barbarian at heart, and I do my best to stay that way'" [21] [a]. 

 

  

II. 

 

Another reason I like Baudrillard: his style of poetry is one I recognise and have tried to emulate; little fragments of language that trigger thoughts rather than feelings (Lawrence calls them pansies). Although his poetic influences - Hölderlin, Rimbaud and Artaud - are not mine and he is a naturally more lyrical writer than I am.    

 

They key point is: Baudrillard's poetic sensibility shaped his later theory which, like the work of other French theorists, is "close to philosophical thought, but more literary and speculative in spirit, and more interdisciplinary in method" [39]. 

 

I loved this style of thinking when I first encountered it in the 1990s and I still love it now; even if others are now returning to common sense and are so over writers like Baudrillard, Barthes, Derrida, et al. 

 

 

III. 

 

Like Sid Vicious, I was too busy playing with my Action Man to really know what was going on in Paris in May '68, but Baudrillard was very much, as a sociologist at Nanterre, Johnny-on-the-spot (if not exactly in the thick of the action). 

 

His attitude to the Situationists, however, was ambivalent: "He accepted Debord's broad definition of the society of the spectacle, but rejected its Marxist theoretical foundations, which he considered far too 'normative'." [45]

 

Baudrillard thought "a more advanced theory of how signs operate in the modern world was needed - to understand images not as travesties of reality but as reality themselves" [46].

 

"Nevertheless Baudrillard sympathized with the Situationists' anti-authoritarian impulses, appreciated their fusion of artistic practice and politics, and enjoyed their Hegelian strategy of 'immanent critique' and attacking from within." [46]

 

Thus, there would "remain something fundamentally 'situationist' about Baudrillard's work" [46] and he cheerfully accepted the image of himself as an intellectual terrorist; i.e., one who blows up ideas and shatters beliefs: I am not a man I am dynamite, as Nietzsche would say [b]. 

  

 

IV.   

 

Yet another reason I like Baudrillard is that he shares my fascination with objects and the way they relate to each other "as a system and a syntax, denoting a world that is more complex than it seems" [50].

 

However, Baudrillard wasn't merely interested in objects as signs and the role they played within human social interactions: 

 

"He was more concerned with the object itself. For him [...] the object allows us to choose a path away from the question of the subject [...] which always tended to be privileged in contemporary philosophy." [50]    

 

It's a slightly magical way of thinking; the object doesn't simply signify - it enchants. Baudrillard thus restores a sense of mystery to the things "we share our world with and normally take for granted" [51]: lamps, mirrors, clocks, chairs, etc. 

 

 

V. 

 

Was Baudrillard a bit of a fraud? 

 

That seems a bit harsh to me.  

 

Nevertheless, his self-presentation as a lone theorist on the outside of everything was "always characteristically ironic and performative" [62] and he participated in many collective projects. 

 

The one thing he did place himself outside of in the early-mid '70s was Marxism, which he came to regard as "nothing other than the mirror-image of bourgeois society because it placed production at the centre of existence and thereby normalized the capitalist system" [65]. 

 

One of his most important works, L'échange symbolique et la mort (1976) [c], attempted a "radically different way of understanding society and culture by turning to both pre-capitalist systems as models and to a range of radical and eclectic French cultural theorists and writers, such as Georges Bataille, Marcel Mauss and Alfred Jarry" [65]. 

 

Now, excess and expenditure were key terms and Baudrillard spoke of sacrifice and death. The book thus consolidated his reputation as "a highly idiosyncratic and controversial thinker, inhabiting the margins of conventional sociology or philosophy" [65]. 

 

In brief: symbolic exchange is an alternative political economy to the one imagined by Marxism and it "confounds the system of complete exchangeability or reversibility of signs that defines modern capitalism" [66].     

 

It also lets death back into the game (as the ultimate challenge). 

 

I know that, thanks to The Matrix (1999) [d], if people can name one book by Baudrillard it's Simulacra and Simulation. But, if asked to name the one text that really sets the scene for his later work and in which he becomes "no longer just a leading representative of French theory but an enigmatic, provocative and, eventually, iconic figure" [67], then it would have to be Symbolic Exchange and Death.    

 

  

Notes

 

[a] Having said that, Fantin and Nicol say that Baudrillard "would always harbour a paradoxical sene of resentment that he was never fully accepted by the French philosophical establishment" (2025, p. 27).  

 

[b] See Nietzsche writing in Ecce Homo, 'Why I Am a Destiny' (1). In the following section (2), Nietzsche adds: "I know joy in destruction to a degree corresponding to my strength for destruction ..." I am quoting from the English translation by R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1979), p. 127.

      Baudrillard's self-characterisation as a terrorist can be found in Simulacres et Simulation (1981), where he writes: "I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us." I am quoting from the English translation by Sheila Faria Glaser (University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 163.   

 

[c] This work was translated into English as Symbolic Exchange and Death, by Iain Hamilton Grant (Sage Publications, 1993).

 

[d] In The Matrix (dir. the Wachowski's, 1999), the protagonist Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, hides a floppy disk inside a copy of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation - and so it was author and book suddenly found a whole new level of fame. 

      However, Baudrillard being Baudrillard, he distanced himself from the enormously successful movie by declaring that it was 'the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce'. See 'The Matrix Decoded: Le Nouvel Observateur Interview with Jean Baudrillard', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 1/2 (July 2004). 

      The main issue Baudrillard had with the film was that, in his view, it completely missed the point of his work and confused the classical Platonic problem of illusion with the postmodern problem of simulation. For an interesting discussion of this, see the essay entitled 'Why Baudriilard Hated The Matrix: And Why He Was Wrong', on The Living Philosophy (17 April 2022): click here.      

 

 

To read part one of this post on Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol's biography of Jean Baudrillard, click here. 

 

Part three of this post can be read by clicking here. 

 

Part four of this post can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

Disney Über Alles

The Happiest Place on Earth [1]

"Children, I wanna warn ya / 'Cos I've been to California

Where Mickey Mouse is such a demon / Where Mickey Mouse is as big as a house!" [2]

 

 

I.

 

Cotino is the first Storyliving community being developed by Disney in Rancho Mirage, California. Work started on the 618-acre site - which will feature residential housing, hotels, resort facilities, and a retail centre, all surrounding a 24-acre grand oasis and an artificially blue lagoon - in April 2022. 

 

Disney are so confident that it will be a successful venture, that, in December 2023, they announced plans for a second such community, Asteria, in Pittsboro, North Carolina, which will include 4,000 homes (the same month that the first houses in Cotino went on sale, although the community will not be opened until 2025).    

 

 

II. 

 

In an article published in The Guardian [3], Oliver Wainwright discusses Disney's plan for curated living, i.e., a life which unfolds in a perfectly stylised and completely controlled environment so as to ensure that residents and guests experience the magical joy that the company has been peddling for a hundred years.    

 

Wainright calls it a fantasy world, but it's really much more (and more sinister) than that; this is a model of zen fascism overseen by Mickey Mouse and other Disney cast members where neighbours will be able to "bond over Disney-themed art lessons, enjoy dinners inspired by Disney stories and join family days with Disney-related activities". 

 

Wainright also informs us that the themed homes curated by Disney imagineers will be priced in excess of $1m, whilst the forthcoming town centre will feature "a street market where local artists will sell Disney-themed arts and crafts" and there will be "'abundant opportunities for laughter'". 

 

Oh, and if you're wondering how to keep a large lake sparkling blue all year round in an area that suffers from extreme drought, well, that's thanks to patented Crystal Lagoons technology.   

 

This expansion by the world's largest mass media and entertainment conglomerate into the real world is surely something that Uncle Walt would have approved of and might have amused Jean Baudrillard were he still alive to witness it ...

 

 

III.

 

Baudrillard wrote an important piece on Disneyland more than forty years ago in his seminal text  Simulacres et Simulation (1981), describing it as "a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra" and a "frozen, childlike world [...] conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogenized" [4] and awaiting resurrection.  

 

Obviously Disneyland exalts American values in miniature and cartoon form. But it does more than this: its real purpose is to conceal the fact that it is the real America, just as prisons are built in order to disguise the fact that society is itself carceral. 

 

Baudrillard writes: 

 

"Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle."

 

He continues: 

 

"The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp. Whence the debility of this imaginary, its infantile degeneration. This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the 'real' world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere - that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness." 

 

With the opening of Cotino next year, I'm not sure whether the Disney executives so skilled in playing this game of concealment have finally triumphed and the Happiest Place on Earth will soon expand across the globe, or if, perhaps, they have made a fatal miscalculation and all but the most fanatic of Disney adults will decide they've had enough of staged reality and curated living.    

 

 

Notes 

[1] This was the original slogan for Disneyland, Est. 1955. 

 

[2] Lyrics from 'Do You Wanna Hold Me?' by Bow Wow Wow, from the album When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going (RCA Records, 1983): click here.

 

[3] Oliver Wainwright, 'Let's move to Disney Town! Will life in its 2,000 themed homes be a dream or a nightmare?' The Guardian (08 April 2024): click here.

[4] This text by Baudrillard was translated into English as Simulacra and Simulation by Sheila Faria Glaser (University of Michigan Press, 1994). Material quoted here and following is from a section entitled 'The Hyperreal and the Imaginary' in the first chapter, 'The Precession of Simulacra'. See pp. 12-14.