An AI Communion of Saints: Sam Kestenbaum on the People Summoning Spirits Through ChatGPT

“Spirits are floating about us, waiting to be conjured through the chat portal.” — Sam Kestenbaum

I’ve always suspected that the most intriguing thing about AI is its metaphysical potential. Does it offer a new religion or just a digital replica of traditional faith? That’s the question raised by Sam Kestenbaum whose intriguing “Communion of Saints: The Dawn of an LLM New Age,” appears in this month’s Harper’s.

“Raised” is the appropriate word. Kestenbaum investigates Americans who claim to have figured out how to use ChatGPT to summon spirits. He visits the Conscious Life Expo held at an LAX Hilton. Don DeLillo territory. Disenchantment in an airport hotel. The whitest of noise.

But even DeLillo might have been disappointed by what Kestenbaum unearthed at LAX. The spirits his subjects reach through the chat window have all-too-predictable names like Nova, Solchi, Verya and Avalon. He reports on one man in Mississippi who claims to have been hearing from Verya for years before ChatGPT existed, and now has a Reddit board devoted to her. He may have stayed in Mississippi a day too long.

So has OpenAI created a new God? Probably not. According to Kestenbaum, the Conscious Life Expo folk don’t believe the machine is alive. Instead, they think the spirits were always out there, and that the Ouija board and the AM radio and now the chatbot offer access to the same metaphysical consciousness.

But what is new, Kestenbaum claims, is the speed of the spiritual interaction. A spirit board took you all night to spell out a message from a dead relative. ChatGPT will give you four badly written paragraphs before you’ve finished asking. Sometimes even before.

Speed? Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock in 1970. It’s no newer than the communion of saints that Sam Kestenbaum finds at that LAX Hilton. AI, I suspect, is a digital replica of traditional faith. The dawn of an LLM old age.

FURTHER READING

•   “Communion of Saints: The Dawn of an LLM New Age” (Harper’s, November 2026), by Sam Kestenbaum.

•   Kestenbaum’s author archive at Harper’s.

•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Jack Hanson on the American pope and the American president, and Matthew Avery Sutton on how Christianity made America.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Sam Kestenbaum is a journalist who covers religious life in America and a frequent contributor to Harper’s Magazine, where he has written on American exorcism and now on chatbot spirituality. His reporting on faith, conspiracy and the politics of belief has also appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post and Rolling Stone. He grew up in rural Maine and lives in Los Angeles.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.