Technology for Religious Empowerment

Religion and faith shape systems of thought, values, social organization, identity, and politics for billions worldwide (opens in new tab). Yet, despite the centrality to human experience, the intersection of technology and religion remains largely unexplored in sociotechnical research (opens in new tab). Our goal is to rigorously investigate the opportunities and challenges that arise when integrating Microsoft technologies with the diverse and often unmet needs of religious communities.

Empowering religious communities is not only a matter of inclusion but also a business imperative. By understanding and addressing the unique requirements of faith-based organizations, we can ensure our technologies serve a broader spectrum of users and foster deeper trust. As such, we plan to collaborate closely with business, policy and security (opens in new tab) teams throughout Microsoft in this work, including the business groups that support religious non-profits, policy work that engages with religious-grounded experts and our red teams that can benefit from religious stakeholder input as we illustrate below.

Our mission is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. Ensuring our technologies are accessible and responsive to the needs of all communities, including those organized around religion, is a critical part of this commitment.

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Explorations this summer

This summer our research intern, Nina Lutz (opens in new tab), conducted a first set of research as the foundation of this initiative and to help us map areas for future research:

1. Empirical Landscape Study: By engaging with 48 stakeholders of 11 faiths, we built an empirical overview exploring how religious stakeholders conceptualize and use technology as well as what they desire from these tools. We uncovered how religious stakeholders desire technology that does not seek to replace religious experiences and their embodiment but rather seeks to extend them while prioritizing the preservation of offline community over digitally enabled isolation and hyper-personalized experiences. Our study unveils opportunities for technology companies to embrace humility and wonder in their communication and design of interactive technologies. From landscape, we derive six guiding design values for technologists to apply, as well as a forward-looking research agenda grounded in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) literature and practice. We hope this work makes tackling this intersection more tangible and approachable across the field. This work is under preparation for academic submission and a preprint is available (opens in new tab).

2. AI Red teaming with faith leaders: Red-teaming, a digital security exercise of testing AI models, at Microsoft and other companies, is increasingly interfacing with outside experts. Building on this practice, we ran a workshop with Seattle-area faith leaders, tapping into their expertise as care and crisis workers in their communities. We discovered not only new vulnerabilities in AI models, but new ways of thinking about scenarios and psychosocial harms from a religious lens and potential interaction paradigms that could make for safer AI systems for everyone. We also demonstrated how Microsoft and other technology firms can positively engage with communities in teaching them about digital safety. This work is currently in preparation for academic submission. 

3. Religious Studies Book Review of Tech Agnostic Article: To express our agenda in broader terms, we have a forthcoming book review of Greg Epstein (opens in new tab)’s Tech Agnostic (opens in new tab), a book that critiques current technology industry culture as resembling religion, of which the author is skeptical as a Humanist chaplain.  While embracing his comparison, we argue for seeing it instead in a positive light as a case for religious pluralism and the incorporation of religious perspectives to strengthen and diversify the technology industry. This is currently in preparation for a 2026 edition of Religious Studies Review (opens in new tab). 

This foundational research seeks to perceive and situate religion as a sociocultural resource which technologists can draw upon. By doing so, we see religion as an additive lens that informs the contexts and mental models that religious individuals and communities approach technology with. We hope our landscape study, theoretical contributions in our review article, and case study of red teaming with faith leaders demonstrates how researchers and technologists can engage with religion as a deeply human experience and infrastructure.