This was a discussion topic at the recent and excellent Civic Future meet-up outside of London. These were my nominations of how new religious ideas might be most likely to emergen in the near future:
1. We don’t have good models for the evolution of religious thought. So bet on the numbers, and figure that Africa will produce new variants of Christianity and Islam. Furthermore, many African regions have not been Christian or Muslim for very long, not by historical standards. That might boost the chances of innovation, since to them it is not a very fixed doctrine.
2. A Constantine for China. If China evolves in a more capitalist direction, leadership might decide that some additional ideologies are needed. Christianity does seem to attract a reasonable number of adherents in China when it is allowed to grow. Constantine formalized Christianity for the Roman Empire, and perhaps a future Chinese leader will create a “Christianity with Chinese characteristics” to make rule easier. Still, I think most people there would not believe it.
3. For my low probability dark horse pick, imagine that LLMs allow us to start talking to some animals. Some small percentage of humans might start worshipping those animals, say they are whales? It would hardly be a first for identifying animals with the deity. A weirder scenario yet is that those animals have gods (God?) and some humans start worshipping those gods. As I said, a low probability scenario! Nonetheless an intriguing idea.
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