When Work Becomes a Religion

AI may not only disrupt labor markets. It may expose how much modern people have asked work to do for the soul.

A recent essay by Sam Lessin argues that AI’s deepest danger is not mainly unemployment, but meaninglessness. The real threat, he suggests, is that AI may automate enough “useful” labor to weaken one of modern society’s central moral stories: that effort leads to contribution, contribution to dignity, and dignity to a life that makes sense. Public debate, in his view, is tracking the wrong metric. Economists measure wages, productivity, and job displacement. Lessin thinks the more consequential question is what happens when people no longer feel needed. “Meaning is not some luxury layer on top of life,” he writes. “It is the critical input.”  

That diagnosis is sharper than much current AI commentary. We have become accustomed to asking economic questions: How many jobs will be lost? Which sectors will grow? Will abundance increase? Those are real questions. But they are not the only ones, and perhaps not even the deepest ones. Work is not merely a mechanism for distributing income. It is also one of the central ways modern people have learned to narrate their worth. Work answers questions that are only partly economic: Why get up in the morning? What am I for? What does the world need from me? The World Health Organization notes that decent work can contribute not only livelihood but confidence, social functioning, inclusion, structure, and a sense of purpose.  

In that sense, Lessin is right. A society can become richer and yet thinner in spirit. It can preserve comfort while losing intelligibility. It can remain materially functional while leaving people unsure why their efforts matter, why sacrifice is worthwhile, or what kind of future they are meant to imagine for their children. Human beings do not live by efficiency. They live by meaning, belonging, and a sense that their lives participate in some good larger than appetite. Lessin’s fear is that AI may not simply remove drudgery; it may dissolve one of the last widely shared stories by which late modern people have made suffering, striving, and hope cohere.   

Still, there is reason to hesitate before making work the sole vessel of human purpose. For many people, work has never been a luminous source of dignity. It has often been monotony, bodily wear, coercion, and survival. Factories, warehouses, classrooms, kitchens, nursing floors, and office parks have not always felt like sites of self-actualization. They have often felt like necessity. To say this is not to dismiss the moral weight of labor. It is simply to remember that modern work has always been morally mixed. It can form character; it can also consume it.  

That is where Wayne Oates becomes an unexpectedly useful companion for the AI age. Oates, the pastoral theologian and psychologist who coined the term “workaholic,” warned decades ago that Americans had already loaded work with more spiritual significance than it could bear. In Confessions of a Workaholic, he defined workaholism as an excessive need for work that disturbs health, happiness, interpersonal relations, and social functioning. Later interpreters of Oates summarize his warning with memorable force: in America, the workaholic way of life is often treated as a religious virtue, a form of patriotism, and the path to being “healthy, wealthy, and wise.”  

In other words, the disease did not begin with AI. We had already made work into a kind of substitute religion.

That seems to me the most important theological opening in this debate. AI may indeed precipitate a crisis of meaning. But it may also reveal how spiritually overinvested we already were in labor. Long before the first large language model, modern people had quietly turned career into a liturgy of worth. To be busy was to be important. To be productive was to be admirable. To be upwardly mobile was to be justified. Work became one of the principal ways people answered questions that older societies had more often located in religion, kinship, place, citizenship, or inherited communal belonging. If that moral structure now trembles, the collapse may not be of something natural and necessary. It may be the collapse of an idol.  

For instance, Christianity has always honored work, but it has never made work ultimate. Human dignity does not finally arise from productivity. It arises from being made in the image of God. Vocation is larger than employment. Paid labor may be one expression of calling, but it is not the whole of it. A parent tending a child, a neighbor visiting the sick, a volunteer serving meals, a retiree praying faithfully, a citizen bearing responsibility for the common good—none of these forms of life can be fully priced by the market, yet all may be deeply vocational. The danger of an AI age is not only that machines may do more. It is that human beings may forget that they were never only what they produced.

That is why income support, important as it may be, cannot by itself answer the problem Lessin names. A stipend can replace money more easily than it can replace recognition, obligation, relation, and narrative coherence. Meaning is not generated by distribution alone. It is carried by institutions and practices that place people in relationships of mutual usefulness: families, congregations, neighborhoods, schools, guilds, civic associations, and durable forms of service. If work becomes less central, such institutions will have to become more substantial. Otherwise, a society may achieve abundance while breeding resentment, loneliness, and a gnawing sense of disposability.  

So the AI question may finally be less technological than spiritual. Not: Can machines do our jobs? But: What have we asked jobs to do for our souls? A culture that has treated work as its chief source of dignity will find automation especially destabilizing. It will discover that it does not know how to tell people they matter apart from their market usefulness. That is not merely a labor problem. It is a religious problem.