THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO P.O.L.
by C.J. Loveman
Loveman combines various SF tropes of a soulless, technocratic corporate world with serious reflections on faith and theology in the age of the megachurch.
Caleb Wright arrives at Synergy Church looking for a new beginning. As the associate pastor at the hottest new Midwest megachurch, he’s become concerned about the overly performative joy he witnesses from the identically teal-clad congregants. Caleb soon learns that everything at Synergy is monitored and governed by the Pastoral Optimization Logic-matrix (P.O.L), an advanced AI system that collects endless amounts of data on congregants, including high-tech Prayer Pods with real-time suggestions based on biometric data they collect during prayer. After discovering that the church uses this data to push congregants toward personalized seminars, programs, or sermon series at a premium cost, Caleb is forced to choose between optimizing his sermons for the board of directors and genuinely trying to help his congregants. Loveman’s novella hews close to contemporary technology and real-world evangelizing tropes, giving the reader just enough distance to laugh but not so much to allow the comfort of dismissing any of it as ridiculous or impossible. The satire takes all the worst data-mining and social engineering aspects of AI and combines them with the insidious isolation tactics of egregiously profit- and power-driven religious movements, such as when the head pastor responds to a prompt in his earpiece to shift topics mid-sermon based on biometric data collected from worshipers listening to his sermon, or the church’s attempts to capitalize on trends, as in the youth pastor’s “sneaker-unboxing sermons.” Loveman’s prose is tight and engaging, such as when Caleb becomes aware of the church’s ulterior motives: “He wasn’t in a church that worshipped God, but a corporation that worshipped an upward-trending graph. The awareness stole the air from his lungs and made him forget about his aching neck.”
A tight, biting SF satire that takes on AI invasiveness and prosperity-gospel profiteering in equal measure.