Originally written in autumn of 2025 for social media, republished for the blog this Easter Sunday upon reading a young trans woman named Georgia Coley's take on some of the same topics.
Against the machines, but not like that
I really wanted to like Paul Kingsnorth (PK).
In some ways, PK’s personal timeline & conversion story resemble mine. A little over a year ago, my incessant searching for provocative YouTubes & podcasts somehow had me listening to Martin Shaw & Paul Kingsnorth muse in wispy & whispery, ponderous & prophetic tones about their profoundly feral & fuzzy mythopoetics that now included Jesus. I admit I loved their accents, their come-to-Jesus confessions, their back & forth, & I felt more than a bit intoxicated by the entire vibe. Are they our Tolkien & Lewis?
I tried to go further with one of Shaw’s books but found he could not hold my attention like he did on video. I forgot about Kingsnorth for a few seasons, but PK’s entire persona is something that really nags at me.
It was just last week that I fully started to grasp the depth of techno-bro-meets-theo-bro delusion that is saturating the far right in the likes of Peter Thiel. I resist the simplistic gasp among some of my friends that MAGA is some cult of ignorance; in fact, they are building an intellectual & theological tradition with passion & tenacity & for some of us it’s worth trying to figure out what the heck it all is saying & why people keep picking up what they are putting down. Thiel’s fusion of end-times uploaded transhumanism with the Theobro posture simply terrifies me.
I found myself in this cybernetic cul-de-sac when trying to come to terms with how generative AI & large language models have upended my professional life. The train is off the tracks & without breaks & I have had to radically revisit how I teach all my classes, leaning towards a combination of all-in-class writing for the freshman comp classes & all offline in-class closed-book paper tests for the sophomore literature classes.
A pen-pal-type friend of decades from the radical zine scene, sent me a video about Machine Gods & AI Psychosis that unraveled me even further. At the core of this takedown is Peter Thiel’s transhumanist Christianity where literal resurrection is simply uploading your loved ones digital remnants to manufacture pure cloud consciousness in total communion with our AI gods.
Furiously typing questions into search engines of various sorts about all this, I crashed into Kingsnorth rapping & repping against Thiel & the AI Jesus to the New York Times. I was pretty skeptical because his conversation partner was Ross Douthat, a person I find at best cringe & more likely dangerous. I also know that PK had been on the Metaxas podcast, whereas even typing that name makes me nauseous.
But from the clip I saw, Kingsnorth lured me again. I also love that his new book is called Against The Machine, which I know he got from Lewis Mumford. It also reminds of my dear friend David Watson’s deliciously radical eco-screed of the early 1990s, Against The Megamachine. With some trepidation, I added Against The Machine by PK to my Kindle library. I know I should have ordered the version that is handwritten by his homeschooled children on parchment, but I just didn’t want to pay the overseas shipping.
Over the last few days, I have tried to devour the Kingsnorth book. I doubt I can finish it. I am glad he is speaking out against Thiel, but if we dig just a little deeper into his game, he is really speaking up for PK’s career as a writer & influencer, to help him avoid the kind of work his type of romantic loves to romanticize. (There is an interesting aside in his text about buying a lawnmower; it’s a sobering confessional take on all post-modern wannabe Thoreaus.) This overall mashup of literary compost is wild, though, like how he is bringing the likes of Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Simone Weil, & Wendell Berry to folks on the far right.
When I was studying at Vanderbilt Divinity School, I had a professor who forever changed me with his perspective against the use of secondary sources. Not what I had been previously taught, about just not leaning on them sources too heavily. No, he said, make your argument or share your expression without using them at all. Since that class I have become increasingly allergic to academic prose that is as much an annotated bibliography as the author’s actual brain spit. Term papers might still be fine (this AI thing makes me doubt that possibility entirely), but if I am going to buy an actual book, I don’t want a research paper, heavy laden with citations. I want the author’s voice & vision.
So the part of PK’s anti-machine manifesto that’s a summary of the history of humanity & a quote-heavy term paper on Mumford & Ellul is all mostly mid, but not terrible. But how are Mumford & Ellul right wing conservatives?
I tried to dig deeper for PK’s actual arguments. Some of these are cute mnemonic devices to categorize our present impasse, & once we get here in the book, PK is deeply reactionary & conservative. He is a culture warrior for “people, place, prayer, & the past.” I find his claims that today’s populist right are the natural inheritors of the joyful green anarchism & global justice anti-capitalism that both PK & I were a part of at the turn of the century really ludicrous & laughable. He also throws in some whiny anti-woke accusations & reminds us that the white boy heterosexual is the real victim, which explains why Metaxas must love him. So much malarchy, spiced with occasional poetic phrases of actual nuance.
Part of me wants to try to finish this book, but that is time I would never get back, better spent with other tasks, like grading another batch of AI-generated college essays & getting the heck outta this semester. I am actually amazed at myself for getting as far with this book as I did. I am against the machine, but not like that.
I certainly have an appetite for good writing at the intersection of radical ecology & Christian theology. I really don’t understand, though, why an encounter with the living Christ, especially for ex-lefties with cool accents like Kingsnorth & the much worse Russell Brand, seems now to include a claustrophobic capture within the cynical & insulated cadre of alt-right thinkers & influencers.
As a lifelong anarchist (with lefty, join-your-union, mutual aid tendencies) & a reluctant apostle of Jesus, I am often embarrassed by my Christianity in ways I never was with my previous eclectic paganism. I am often fearful of getting sucked into some form of conservatism in my old age. (Even my spouse is worried, because I listen to more folk & country music than rock these days.) All this to say, I am always seeking fellow travelers & conversation partners, especially among those interested in unplugging from the matrix & meeting somewhere in the grove.
To the last end of what folks should read instead of Paul Kingsnorth, I love the practical vision of green theology in Church of the Wild by Victoria Loorz. For the more heady & for solo practitioners who love to hike, all of Belden Lane’s books are mindblowingly beautiful. Lane can be simultaneously academic & personal in a way that few writers achieve. I cannot recommend his books enough for my fellow tree-huggers that love Jesus.
