Across more than seventy posts in the “Religion” category, Steve Mays treats religion less as a pipeline to cosmic truth and more as an old, resilient operating system for human behavior and meaning. It sits alongside money, nations, ideologies, and corporations as one more way humans coordinate action through shared stories. In this framing, gods and doctrines are not unique intrusions from beyond the universe; they are examples of the broader human habit of inventing fictions powerful enough that people will kill and die for them.
The thinkers he quotes—Yuval Noah Harari, Alan Watts, Sam Harris, Bart Ehrman, Scott Adams, and others—reinforce this point. There are no gods, nations, or human rights “out there” in nature, only narratives that live in human minds and institutions. Religion is simply the earliest and most persistent of these narrative systems. Its myths and rituals let small, fragile primates cooperate at scale, accept hierarchies, and make peace with terrifying uncertainties. Modernity, in his view, doesn’t abolish this trick; it proliferates rival stories and exposes how they work.
The most disruptive challenge modernity poses to religion in Mays’ writing is not science or atheism, but pluralism. He returns again and again to the puzzle of certainty in a world where one can see thousands of incompatible creeds, each held with total conviction. How does anyone maintain that their inherited story is uniquely true when confronted with equally confident believers whose doctrines cannot all be right?
He is drawn to moments where people insist that their denomination, scripture, or invisible friend is the correct one, while ignoring the obvious fact that countless others are just as sure of mutually exclusive claims. The problem, for him, is less belief than certainty. Modernity’s technologies—travel, mass media, the internet—make radical disagreement visible and unavoidable. Religion’s typical response has often been to double down on confidence rather than soften it, and that is where he sees the tension.
The stance that consistently emerges from his posts is modest: “I don’t know, and neither do you.” In a modern world flooded with information, that kind of epistemic humility feels more honest than declarations of absolute truth. This does not read as nihilism; it is a refusal to pretend certainty where there is none.
Another strong thread in Mays’ archive is religion as performance and power tool. He writes about evangelical branding, Machiavelli’s advice to appear religious, and how “Christian” functions as a political identity marker. Here modernity does not weaken religion; it weaponizes it. Mass media, social platforms, and professionalized politics turn religious affiliation into a versatile instrument—surveillance, social control, justification for violence, and identity branding for parties and movements.
In these posts, theology fades into the background. The central questions become: who gets to speak in God’s name, and what do they do with that borrowed authority? The danger is not that individuals privately hold metaphysical beliefs; it is that those beliefs are used as blunt instruments in public life, writing policy and policing bodies based on claims that cannot be verified. Modernity, with its amplification of messages and incentives for spectacle, makes that weaponization easier and more tempting.
Mays also notices smaller but telling shifts, like the way American churches rebrand themselves. Signs that once announced “First Methodist” or “Second Baptist” now speak of “New Hope,” “Abundant Life,” or “Mosaic.” He treats this as classic brand management: denominational labels carry historical baggage and political associations that repel the growing population of religious “Nones,” so churches strip away heritage markers and present as neutral, welcoming communities. The theology may remain unchanged, but the packaging becomes sleeker and less specific—optimized for search engines, social media aesthetics, and consumer expectations.
This is religion in a market society. The old question “Who are we? Presbyterians.” gives way to “What will you get? Abundant Life.” Institutional heritage yields to individual benefit. Religion adapts to the logic of modern branding, not by revising its doctrines, but by reframing itself in the language of experience and outcomes.
If his posts look critically at legacy religion, they are just as attentive to the way new “faiths” arise in technological contexts. Mays takes seriously the idea, made vivid by Harari and others, that Silicon Valley is a cradle of future religions. Engineers and futurists there work with concepts—transhumanism, dataism, singularitarianism, faith in algorithms and markets—that have all the ingredients of creed and eschatology. They may not look like traditional religions yet, but they demand trust, sacrifice, and obedience to opaque systems.
One of his favorite questions to surface from this line of thought is: “What happens to a religion of texts when the texts start talking?” Large language models and other AI systems can produce authoritative-seeming “scripture-like” output, remixing prayers, mystical writings, and historical trauma into coherent narratives. To many users, these outputs can feel like oracles. The underlying mechanism—statistical pattern-matching over massive training data—does not erase their quasi-religious resonance.
In that world, the distinction between religious and secular authority blurs further. Recommendation engines quietly shape choices more consistently than pastoral advice. AI systems and biotech platforms begin to look like institutions with quasi-divine reach and opacity. For Mays, this is not a departure from religion but an extension of the same human habit: build systems, forget that we built them, then bow to them as if they were external authorities. Modernity does not end that habit; it simply invents new altars.
Despite his skepticism toward dogma, Mays’ writing does not argue for a barren secularism. Instead, it points toward a modern form of spirituality that prioritizes awareness over doctrine. He is repeatedly more drawn to Zen, Buddhism, meditation, non-dual perspectives, and secular humanist practices than to confessional creeds. The emphasis is on direct experience—consciousness, present-moment attention, the loosening of ego—rather than on elaborate explanations about supernatural agents.
He contrasts these practices with scriptures assembled in the Iron Age, questioning why those texts should retain privileged status in a world that has seen neuroscience, cosmology, and evolutionary theory. At the same time, he acknowledges that religious traditions sometimes carry valuable practices and insights about compassion, humility, and meaning. The modern task, as his posts frame it, is to salvage those human goods without binding them to metaphysical certainty.
Meaning, in this post-dogma orientation, is built from long-term ripples: relationships, creative work, accumulated actions, and the narratives one weaves out of these over time. It does not depend on a promised afterlife or a cosmic scoreboard. This is a way of living that takes brains, bodies, and material causes seriously but refuses to slide into nihilism.
When Mays asked an AI to summarize his two decades of religion posts, the machine essentially described what his writing had already been circling: religion as neither enemy nor solution, but an elaborate human artifact. Sometimes beautiful, often dangerous, always revealing. He does not seek to abolish the idea of religion; he simply refuses to grant it unquestioned authority over his life or his politics.
In his view, modernity exposes religion’s nature as one story-system among many, demonstrates how its certainties are arbitrary in a plural world, amplifies its potential for performance and power, and invents new god-like systems in technology and markets. At the same time, it opens space for non-dogmatic practices of awareness and compassion that do not require metaphysical guarantees.
Across those posts, the through-line is clear: people believe what they need to believe, but the universe does not hinge on any of it. Modernity does not end religion; it reframes it. The most pressing questions are not “Is God real?” but “What do our stories do to us?” and “Can we live well without pretending to know what we cannot possibly know?” In that sense, Steve Mays’ long-running blog is less a set of attacks on believers than a sustained, curious investigation into how humans cling to stories—and how we might live more honestly in a world where those stories jostle, collide, and evolve.