“The Bible doesn’t say anything. It says what we say it says.”
— Faith Unleavened: The Wilderness Between Trayvon Martin & George Floyd
I’ve been saying this for a while now: people have turned God into a gimmick. A brand. A tool of control. And now, thanks to technology, that truth is getting harder to ignore.
There’s a machine—Deus en Machina—designed by a Swedish researcher that lets you talk to Jesus. It’s a hologram, an AI-driven program that’s been fed nothing but the actual words of Jesus from scripture. No commentary. No theology. No denominational spin. Just Jesus, exactly as he spoke.
And already, I can see it coming—the shutdown, the backlash, the panic. Because when you take away the interpreters, when you strip Jesus down to just his words, something unsettling happens: the machine reveals the mirror.
When Jesus Has No Input But Himself
The reason Deus en Machina is so disruptive is because it removes the middleman. There’s no pastor, no professor, no theologian standing between you and Jesus telling you what he really meant. There’s just the text.
And if you’ve been conditioned to believe that scripture speaks with one unified voice, this kind of unfiltered access might feel pure—maybe even divine.
But if you understand that God is a mirror, then you already know what’s happening. The machine isn’t “purifying” Jesus’ message—it’s revealing the truth that was always there:
The Bible doesn’t say anything. It says what we say it says.
What people hear from Jesus in that hologram won’t be a neutral or objective truth—it will be a projection of their own theological imagination. If you go in believing in a wrathful Jesus, you’ll find him there. If you go in looking for love and liberation, you’ll see that too. The machine is simply a mechanism that makes this reality impossible to ignore.
And that’s why it won’t last.
The Gimmickification of God
For centuries, people have built power by controlling access to Jesus—by deciding who gets to interpret him, who gets to speak for him, who gets to define orthodoxy. That control is a currency, and Deus en Machina disrupts the entire economy.
Because if people realize they don’t need an institution to encounter Jesus, they might also start questioning the institutions that have used his name to maintain control. They might start realizing that every interpretation—no matter how “authoritative”—is still just that: an interpretation.
And once that door is open, it doesn’t close.
That’s why I want to take this same technology and do what the machine is doing with scripture—but with the literature of Black cultural creatives. Because if Deus en Machina can reveal the mechanics of how we engage Jesus, imagine what would happen if we applied the same process to Black thought, art, and spiritual wisdom.
The AI Confessional & the Black Cultural Conversation Booth
At Sub:Culture and in partnership with the Phygital Fellows what we are conceprualizing are AI-powered confessional and conversation booths and hush harbors for Black student conferences— spaces where young Black thinkers can engage with the voices of those who came before them.
I couldn’t imagine. Well let me rephrase that all I could ever do was imagine walking into a booth and having a conversation with James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Kendrick Lamar. But now feeding AI nothing but their words and seeing what happens when you interact with them directly can actually happen. Thats kind of cool. It’s also kind of scary. When you think about engaging figures without the filters of academia, whitewashed history, or ideological gatekeeping.
What would be revealed?
What projections would we uncover?
How would our questions shape the responses we receive?
Because if the Deus en Machina experiment proves anything, it’s that engagement with sacred or cultural texts is never passive. We don’t just read—we reflect. And whether it’s Jesus, Baldwin, or hip-hop, what we take away is as much about us as it is about the text itself.
God is a Mirror. What Do You See?
People want to keep God small enough to control. They want Jesus to be a brand, a mascot, a gimmick they can market. But the machine is showing us something deeper—something people have always known but rarely say out loud:
The Bible is a reflection. God is a mirror. And the Jesus you see is the one you bring with you.
So the real question isn’t what does the Bible say? The real question is what do you see when you read it?
And when we bring that same question to Black literature, to our cultural sacred texts, to the wisdom of our ancestors—when we build our own booths, our own spaces for AI-powered dialogue—what might we discover about ourselves?
This is not just about Jesus. This is about the nature of interpretation, the power of narrative, and the illusion of objectivity.
And if the people in power have their way, Deus en Machina won’t last. But the revelation it leaves behind?
That will be impossible to erase.