The Download: churches in the age of AI, and how to run an LLM at home

On a Sunday morning in a Midwestern megachurch, worshippers step through sliding glass doors into a bustling lobby--unaware they've just passed through a gauntlet of biometric surveillance. High-speed cameras snap multiple face "probes" per second, before passing the results to a local neural network that distills these images into digital fingerprints. Before people find their seats, they are matched against an on-premises database--tagged with names, membership tiers, and watch-list flags--that's stored behind the church's firewall. This hypothetical scene reflects real capabilities increasingly woven into places of worship nationwide, where spiritual care and surveillance converge in ways few congregants ever realize. Where Big Tech's rationalist ethos and evangelical spirituality once mixed like oil and holy water, now they're combining to redraw the contours of community and pastoral power in modern spiritual life.