Defining 'The Machine' and Its Mindset

What if the world’s brightest engineers aren’t just building smarter tools—but opening a door to something older, darker, and more sinister?

In this episode of The Russell Moore Show, RDM sits down with Paul Kingsnorth—novelist, essayist, and former pagan turned Orthodox Christian—to talk about his searing new book Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. Kingsnorth argues that the technologies we treat as neutral conveniences may, in fact, be spiritual weapons. The internet as a giant Ouija board. AI not as invention, but as invocation.

It sounds insane—until you realize the people creating these systems admit they don’t fully understand them either.

In this conversation, Kingsnorth tells the unlikely story of his journey from Wiccan witchcraft to baptism in the Orthodox Church, why he believes our cultural obsession with screens, sex, and selfhood is a trap, and why Christians in particular must stop treating technology as just another tool. What if it’s more than that? What if, in chasing progress, we’ve been summoning something we cannot control?

This isn’t your average hand-wringing about iPhones or social media. It’s a bracing, unsettling, and oddly hopeful dialogue about how to remain human in an age increasingly hostile to humanity itself.

Listen in if you’ve ever wondered:

• Why AI feels less like a tool and more like a presence

• How paganism and environmentalism can point toward, but never satisfy, the longing for God

• What the “four pillars of the machine” are—and how they’re shaping us without our consent

• Whether resistance to the machine is possible, and how communities of faith might embody it

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth

• Savage Gods by Paul Kingsnorth

• Buccmaster Trilogy by Paul Kingsnorth

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