{"id":1152865,"date":"2025-11-12T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-12T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-project&p=1152865"},"modified":"2025-11-11T12:06:34","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T20:06:34","slug":"technology-for-religious-empowerment","status":"publish","type":"msr-project","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/technology-for-religious-empowerment\/","title":{"rendered":"Technology for Religious Empowerment"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Technology for Religious Empowerment<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Exploring how technology can empower religious individuals and organizations to achieve more in living their values<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Religion and faith shape systems of thought, values, social organization, identity, and politics for billions worldwide (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>. Yet, despite the centrality to human experience, the intersection of technology and religion remains largely unexplored in sociotechnical research (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>. Our goal is to rigorously investigate the opportunities and challenges that arise when integrating Microsoft technologies with the diverse and often unmet needs of religious communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Empowering religious communities is not only a matter of inclusion but also a business imperative. By understanding and addressing the unique requirements of faith-based organizations, we can ensure our technologies serve a broader spectrum of users and foster deeper trust. As such, we plan to collaborate closely with business<\/a>, policy and security (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> teams throughout Microsoft in this work, including the business groups that support religious non-profits, policy work that engages with religious-grounded experts and our red teams that can benefit from religious stakeholder input as we illustrate below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our mission<\/a> is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. Ensuring our technologies are accessible and responsive to the needs of all communities, including those organized around religion, is a critical part of this commitment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Explorations this summer<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This summer our research intern, Nina Lutz (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, conducted a first set of research as the foundation of this initiative and to help us map areas for future research:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Empirical Landscape Study: <\/strong>By engaging with 48 stakeholders of 11 faiths, we built an empirical overview exploring how religious stakeholders conceptualize and use technology as well as what they desire from these tools. We uncovered how religious stakeholders desire technology that does not seek to replace religious experiences and their embodiment but rather seeks to extend them while prioritizing the preservation of offline community over digitally enabled isolation and hyper-personalized experiences. Our study unveils opportunities for technology companies to embrace humility and wonder in their communication and design of interactive technologies. From landscape, we derive six guiding design values for technologists to apply, as well as a forward-looking research agenda grounded in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) literature and practice. We hope this work makes tackling this intersection more tangible and approachable across the field. This work is under preparation for academic submission and a preprint is available (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. AI Red teaming with faith leaders:<\/strong> Red-teaming, a digital security exercise of testing AI models, at Microsoft and other companies, is increasingly interfacing with outside experts. Building on this practice, we ran a workshop with Seattle-area faith leaders, tapping into their expertise as care and crisis workers in their communities. We discovered not only new vulnerabilities in AI models, but new ways of thinking about scenarios and psychosocial harms from a religious lens and potential interaction paradigms that could make for safer AI systems for everyone. We also demonstrated how Microsoft and other technology firms can positively engage with communities in teaching them about digital safety. This work is currently in preparation for academic submission. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Religious Studies Book Review of Tech Agnostic Article: <\/strong>To express our agenda in broader terms, we have a forthcoming book review of Greg Epstein (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>\u2019s Tech Agnostic (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, a book that critiques current technology industry culture as resembling religion, of which the author is skeptical as a Humanist chaplain.  While embracing his comparison, we argue for seeing it instead in a positive light as a case for religious pluralism and the incorporation of religious perspectives to strengthen and diversify the technology industry. This is currently in preparation for a 2026 edition of Religious Studies Review (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a><\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This foundational research seeks to perceive and situate religion as a sociocultural resource which technologists can draw upon. By doing so, we see religion as an additive lens that informs the contexts and mental models that religious individuals and communities approach technology with. We hope our landscape study, theoretical contributions in our review article, and case study of red teaming with faith leaders demonstrates how researchers and technologists can engage with religion as a deeply human experience and infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Going forward, our research agenda is organized around five core areas supporting religious empowerment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Innovating technology with and for religious communities<\/strong>
We aim to move beyond reactive adoption, fostering proactive codesign with religious communities. We began exploring this during the late summer 2025 with hackathon theme we developed in collaboration with Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer and our nonprofit platform Elevate that focused for the first time on empowering religious non-profits including International Religious Freedom Secretariat (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, the Templeton Foundation (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> and AI & Faith (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, which we will continue to collaborate with and support in the coming months. We have also supported the launching of the Vatican’s Builders AI (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> forum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Making sure our existing offerings serve religious communities too<\/strong>
We recognize that religious communities have specific, often unarticulated needs\u2014from concerns about children interacting with AI companion apps to religiously-grounded content customization and theologically-grounded perspectives on image-based abuse. Building on our red-teaming work this summer, we plan to continue to provide grounded input to help ensure our products meet the needs in both functionality and security of religious communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Ecosystem leadership<\/strong>
With the field of technoreligious systems still emerging, we believe there is a critical opportunity to offer technical insights that can help make the emerging agenda actionable. As such, we plan to build on our review discussed above with further work that shapes the intersection between religion and technology broadly. Specifically, we plan to focus on ways, grounded in the research of Plural Technology Collaboratory (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, that advanced digital technologies can bolster values of community in an age of pluralism, AI and long-distance communication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. Understanding stakeholder perceptions and insights<\/strong>
We plan to build on our landscape study above to continue to map the needs and perceptions of religious stakeholders in the technology industry, ensure our outreach in both research and product includes a diverse and representative set of religious stakeholders and to support external researchers in extending our analysis in more quantitative and representative directions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. Standards and social organization<\/strong>
As technology regulation increasingly intersects with religious authority, we are studying the political dynamics of religiously motivated policy and collaborating with leading theorists to envision sustainable principles for technology deployment, especially in the developing world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These five areas guide our work as we strive to make Microsoft technologies more inclusive, responsive, and to make Microsoft technologies more inclusive, responsive, and empowering everyone – including religious communities globally.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Please reach out to Glen Weyl (glenweyl@microsoft.com<\/a>) for more information.<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Exploring how technology can empower religious individuals and organizations to achieve more in living their values Religion and faith shape systems of thought, values, social organization, identity, and politics for billions worldwide (opens in new tab). Yet, despite the centrality to human experience, the intersection of technology and religion remains largely unexplored in sociotechnical research […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1152868,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"research-area":[13559],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-1152865","msr-project","type-msr-project","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","msr-research-area-social-sciences","msr-locale-en_us","msr-archive-status-active"],"msr_project_start":"","related-publications":[],"related-downloads":[],"related-videos":[],"related-groups":[],"related-events":[],"related-opportunities":[],"related-posts":[],"related-articles":[],"tab-content":[],"slides":[],"related-researchers":[{"type":"user_nicename","display_name":"E. Glen Weyl","user_id":31885,"people_section":"Related people","alias":"glenweyl"},{"type":"user_nicename","display_name":"Weishung Liu","user_id":39805,"people_section":"Related people","alias":"weisliu"},{"type":"guest","display_name":"Nina Lutz","user_id":1154708,"people_section":"Related people","alias":""}],"msr_research_lab":[199565,1161007],"msr_impact_theme":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project\/1152865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-project"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project\/1152865\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1155426,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project\/1152865\/revisions\/1155426"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1152868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1152865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=1152865"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=1152865"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=1152865"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=1152865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}