The False Gods of Silicon Valley: What Your Baptism Really Means

The Second Question of the Book of Common Prayer Catechism

"Who gave you this Name? Answer. My Godfathers and Godmothers in my Baptism; wherein I was made a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven."

Your name

You most likely did not choose your own name, but if you are preparing for Baptism or Confirmation, you do have the opportunity to choose another Christian name of your own. This is not compulsory, but is a worthy practice and matter for prayerful discernment. You might ask your priest which saint's story matches your own sense of calling and the virtues of character to which you aspire. But once you take that saint's name, you live with his or her prayers, blessing and protection — and through that saint, with Christ's. For they are only parts of His body, as we are, and their work is all His.

The catechism assumes that all those old enough to answer its questions have already been baptised, most likely as infants. That was more likely in 1662 than it is now. Whether you are baptised as an adult or a baby, on your emergence from the water, you are reborn as a member of the Body of Christ and, as the catechism puts it, a "child of God." But are we not all already children of God, since He is our Creator?

The Prayer Book does not have you declare your filial status for no good reason. For while all people are, in a general sense, children of God and bearers of His image, by baptism that childhood is legitimised. We become our Father's heirs: inheritors to the Kingdom of Heaven.

God is not routinely addressed as Father in the Old Testament. It is Christ who specifically charges His followers to pray to God as Father. This is because God is the Father of Jesus both as the eternal Word and as the Incarnate Son whose Mother is the Blessed Virgin Mary. When we are baptised, we share in His sonship, and so we become His adopted brothers and sisters. Before baptism, we were bastards, but have now been received into the family and taken on our Father's name. This is what the Catechism means by calling the baptised "inheritors." United with Christ, we share in His sonship of God, and so we become joint inheritors with Him of the Father's estate. We are one with the Crown Prince, guaranteed the kingship when the time comes.

As St Paul writes to the Romans (8:14-17:

For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.

Heirs to the Kingdom of Heaven

There is a deeper, spiritual sense to being "sons of God." In Old Testament and ancient Jewish literature, that phrase refers to angels. The purpose of humanity is in fact to replace those fallen angels as governors of the world under God. We take their job. This is the meaning in Genesis of "dominion" — not domination, but ruling in God's stead, ruling as God would have us rule. It means taking care of and tending the world according to divine order, just as surely as the stars and planets move in the sky.

These "sons of God" are sometimes in the Old Testament referred to simply as "gods." Judaism and Christianity are commonly presented as straightforwardly monotheistic religions. This is only a partial truth. Our Scriptures do indeed speak of only one God, to whom alone worship must be offered. Yet they speak also of God being above other gods. Such deities as Baal and the various pantheons of the ancient Near East were acknowledged as existing, otherwise the God of Israel's many triumphs over them would be somewhat hollow.

God is not one of the "gods." God is not a being of any kind at all. He transcends all classification. To describe the spirits that govern the world as "gods" is only a very weak analogy to God Himself. They exist, but they are spirits of an infinitely lesser order — angelic in nature, but those who do not serve God and demand worship for themselves have a more appropriate name: daemons.

Made in the image of God, many of the "Sons of God," the angels, have fallen from grace by acts of their own free will. The saints of the Church are those called to take their place in the Heavenly Kingdom, governing the world where the so-called "gods" have failed. Humans are made to become as much like God as possible — to be restored in the "likeness" of God that was corrupted when Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden. In the words of St Athanasius, "God was made man that man might become god." Through our incorporation into Christ we become, as St Peter puts it, "partakers of the divine nature." This is what the ancient church calls theosis, or divinisation: in Christ, we become one with God.

But the world is still pagan, and worships the so-called gods, even if we do not often call them that anymore. And if by "god" we mean a spiritual entity which is beyond human control and to which we offer sacrifices and worship, then such things are very much real.

Old gods, new faces

The most popular god of the modern age is Mammon. We tend not to call him that these days. We prefer to call him the Economy. We speak of the Economy's invisible hand, we try to trace its mysterious ways, and have long given up the pretence that it serves us. We serve it. A trained cadre of diviners descry arcane signs and try to predict what their fickle lord will do next. Seated in buildings vaster than any ancient temple, they codify the auguries in spreadsheets and graph charts. The god's prophets make a living interpreting the divine revelations to the masses. The Chancellor, wielding his ceremonial red box, announces solemn sacrifices at every budget: whose jobs must be cut, whose livelihoods offered up to appease the deity's wrath. An invisible, inscrutable power that moves of its own accord and demands our homage at the peril of our lives: is that not a god?

Then there is Mars, the god of War. Few use that name now. Yet he is no less real for our failure to name him. He manifests in the perpetual arms race which afflicts our nations, most devastatingly in nuclear weapons. There can be no pretence that this competition is something within human control. Like the Economy, the arms race controls us. It has its own momentum. The sacrifices this god demands are evident: whether the trenches of the Great War, the many fronts of the Second, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, botched efforts in Vietnam and the Middle East, or the present weapons testing zones of Ukraine and Israel.

Mammon and War are served by the gods of chaos and rage who rule much as the dragon-serpent Tiamat of old ruled the oceans. There is something more than collective human will that stirs the anger of the tens of thousands who have protested in our cities for their many causes. Every activist group has its priests, its cultic uniforms, its flags and scarves. They have their scholars in the academy, arguing over their radical talmud of destabilisation. They think themselves enemies of Mammon even as they take his pay and use his machines to propagate their dogma. Power receives their highest veneration, but that power soon devours its advocates as it shows its true nature as chaos.

We really do worship many gods. They are idols, made by human hands, and yet we have invited spirits in to animate them: spirits which we find ourselves unable now to exorcise. Still we press on with our idolatrous making. Still we think that we might make one great god to rule them all — one Ring of Power. Certain servitors of Artificial Intelligence in their Holy Valley of Silicon venerate AI in unironically exalted paeans of praise. Some speak of invoking an unknown spirit into the world; of crafting not just a god, but the one and only God: a singularity.

Tech, dependence and resistance

In the ancient stories, technology and power were always in the hands of the gods. Adam and Eve received protective leather clothes from God, Tubalcain learnt metalwork from fallen angels (though you need to look outside the Bible, into 1 Enoch and the writings of St Irenaeus to find that out), Prometheus in Greek myth stole fire from the gods. In each instance, the boon was associated with a curse. And as the boons increase, so do the curses. We become increasingly reliant on each technological advance, and increasingly vulnerable to its absence.

The only way to resist it, insofar as we are able, is by a deliberate turn from the artificial to the real. There is nothing much more real in this world than bread and wine shared with others. But the reality into which that sharing incorporates us is more real still, and certainly realer than the false gods with their false promises. The hope that they offer is laced with despair, addiction and sacrifice of the weak. The hope that God offers is of a sacrifice already complete and which leads to joy in this world and eternal, bodily life in the next.

The Economy, War, Chaos, and Power are just some of the false gods wreaking havoc in this world through their legions of servants. We all, consciously or otherwise, persist in serving them. Christians must know and, as far as we can, desist. Such is the baptismal promise to renounce the Devil, for he is chief of all the fallen angels. The cold waters of baptism will awaken the soul and fit us in the armour of light; frequent confession will aid in keeping the eyes open.

But to go beyond purification and aim for the perfection of being one with God — to move towards theosis and take the place of the fallen "gods" — we must turn from intercourse with demons and offer ourselves to join our bodies with Christ alone. Hence, the first Christians "devoted themselves to the Apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers." Holy Communion is union with God in Christ, the bridal feast between Christ and His saint-limbed Church spilling out from heaven to earth.

God’s folly is greater than the gods’ wisdom

It is an act of utter uselessness to Mammon, Mars or Tiamat. It makes no economic sense to give the greatest value to such humble fruits of the earth as bread and wine, still less to share that most precious gift between poor and rich alike, given without price. It makes no martial sense for the Church to proclaim Love its only weapon. It makes no sense for the omnipotent craftsman to make Himself babe and bread, to let our human weakness bear His image and do His work — like Tolkien's little hobbits being chosen to journey to Mount Doom when great warriors would be the more obvious choice.

It makes no sense: yet this is how things really are. This is God's will. This is what it means to become "like a child,” as Jesus keeps commanding. It is to "make ourselves less" that He might grow in us, to die to self so that He alone might live in us. It is to be inheritors of His kingship, to grow in His likeness as we mature in faith, and ultimately to join as one in His kingly and eternal reign. It is to take our place in the ranks of the Lord of Hosts, to fight alongside the saints and angels, to join St Margaret and St George in the war against the old dragon-gods and to take their place.

It is to live up to the name we have been given.