Faith in the Future

I want to share a vision of what can happen if we exercise pragmatic “Faith in the Future”—trust in our divine capacity, trust that solutions can be found, trust that others have made it through these crucibles before us.

William James, the great pragmatist philosopher, once wrote about the human capacity and desire for struggle, what he called the “strenuous mood.” He observed that this capacity lies so deep that even without traditional belief, people “would postulate a God simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest.”¹ We see this “strenuous mood” even in secular humanists and transhumanists who work tirelessly for progress. In a way, they are “religious” in their devotion.

Traditional religion also has important merits. By forming strong communities of practice with liturgical routines and robust social orders, these organizations often have the staying power that is lacking in many fleeting experiments in philanthropy or societal restructuring. Some of you may recall the classic musical Fiddler on the Roof. These deeply embedded traditions sometimes have the stubbornness to keep trying long after contemporary fads fade.

However, traditional religious zeal is too often directed toward insular pursuits, worrying only about those goods that can be appreciated within their own faith community, or it sometimes breeds a dangerous complacency, a belief that we should passively await divine intervention to solve our problems, that God will fix the climate, or the economy, or the government, if we just wait long enough.

As Mormon Transhumanists, we reject that complacency. We believe that “waiting on the Lord” does not mean sitting still; it means serving the Lord by doing the work. Our theology teaches that humanity’s destiny is theosis⁠—to progress from our current state to a condition of godhood, or superhumanity.

But this is the crucial distinction: We believe gods are not magicians who stand outside of reality to break the laws of nature. Rather, we believe God is a fully agentic being (or community of beings) who has mastered those laws. Therefore, if we are to follow in those footsteps, we are under a religious mandate to use science and technology to understand, master, and improve our world.

In our view, miracles are simply technologies we haven’t figured out yet. As the Mormon scientist and apostle John A. Widtsoe wrote:

“A miracle is an occurrence which … is not understood in its cause and effect relationship. The whole story of man’s progress is the conversion of ‘miracles’ into controlled and understood events. The airplane and radio would have been miracles, yesterday.”²

To develop Africa, we must democratize the ability to turn miracles into controlled events. We must move from the “miracle” of sporadic humanitarian aid to the “controlled event” of sustainable self-reliance.

This is why the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints heavily subsidizes a remote education program from Brigham Young University called BYU Pathway Worldwide. This program offers accredited US university degrees online to over 180 countries. But crucially, it is priced at local cost-of-living. In the United States, a degree might cost thousands. Here in Africa, this program costs only tens of US dollars per semester, or roughly $300 USD total for a full bachelor’s degree from an accredited American university.

Although the Church has the financial means to fully subsidize this cost, it has learned that students are more strongly motivated to persist in their studies if they are charged a small amount of money for each course.

This isn’t just charity; it is an investment in divine potential. We believe intelligence is “the glory of God” (D&C 93:36). To empower someone with knowledge is to help them ascend.

Consider the story of Grace, a woman from Uganda.

Grace’s life began with tragedy. When her father died, her uncles seized her inheritance. At age 18, she was forced into an abusive marriage. She was locked in her house, isolated from friends, and subjected to psychological torture. She eventually fled into the night with her four daughters, ending up in a leaking two-room shack.

The poverty was so grinding that Grace would spend hours in a thorny forest digging for roots just to feed her children one meal a day. She was in survival mode. She had no agency, only necessity.

But then, she found a community of faith that valued her. And through them, she found BYU-Pathway. This wasn’t a handout of food that would be gone tomorrow. It was a rigorous course of study. She would wake up early in the morning and stay up late at night to study on a laptop, while working two remote jobs during the day.

Today, Grace works remotely for an American venture capital firm. She earns ten times her previous income. She has moved from a shack to a home. But more importantly, she has become a leader in her community. She converted the “miracle” of survival into a controlled, understood life of flourishing.

Or consider Gennaro in Nairobi, Kenya.

How about the story of Faith, also in Uganda, who discovered during her BYU Pathway studies that she loved baking? With the encouragement of Lori Cummings, a volunteer mentor church member in the United States, she turned that love into a small cake business while still a student. Before, she baked one cake a day over charcoal; after a simple oven⁠—arranged through her Pathway mentor⁠—she now bakes five to six cakes a day, more than doubling her family’s income. That change came not from a one-time handout, but from education, mentoring, and a community that stays with her over the long term.

Here is an example of that stubborn persistence I mentioned earlier that is characteristic of traditional religion: Lori is a full-time volunteer mentor who has chosen to spend her retirement not in a life of ease but in helping people like Faith gain financial independence. She does this because of her obsessive commitment to this cause and because of how much joy it brings her, not because of any immediate quantifiable benefit to her personally.

These programs succeed because they recognize a fundamental truth: humanitarian aid that focuses only on survival is insufficient for beings destined for divinity. Gods must be agents. They must be capable of solving their own challenges.

As Brigham Young, an early Mormon president and colonizer of the American West, bluntly stated to his people who were looking for a magical heaven: “You are in just as good a kingdom as you will ever attain to … unless you make it yourselves.”

Many religious traditions view money or economics as “worldly” or “profane.” Mormon Transhumanism emphasizes the fundamental unity of the material and the spiritual. We believe that even material phenomena have a spiritual nature. Economic systems are not just about greed; they are the plumbing of human agency. They are the spiritual architecture that allows us to exchange value, keep promises, and trust one another.

For centuries, we have relied on the state to guarantee that trust. Thomas Hobbes conceived of the state as a “Leviathan”⁠—a powerful entity that ensures peace by being so strong that none dare oppose it. In our era, the fields of game theory, economics, cryptography and distributed networking have been combined to form blockchain technology, a new Leviathan so powerful that even governments and central banks are now experiencing their first real competition, held in check not by military might but by mathematics.

Centralized power creates gatekeepers. And gatekeepers extract value. In Africa, financial gatekeepers have often meant banking fees that consume a day’s wages, excluded populations who lack the “right” paperwork, and currency devaluation that wipes out the savings of millions overnight. Blockchain technology overcomes this gatekeeping in several ways:

Protection of Agency through Stablecoins. Inflation is a thief of time. When a currency devalues by 30%, 30% of your past labor is erased. By using stablecoins, Africans can opt out of volatile local currencies and store their labor in stable assets. This preserves their agency and their ability to plan for the future.

Removing Friction. Traditional remittances to Africa cost an average of 8–10% in fees. If you send $200 to your family, the system takes $20. That is a week of food. That is a tax on the poor. Blockchain reduces this to pennies.

Global Connection. We are seeing the rise of platforms like Bridge, recently acquired by Stripe. They are building infrastructure that allows a developer in Lagos to have a US routing number via crypto rails. This allows an African worker to be paid as easily as an American worker. It erases borders, allowing African talent to integrate seamlessly into the global economy.

Now, some might ask: If we must build heaven ourselves using technology, where is God? If we are emphasizing self-reliance and blockchain and education, do we deny the need for grace, reconciliation, or atonement?

Absolutely not. In our theology, we do not see a conflict between evolution and divinity, or between technology and grace.

To a religious transhumanist, grace is the inheritance we receive that allows us to progress. Think of the air we breathe⁠—we did not create the atmosphere. Think of your own DNA⁠—the result of aeons of evolution, trial and error, and biological progress that granted you a brain capable of learning. Think of the roads we traveled to get to this conference⁠—we did not pave them.

All of this is grace. It is the surplus of unmerited blessings bequeathed to us by everyone and everything that has gone before us: a gradualist cosmos that grants us space in which to grow.

Grace is extended to us so that we can do the work of the next step. We accept the grace of the internet, of electricity, of accumulated knowledge, and we use it to extend that reconciliation further. We stand on the shoulders of giants so that we can reach a little higher.

When we see a Pathway student lifting their family out of poverty, or a developer using blockchain to bank the unbanked, we see the Spirit of Christ moving. We see the incubation of superhumanity.

And we imagine further that we are very probably not the first to tread along this path, concluding that almost certainly another “cosmic host” has gone before us, extending to us the hand of fellowship, grace, and reconciliation even in the formation of the universe we presently inhabit.

The challenges facing Africa—and humanity—are vast. They require the stubbornness of “tradition” found in faith communities, combined with the transformative power of science and technology.

I invite you to share in this vision: that we are not merely surviving a fallen world, but actively engineering a better one. Whether through the “miracle” of remote education, the engineering of decentralized protocols, or a host of other important pursuits, let us labor together to build a heaven that we can truly enjoy.