The first assignment for the students in "After Religion" is a "Multi-generational spiritual portrait": 2-3 page narrative of your religious/spiritual affiliations and/or disaffiliations over three generations, past and/or future. Can be fictional and need not prioritize “family.” The caveats at the end are recognition that "family" isn't the only form of important intergenerational relationship, and acknowledgment that their life stories are nobody's business unless they care to share them. In class I framed this last in terms of being "half American," with my other half regularly shocked at the ease with which Americans think they can ask people personal questions. (True to form, when I described this to an American colleague who teaches courses in spirituality, I was met with a blank stare.)
I've been assigning this exercise since the course started but, since assignments are handed in to the graduate students leading the discussion sections, I've never seen what students come up with. (The discussion leaders' reports indicated it was fruitful, and got students thinking about religious/spiritual things as inheritances and discoveries in the context of relationships and history.) This time around, I was sitting in on one of the discussion sections as the class discussed the assignment, which many described as more interesting and more difficult than they expected. Everyone who spoke recounted their family's religious history, one venturing conjecturally into the future should they have a child. One discovered that their father thinks of himself as a "cafeteria Catholic," a term the sudent hadn't heard before; "so what does that make me?"
Students at The New School who signed up for a class called "After Religion" are of course a self-selecting group, but generally they reported themselves unrooted in traditions which their parents already distanced themselves from. A child of a mixed marriage described exploring a third religion before settling into atheism. Another told how their sibling had leaned into the family's faith tradition while they drifted away. Several described being surprised to find their grandparents were devout. Overall what they shared aligned with the standard narrative of generational change in American religion/postreligion - progressive disaffiliation.
I got more out of the assignment this year, too (perhaps because I was aware as I haven't as clearly been before that I'm their parents' generation). I was a little disappointed that none chose the fictional option, so I decided (since this is 2022) to ask the latest free AI making waves, ChatGPT. Here's what it came up with.
Uncanny (this required no time to generate) but perhaps a little cliché, I thought, so I asked to "Regenerate response" a few times. There were enough differences, within an overall sameness, to be uncanny in a whole new way. (This was my first experiment was ChatGPT.)
Still, what had I discovered? That the progressive disaffiliation narrative is true? ChatGPT was distilling down everything available... though I'll have to try with differently worded prompts (without jargon like "affiliation/disaffiliation"!) to see if it the results vary. But still, the sociological studies I had in mind were about the United States, which sometimes observed that the US was finally lining up with the experiences of other complex industrialized societies, but generally abstracted from broader global patterns. Did my English language question distort my result? I'll try in some other languages...
Unsure what to make of all this, I asked some friends who came to dinner on Friday about it. (Actually, I read them the second one above before identifying it as AI-generated.) Should I tell the class, I asked? Before we got there, a friend picked up on my recounting that students had described the assignment as difficult. That wouldn't be the case for African Americans, she thought, who have an abiding sense of ancestors. And what about recent immigrants, where the dramatically different experiences of successive generations are hard to overlook? And the ever increasing number of families that bridge and weave together cultures and religions? The ChatGPT narrative seems very ... white. Or was it the way I was posing the question?
Aha, a slight change in the prompt and ChatGPT contains the entropy and offers not just a harmonious future but a family religious identity stronger and more resilient than ever. I wonder what (different) lode of sources the AI tapped into for this one?
Folks in education are all thinking of ways we can coopt ChatGPT (if you can't beat 'em join 'em!) and I think I might have found one. What question do you have to ask it to get a story that rings true to you?
