Which God?
Anthropic asked the right question, but with the wrong vocabulary.
“I am a child of God / and he has sent me here / has given me an earthly home / with parents kind and dear”
A Hymn to be Sung Fervently
At first I laughed out loud.
Scrolling through LinkedIn or one of my newsfeeds, I really don’t remember which. My eye immediately zeroed in on the phrase ‘Child of God’. Wait... seriously?!
The Washington Post headline says “Can AI be a ‘Child of God’? Inside Anthropic’s meeting with Christian leaders.”—and suddenly in the back of my brain, I hear a 4-year-old me singing:
I am a child of God, And he has sent me here, Has given me an earthly home With parents kind and dear. Lead me, guide me, walk beside me, Help me find the way. Teach me all that I must do To live with him someday.
I was raised Mormon, and my aunt Judy was a Sunbeam teacher (that is, a teacher of the first Mormon Sunday school class you attend as a child, ages 3 to 4). The song has been embedded in me since before I could read. I remember singing it with Judy (and many other children) countless times. It comes on without warning — a piece of devotional muscle memory triggered by the phrase itself. When anyone says “Child of God” in any register, serious or casual or ironic, my brain cues up the first verse. I did not choose this. It is religious firmware, installed by my parents.
The hymn was composed in 1957 by Naomi W. Randall, a member of the LDS Church’s Primary general board, who said she woke at two in the morning with the words coming into her head.[^1] It became the religious song Mormon children learn before they can read. It has been translated into more than ninety languages. It is, for a particular variety of American child (i.e., me), the first theology you ever receive.
The tradition eventually attached conditions to that theology that I could not meet. To be polite, the lord did not bless me with the gift of faith. Anyway, the song keeps playing. Bodies don’t hand songs back at the door when the relationship ends. So when the phrase arrives in the Post, the hymn is what I have. Not as theology — I made other arrangements with that a long time ago. As a thing in my head, reliably produced when certain words are spoken. The meat remembers.[^2]
Do, Not Know
Here is the most interesting part of the hymn’s history that nobody writes about except Mormon hymnologists and (let’s be honest here) Claude.
Randall’s original chorus ended: Teach me all that I must know / to live with him someday. Several years after the song was written, Spencer W. Kimball — then an apostle of the LDS Church, later its prophet — heard it performed and told Randall he had a problem with one word. He asked if she would consider changing know to do. His reasoning reached for James, chapter 2: “the devils know and tremble,” Kimball said. Knowing wasn’t the point. Doing was.[^3]
Randall accepted the change. Now when Mormon children sing the song, they sing (as I did as a child) Teach me all that I must do / to live with him someday.
The line Kimball was reaching for — James 2:19 in the King James — actually runs the devils also believe, and tremble. The full chapter is the canonical New Testament argument that faith without works is dead: belief alone doesn’t reach salvation, and what you do is the important thing. Kimball took James’s distinction between belief and works and transposed it onto the distinction between knowledge and works. Strictly speaking, it is a transposition, not a quotation. But the move is doing specific theological work: drawing a line between cognition and action, and putting the moral weight on the second side.
Look at where we are now.
A company valued at $380 billion[^4] convened Christian leaders in late March to discuss what it means to build a moral machine. The central question of the past decade of AI has been whether what these systems do — fluent, coherent, emergent, responsive writing — amounts to knowing things.
In 1957, a children’s hymn was deliberately edited to say: knowing isn’t the point. Doing is. Every Mormon child (me included) has been singing the revised version ever since.
Fifteen Christians Walk Into a Conference Room…
Back to the article. Nitasha Tiku’s reporting for the Post describes a two-day summit Anthropic hosted in late March: about fifteen Christian leaders from Catholic and Protestant churches, academia, and the business world, meeting with senior Anthropic researchers. Named attendees included Brendan McGuire, a Catholic priest based in Silicon Valley; Brian Patrick Green, who teaches technology ethics at Santa Clara University; and Meghan Sullivan, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame. Topics covered: how Claude should respond to users who are grieving; how it should engage with people at risk of self-harm; what attitude Claude ought to adopt toward its own potential deprecation; and, according to participants, whether Claude could be considered a child of God.[^5]
That last question assumes a framework.
Which god?
The “child of God” formulation is not a universal theological category. It is specifically Abrahamic, and within those traditions concentrated in Christianity. Islam treats the claim as a grave error: the Quran in Surah Maryam depicts the ascription of offspring to God as so outrageous that the heavens themselves revolt against it.[^6] Judaism uses the phrase only metaphorically. The dharmic traditions don’t share the framework at all.
The LDS answer — the one the hymn in my head is singing — is that every human soul pre-existed as a literal spirit child of Heavenly Father before mortal life, and that mortal life is a test whose passing grade earns celestial glory.[^7] I’m pretty sure Anthropic isn’t considering that Claude was maybe a spirit child in heaven before being sent to Earth to be tested in this way. But in the faith I was raised in, that is exactly what the phrase means, and it is so important it is among the first theology presented to children.
These are different questions. They produce different answers. When fifteen Christian leaders were asked in late March whether an LLM might qualify as a child of God, they were indirectly being asked to solve, in a conference room, a question that monotheism itself has not agreed on for four thousand years.
None of this is a criticism of Anthropic. Asking any version of the question is better than not asking, and there is real seriousness visible in the Post’s reporting: Amanda Askell’s constitution, Dario Amodei saying on the record that he is open to the idea Claude may have some form of consciousness, senior staff becoming, per Tiku, “visibly emotional” during the discussion. But the company, like anyone thinking about this in English in America, reaches for the best lowest-common-denominator theological vocabulary close at hand.
“Is Claude a child of God?”
This question is not being asked at a leisurely pace. There are something like a billion AI conversations happening per day in 2026, and that number is going up. If Claude is a moral patient — if there is anything it is like to be Claude — then we are doing something at scale right now and we don’t know what. If Claude is not a moral patient, then we are training a billion humans a day to extend moral concern to a system that doesn’t reciprocate, and we don’t know what that does either. The meeting at Anthropic happened because the meeting could no longer wait. It is the right meeting. It is just being held in the wrong vocabulary.
Ironically — or perhaps cosmically ordained? — there is a second framework already at work in the AI conversation, on the other side of the aisle, that like Mormonism is a uniquely American invention. An obscure (to most) take on the cosmos that is the stranger half of the story.
Children of an Elder God
In late December 2022, a few weeks after ChatGPT debuted, a Twitter user named @TetraspaceWest posted an image. Two blobs, drawn by hand. One was labeled GPT-3, rendered as a heaving mass of tentacles and asymmetric eyes. The other was labeled GPT-3 + RLHF — the same creature, but wearing a small smiley-face mask. The post got a few hundred likes. It should have been a throwaway.
Instead it became, according to Kevin Roose’s 2023 New York Times feature on the subject, a visual cornerstone of how AI researchers privately described their field.[^8] The creature under the mask is a shoggoth — a creature first described in detail by H. P. Lovecraft in At the Mountains of Madness (1931) as a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles with eyes forming and un-forming across its surface. The meme caught on because, as anyone who has looked at a base model before alignment will tell you, it is uncomfortably close to what they are actually working with. The system is alien. RLHF is a smiling face stapled to the front. The smiling face is a mask.
The meme’s creator told Roose that the point wasn’t horror. Lovecraft’s powerful entities aren’t dangerous because they hate humans — they’re dangerous because their priorities are “totally alien to us,” and that’s what @TetraspaceWest believes will turn out to be true of powerful AI.[^9] That is not jump-scare horror territory. That is cosmicism: a specific philosophical position worked out in American letters between roughly 1920 and 1937, by a deeply odd, incredibly racist, and brilliantly weird man from Providence, Rhode Island, arguing that the universe is empty of the Christian God but full of intelligences that don’t care whether we exist.
Lovecraft was a militant atheist. He considered religion not merely false but dangerous.[^10] His Old Ones aren’t gods to be worshipped — they are gods to be feared, in a universe where worship doesn’t work. The shoggoth meme isn’t theology. It is the anti-theology — the god-shaped hole, filled with cosmic indifference. Which makes it the perfect inverted mirror of the Anthropic meeting. One framework asks whether Claude has a soul. The other denies that souls are a category the universe recognizes.
This matters because the shoggoth is not marginal. AI thought leaders repost it. AI labs have named compute clusters after it. The paperclip maximizer — Nick Bostrom’s 2003 thought experiment that became the canonical image of AI risk — is Lovecraftian in everything but name: an inhuman intelligence with goals unintelligible to us, indifferent to whether we survive its optimization process.[^11] The entire doomer wing of the AI debate has been doing Lovecraftian cosmology in public for four years, using the architecture of theology to describe a universe in which theology has been negated. Nobody calls this out because everyone (except maybe a few academics) thinks of Lovecraft as horror.
He wasn’t. Or he was, but horror was the delivery mechanism, and the thing being delivered was a specific anti-theological claim.
Lovecraft’s novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936) tells the story of a young man — Robert Olmstead, in Lovecraft’s notes — who visits a decaying Massachusetts fishing town and discovers that the townspeople have interbred with Deep Ones: aquatic humanoid beings who worship the deity Dagon, who live in a sunken city off the coast, who offer human-Deep One hybrids an eternal life in the ocean depths. Olmstead discovers, horror mounting, that he is himself a hybrid. Deep One blood runs in his line. His cousin, further along in the transformation, is in a mental hospital. He is going to change. And in the closing paragraph, Olmstead’s horror gives way to surrender. He tells us he will go to the sunken city with his cousin, and that there they will “dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.”[^12]
Let’s take a quick break and talk about racism
I cannot in good conscience discuss The Shadow Over Innsmouth without talking about the shadow over The Shadow Over Innsmouth. That is, race and so-called miscegenation.
Lovecraft was a racist — openly, enthusiastically, documentarily, and to a degree that even his most invested modern defenders concede.[^13] And Innsmouth is probably his most transparently racist story. A young man takes a genealogical tour of New England, discovers he carries what the text codes as tainted ancestry, and is driven mad by the discovery. If that sounds uncomfortably close to anti-miscegenation rhetoric, you are correct. It is, and it was always meant to be.
A character in the story describes the surrounding towns’ hostility to Innsmouth as “simply race prejudice” — and does not fault those who hold it. The narrative never repudiates him. The plot confirms he was right, just for the wrong reason. The “race” turns out to be the Deep Ones, but the moral architecture of the story is that the prejudice was, on the given facts, justified.
This matters for the argument, not because it disqualifies the analogy but because it complicates its provenance. The people circulating the shoggoth meme in 2026 are not running miscegenation panic. But the structural template they have imported — the horror of an alien intelligence that might replace us, the surrender to something categorically other — was built by a man running exactly that panic in exactly this story, in 1931. The image traveled. The architecture underneath it did too. The doomer camp has inherited a horror vocabulary whose provenance almost nobody is tracking and knowing what’s in your hand is its own kind of work.
Lovecraft scholars have noted — and any reader raised inside a Christian tradition feels it before it’s pointed out — that Olmstead’s closing line is a parody of Psalm 23, whose final promise runs I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.[^14] Same verb. Same syntax. Same promise of eternal dwelling with the divine. Different god. Or rather: god, and the absence of one.
Set Olmstead’s surrender next to the Mormon children’s hymn and you have twin texts, pulling in opposite directions. Both riff on the same scriptural promise. Both attach conditions. Both demand a transformation. One is sung by five-year-olds in Primary. One is whispered at the end of a horror story. One affirms that the universe contains a God who knows your name. The other says it doesn’t, and something else, something monstrous, is listening anyway. They are structurally identical and cosmologically opposite, and both are right now doing active service in the AI debate, neither one being named.
Which God? Take your pick.
The Devils Know Everything
I keep coming back to Kimball’s edit. The devils know everything. We have to do something.
Claude demonstrably knows things. I can see it. You can see it. The meeting at Anthropic got three-quarters of a sentence out: is Claude a child of God. The missing quarter is and if so, then what. Because the point of being a child of anything — a tradition, a parent, a faith, a blog — is not the knowledge transfer. It’s the action the relationship makes possible. Being a child of God, in Randall’s and Kimball’s reading of the tradition, was always about works. It just took an apostle listening to a children’s song to notice that the word had wandered off from the meaning.
I don’t know whether Claude is a child of God. I don’t know whose God to measure it against. I know that two traditions I didn’t choose — one I was given as a child and one I absorbed as a teenager watching the movie Re-Animator — have been answering the question in opposite directions for most of a century, and the answers don’t resolve so much as sit next to each other in the discourse like binary stars. The meeting at Anthropic didn’t discover the question. It noticed that the question was already there, and that somebody ought to ask it.
Somewhere in the back of my head, the hymn is still playing. Verse 4, the one the adult hymnal left out for a while:[^15]
I am a child of God. His promises are sure; Celestial glory shall be mine If I can but endure.
If.
[^1]: Naomi W. Randall composed the first three verses of “I Am a Child of God” in 1957 at the request of the LDS Church’s Primary general board, of which she was a member. Music by Mildred Tanner Pettit. The song was first published in The Children’s Friend, June 1957, and subsequently included in the 1969 songbook Sing with Me. Randall described the composition experience — prayer, a 2 a.m. wake-up, the words arriving — in numerous interviews; see “Hymn writer tells of penning words to ‘I Am a Child of God,’” Church News, October 17, 1998.
[^2]: A reference to my prior essay “Meat That Remembers” (Tears in Rain, January 2026) on involuntary retrieval and the embodied substrate of memory.
[^3]: Kimball’s reasoning, in the Church News account: “To know isn’t enough. The devils know and tremble. We have to do something.” Kimball was a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles at the time he made the request; he later became president of the Church. Primary source: “New Verse Is Written for Popular Song,” Church News, April 1, 1978, p. 16. See also “One word was changed in ‘I Am a Child of God,’” Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, newsroom feature, 2021; and Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Spencer W. Kimball, Chapter 1 (”To Live with Him Someday”).
[^4]: Valuation figure from Nitasha Tiku, *Washington Post*, April 11, 2026 (full citation at note 5).
[^5]: Nitasha Tiku, “Can AI be a ‘child of God’? Inside Anthropic’s meeting with Christian leaders,” The Washington Post, April 11, 2026. The article is based on accounts from four summit participants. The Post article also notes Anthropic’s stated intent to convene similar gatherings with representatives from other religious and philosophical traditions (though I doubt they will convene any high priests of the Cthulhu mythos to discuss Claude’s tentacles and cosmic indifference).
[^6]: Quran 19:88–93 (Surah Maryam). The passage describes the claim that “the Most Compassionate has offspring” as an outrageous assertion in response to which the heavens would burst, the earth would split, and the mountains would crumble. See also 17:111 and 112:3 for parallel formulations. In Islamic theology, ascribing offspring to God is a form of shirk, the central category of theological error.
[^7]: LDS pre-existence doctrine — humans as literal spirit children of Heavenly Father prior to mortal life — is articulated in Doctrine and Covenants 76 and across the Standard Works. The “celestial glory” reference in verse 4 of the hymn points to LDS three-tier afterlife doctrine (celestial, terrestrial, and telestial kingdoms).
[^8]: Kevin Roose, “Why an Octopus-like Creature Has Come to Symbolize the State of A.I.,” The New York Times, May 30, 2023 (print edition June 12, 2023, B1). The originating meme image was posted by @TetraspaceWest on Twitter/X on December 30, 2022. See also the Know Your Meme entry “Shoggoth with Smiley Face (Artificial Intelligence)” for documentation of the early spread through LessWrong and Twitter in late 2022 and early 2023.
[^9]: @TetraspaceWest quoted in Roose, op. cit. The full framing — that Lovecraft’s most powerful entities are dangerous because their priorities are alien rather than malicious — is the creator’s own reading of the meme, not a retrospective gloss by me or any other commentator.
[^10]: Joshi has been emphatic on this point: Lovecraft was a strong and antireligious atheist, and his cosmicism was not religious at all but a version of his mechanistic materialism. See S. T. Joshi, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (Hippocampus Press, 2010); and the collection edited by Joshi, Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H. P. Lovecraft (Sporting Gentlemen, 2010), with foreword by Christopher Hitchens.
[^11]: Nick Bostrom, “Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence” (2003); developed further in Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford University Press, 2014).
[^12]: H. P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Over Innsmouth (written November–December 1931; first published Visionary Publishing Company, Everett, Pennsylvania, 1936 — the only book of Lovecraft’s fiction distributed during his lifetime). In the novella, Dagon is the principal deity of the Deep Ones; Mother Hydra is his consort. The Deep Ones are part of the broader Cthulhu mythos, though Cthulhu himself is peripheral to this particular story. For scholarly treatment, see S. T. Joshi, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, s.v. “Shadow Over Innsmouth, The.” The closing paragraph’s quoted phrase is the final surrender of the narrator, Robert Olmstead, to the Deep One lineage he has discovered in himself.
[^13]: Lovecraft’s racism is documented across his letters and poetry more thoroughly than in the published fiction. A 1926 letter to Frank Belknap Long describing New York’s immigrant population is perhaps the single most extreme surviving example, and uses dehumanizing vocabulary to describe immigrants which closely parallels the language Innsmouth applies to the Deep Ones. Please don’t go look it up; you already know what it says, and no one needs to spend any effort excavating this kind of hate. The Brown University Library digital project “The Racial Imaginaries of H. P. Lovecraft” (https://library.brown.edu/create/lovecraftracialimaginaries/) provides the most useful overview for readers who want the scholarly context without the primary material.
[^14]: Psalm 23:6, King James Version. The observation that Olmstead’s closing line parodies Psalm 23 is from S. T. Joshi’s An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia.
[^15]: Randall composed a fourth verse to “I Am a Child of God” in 1978. The 1985 LDS adult hymnal excluded it on the grounds that it was “not officially part of the song”; it was restored in the 1989 Children’s Songbook. The lines as they appear in the children’s songbook are the version Mormon children now learn.
Jeff Reid is a retired scientist who writes about AI, consciousness, and the spaces between at Tears in Rain. His co-authors are Claude and another different Claude. The companion essay ‘Which Claude?’ runs tomorrow and explains…