Can a tech conference for people of faith be apolitical?
The tension between faith, innovation and public life
I have been wrestling with a question that appears, at first glance, trivially procedural: Can a tech conference for people of faith be apolitical?
One might imagine the answer is pretty straightforward. Yes. Remove any overt political symbols: no campaign banners, no endorsements, no panel on tax policy, and the whole affair can remain above the political fray. In the discussions on stage, speakers can be instructed to avoid the vulgarities of party warfare, and occupy themselves instead with the respectable language of innovation—target markets, market size, business model, ROI, growth rates, infrastructure, marketing, scale, valuations and product demand. In the age of artificial intelligence, conversations may even ascend into loftier terrain, asking questions, such as can technologists replicate conscience and what does it mean to be human in a world increasingly mediated by machines.
Yet this appearance of neutrality is deceptive. Technology is never merely technical. The moment one asks what ought to be built, who ought to benefit, who may be harmed, and what costs are acceptable, one has already moved beyond the technical and into the moral domain. And once moral judgments are embodied in institutions as policy, we are now in the political domain.
Take artificial intelligence infrastructure. Even the prosaic matter of building datacenters immediately raises questions of public life: should governments slow development if working families are saddled with higher energy costs? Who decides which communities absorb those burdens? Or take the concerns around children befriending AI companions to their detriment. Should this type of usage be regulated much like social media is now being restricted for teens under 16 yrs old, at least in some countries. These are not engineering questions nor political questions of efficiency or order. They are questions that require moral judgments.
Now introduce faith into the room and morality is front and center; and the prism through which every decision is made. A conference for people of faith isn’t just a gathering of individuals who happen to share certain private beliefs. It’s a gathering of people whose understanding of humanity is already structured and ordered by deep beliefs about the meaning of man’s existence, purpose, justice, and good and evil.
The conversation amongst people of faith is therefore never simply about technology and whether one believes in God. It is about the kind of world technology is called upon to serve. It is about the power technologists or politicians can have to use technology to wield moral authority.
When Jack Dorsey suspended Donald Trump from Twitter in 2021, the decision was presented in the language of risk management and civic responsibility. But everyone understood what it really was: an exercise of power rooted in a moral vision. No serious person could describe it as value-neutral. It was an assertion of his moral authority. It was an assertion of order and judgment of permissible speech. Simply put, it was an assertion of political power.
Moral conflicts at tech events
I have spent decades hosting technology events in the U.S. and Europe and for many years it was possible to pretend that these gatherings existed in a realm apart from the larger moral conflicts that exist in culture and politics. That illusion became harder to maintain when I began researching healthcare and mental health, where questions of technology quickly gave way to questions of anthropology.
At one tech conference, where the merits of religion on our mental health were discussed, the reaction from many technologists was openly contemptuous. The very inclusion of religious perspectives was treated as a kind of intellectual scandal, as if any appeal to spiritual categories in Silicon Valley constituted an embarrassing relapse into primitive, voodoo superstition.
What was striking wasn’t merely the dismissal, but the certainty that science had already answered the question of what it is to be human—a collection of material biological stuff that could be repaired or tuned up, like a car.
By 2022, that scientific confidence had curdled into something more troubling. At a panel on the ascendance of gender-confused kids, it became increasingly clear that scientific and medical institutions were not merely trying to find solutions for cultural problems but actively manufacturing, shaping and reinforcing the very problems they said they were addressing. Gender mutilation, wrapped up in the euphemism “gender-affirming care,” was not simply a clinical response; it was moral and political orthodoxy, endorsed by professional bodies, such as the American Medical Association and advanced through public policy, such as a diversity law requiring venture firms to actively collect statistics on the sexual orientation of the founders they invest in.
Once institutions sanctified this ideology, capital followed. Companies, such as Plume, which raised $24 million in 2022, emerged to commercialize it, venture firms accelerated funding for it, and an entire ecosystem of startups arose despite a set of assumptions that many religious believers rejected at the level of first principles!
Today, for tech innovators of faith, the responsible question on the table that cannot be ignored, isn’t does the tech work, but whether the premise on which these products and services are built is true in the first place.
The fissures in the church
A conference that brings together people of faith and innovation cannot indefinitely avoid asking the questions about what is true. After all, one’s view of truth yields one’s vision of how industries should work from healthcare to education to what kind of energy to produce. Different views of truth also apply to different visions of the human person, the family, the community, citizenship, and the nation itself. This division is not only visible between secularists and Christians but within the church itself and among prominent Christian leaders.
Tim Keller, for example, who in a New Yorker essay, argued that white evangelicals–80% of whom voted for Trump in 2016–allowed political identity to overtake theological conviction. The crux of his essay was that these evangelical voters weren’t really dedicated to any true theological ethos because they were not welcoming of the immigrant or interested in racial justice or caring for the poor. Whatever one makes of his critique, his essay illustrates the larger reality: believers do not enter public life with a single political imagination. They bring competing visions of duty, responsibility, and national belonging. Those differences inevitably shape how they think about what ought to be built, funded, and legitimized in the culture.
The debates over immigration, sexuality, race, and national identity are not peripheral disputes. People of faith are not above such rhetoric. If Christians themselves disagree about the shape of the common good, then a conference composed of believers will naturally reflect those fractures.
This does not mean that faith-based innovation will collapse into partisan activism.
The stronger argument is to recognize that to build a company, a platform, or a durable technology is to make judgments about human needs, desires, purpose and so on. It is to participate in the formation of culture—fundamentally a form of institution-building—which is itself a moral act. And policies to fortify that culture are often political.
A Christian ethic focused largely on stewardship, personal responsibility, vocation, agency, discipline, hard work and capitalism is just as valid as a Christian ethic focused on compassion and gestures of immediate care and inclusivity of all marginalized groups.
These are not rival moral visions. They are complementary. Compassion without responsibility risks sentimentalism. Stewardship without mercy risks hardness of heart. A serious conference rooted in faith should be able to speak about both.
So the answer, after all this, is yes: a tech conference can be apolitical if political advocacy and debates don’t dilute the message of the cross. At the same time, a tech conference, especially one for people of faith, cannot truly be apolitical because entrepreneurs are part of institution-building.
But that is not a defect. It’s simply an acknowledgment that innovation always carries with it a vision of the world one hopes to bring into being.
(Image source: Douglas Sanchez)