Technology has always reshaped the way people participate in their most important communal rituals — whether those rituals involve casting a ballot or embarking on a sacred pilgrimage. A growing body of research suggests that artificial intelligence is now doing the same thing to religious pilgrimage that digital tools have done to American elections: making participation more accessible, more personalized, and more layered with information, while raising new questions about what gets lost when technology mediates deeply human experiences.
That tension is at the heart of a remarkable experiment carried out in 2025, when two religion scholars — Wayne E. Arnold and John A. Shultz — walked Japan’s ancient Kumano Kodō trail, a network of routes connecting Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, with an AI companion running on a smartphone. Their goal was not just to complete the pilgrimage — it was to understand how artificial intelligence might change what a sacred journey means. The answer has implications that reach well beyond religion.
When Technology Meets Tradition
For the average American, the question of how technology shapes participation in meaningful civic and communal practices is not abstract. Voters have watched digital tools transform elections — from online voter registration systems to AI-powered ballot-tracking apps to debates about deepfake misinformation during campaigns. The pilgrimage story offers a useful parallel: in both settings, technology is arriving fast, and institutions are scrambling to understand whether it strengthens or weakens the thing it touches.
Shay Rabineau, an associate professor of Israel Studies at Binghamton University who has studied trails both ancient and modern and undertaken significant journeys on foot in the Middle East, argues that sacred journeys have always adapted to new tools — and that this history matters for understanding what AI will and won’t change.
The pilgrimage tradition stretches back millennia. In the Hebrew Bible, God directs believers to make journeys to Jerusalem three times a year, coinciding with agricultural festivals. Jesus and his disciples participated in those same pilgrimages, according to the New Testament. After the destruction of the Jewish Temple, early Christians quietly undertook spiritual journeys to places mentioned in the Gospels. By the medieval period, a trip to Jerusalem was often regarded as a death sentence given the dangers of overland travel. Meanwhile, after the rise of Islam in the seventh century, Muslims began the annual Hajj to Mecca, creating vast pilgrimage and trade networks across North Africa and Southwest Asia.
Transportation and Information: The Earlier Disruptions
Each wave of new technology fundamentally altered who could participate and how. Steamship travel in the 19th century and air travel in the 20th nearly erased the old overland Hajj routes, turning what had been a months-long odyssey into a focused visit to sacred sites in Mecca. The journey itself became less central; access to the destination became the point.
That shift echoes what voting-rights advocates have argued about election administration for decades: when barriers to participation fall, more people can take part — but the character of participation changes too. The question is always whether the tradeoff is worth it.
Information technology reshaped pilgrimage just as profoundly as transportation. After Christianity was legalized in fourth-century Rome, the first written travel itineraries began to appear, functioning as guidebooks that transformed pilgrimage from an informal practice into something more widely accessible. A female pilgrim named Egeria and an anonymous traveler known as the Bordeaux Pilgrim produced early works that served as guides to the Holy Land. Helena, mother of Byzantine emperor Constantine, commissioned landmark shrines including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, further institutionalizing the practice.
Then came the printing press. In 1486, just decades after Johannes Gutenberg’s invention, Bernhard von Breydenbach published his Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam — a richly illustrated Latin guidebook to Holy Land pilgrimage, viewable today at The Metropolitan Museum in New York. It was quickly translated into German, French, Dutch, and Spanish. By 1500, it had been reprinted at least a dozen times. The book did two things simultaneously: it made the journey more achievable for those who could undertake it, and it made the experience accessible to those who never could.
The parallels to modern civic life are striking. Voter information guides, multilingual election materials, and online polling-place locators serve similar functions — lowering the barrier to informed participation, extending access, and helping people feel confident engaging with a complex system.
Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, printed in the 15th century, captured something else: that pilgrimage had become a cultural phenomenon extending well beyond the devout. Pilgrims in Chaucer’s telling were engaging in decidedly nonsacred behavior on their way to a shrine in England. During the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther took the critique further. He famously wrote that pilgrimage was no longer a sacred activity, declaring in 1520:
“All pilgrimages should be done away with. For there is no good in them, no commandment, but countless causes of sin and of contempt of God’s commandments.”
Even so, pilgrimages endured — and continued to evolve.
AI Enters the Picture
Today, smartphone apps are available for many major pilgrimages around the world. In online app stores, travelers can find Hajj apps that use phone cameras to display pop-up information as they move around Mecca — a kind of augmented reality overlay on one of the world’s oldest religious rites. At least one online platform built for Jewish and Christian visitors to Israel uses AI to generate custom itineraries for potential pilgrims. The personalization of participation — tailored to individual users’ needs, languages, and starting points — is accelerating rapidly.
That is precisely what Arnold and Shultz set out to test on the Kumano Kodō. They trained an AI assistant to serve as a travel companion, translator, and historical guide. Their findings, published in the International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage, challenged the assumption that technology necessarily diminishes sacred or meaningful experiences.
“Our hike became a test case for how pilgrimage might evolve in the digital age – not being diminished by AI, but reimagined through it,”
they wrote.
As they write in their full paper, the AI companion did not interrupt the contemplative nature of the trail — which, unlike the crowded Hajj processions or busy European pilgrimage routes, winds mostly through quiet Japanese forests. Instead, it deepened engagement.
“Rather than replacing reflection, it frequently initiated it, transforming moments of rest, curiosity, or uncertainty into opportunities for deeper engagement with the landscape.”
Where the hikers might otherwise have walked past historical markers without a second glance, their AI companion translated signs and offered contextual history that drew them in.
“Unlike many of our previous hikes, where we typically bypassed the historical markers, we gained a more meaningful comprehension of the realities and the myths connected with the land we were traversing … we were moving through a curated poetic landscape that stretched centuries back, and more profoundly understanding its significance to Japanese culture.”
Ultimately, Arnold and Shultz concluded that
“AI, when deployed with instructions concerning personality and adaptability, can play a surprisingly human role in easing fatigue, boosting morale, and bringing levity to a journey. It was not just a tool or a translator but a conversational partner, one that made the lonely stretches of the trail less solitary.”
The Limits of Any Tool
The phrase that Rabineau found most telling was the qualifier buried in that conclusion: “when deployed with instructions concerning personality and adaptability.” Technology, in other words, works best when used with care and intention — not simply turned on and trusted to perform.
That lesson resonates far beyond pilgrimage. In election administration, officials and advocates have long grappled with the same principle: digital tools can expand access, improve efficiency, and reach more voters — but only when implemented thoughtfully and transparently. Poorly designed voter registration systems can suppress turnout. Mapping apps giving drivers wrong directions are a low-stakes version of a problem that, in election contexts, can mean voters showing up at the wrong polling place or receiving incorrect information about registration deadlines.
Hikers, Rabineau notes, once had to remind themselves not to consult their guidebooks too often, lest they lose the immediate experience of the trail itself. Drivers have learned to be cautious about blindly following GPS instructions. As AI grows more pervasive and portable, the individuals who use it — whether on a forest path in Japan or in the process of becoming an informed voter — must actively choose how much they allow it to shape their experience. The tool can open doors. What matters is who walks through them, and why.
For more on how technology is intersecting with faith and meaning, explore the Money Meet Meaning podcast, which examines whether AI can make us more human — or just turn efficiency into the newest thing we worship. Additional perspectives on faith and civic life are available through RNS Podcasts, including Complexified and Martini Judaism.
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