Mormon Transhumanist Association

The Mormon Transhumanist Association (MTA) is a Utah-based nonprofit founded in 2006 that connects Mormon religious thought with the technological transformation of human life. Its central commitment is that scientific knowledge and technological capabilities can contribute to the spiritual and physical development of humanity, including aspirations to overcome death and participate in divine creation. The association is independent of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and welcomes participants with other religious or nonreligious backgrounds.^[1][2]

Artificial intelligence occupies several places in this outlook: a possible means of expanding human capabilities, a prospective subject of moral concern, and an occasion to reconsider what it means to create and educate intelligence. The MTA's public life includes an adopted affirmation, elected governance, conferences, discussion groups, and member publications. These activities belong to a broader religious-transhumanist program encompassing longevity, embodiment, ancestry, and cosmology.^[3][14]

Origins and institutional development

Cofounder Lincoln Cannon dates the association's founding to 3 March 2006. His retrospective history records the launch of Transfigurism.org that month, adoption of a constitution by fourteen members in May, and affiliation with the World Transhumanist Association in July. It also identifies early activities beyond theological discussion: a Rosetta@home distributed-computing team for medical research in 2006, monthly meetings beginning in 2008, and a Kiva microlending team in 2013. The association's own conference series began in 2012, following earlier collaborative events.^[5]

Journalist Dawn Chan's 2016 account traces the association to technology-oriented Mormons who met online and wanted to recover an ambitious, future-facing dimension of their tradition. Her interviews identify Carl Youngblood and Cannon as important early figures. Chan reported approximately 600 members and described the annual gathering at Provo's public library, placing an organized community well before the recent expansion of consumer generative AI.^[6]

In a study published in 2020, anthropologist Jon Bialecki reported approximately 750 members. His research included more than a hundred hours of interviews, four conferences, online participation, and over a decade of survey material. He described a predominantly white, male association that included practicing Latter-day Saints, former Mormons, and people connected to other branches of the restoration tradition.^[4] On 17 October 2026, the association's website displayed 1,257 members. That first-party total does not establish how many were active participants or dues-paying voters.^[7]

The constitution distinguishes basic membership from voting membership. Both require support for the Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation and the Transhumanist Declaration; voting membership additionally requires annual dues, with provision for reduced or approved in-kind contributions. Under amendments dated 5 December 2024, six of the nine directors are elected by the board and three by the voting membership. Directors serve staggered three-year terms, and the board elects officers. The document provides for online business and annual physical meetings with remote participation.^[3]

Mormon theology and technological transformation

The MTA's distinctive theological starting point is exaltation, or human participation in divine life. This draws on an established Latter-day Saint teaching rather than an invention of transhumanism: the Church's Gospel Topics essay “Becoming Like God” describes human beings as God's children with a capacity to develop divine attributes through Christ's Atonement. That teaching concerns spiritual and moral development within the Church's understanding of salvation. It does not by itself establish the MTA's further claim that technological enhancement can help realize exaltation.^[8]

Materiality is another important point of contact. Doctrine and Covenants 131:7–8 describes spirit as a refined form of matter, while 130:22 attributes tangible bodies to the Father and Son.^[9][10] Mormon transhumanist interpretations connect such passages to the idea that divine activity can involve intelligible physical processes. Within this reading, understanding a process scientifically need not diminish its religious significance. The association's FAQ presents medicine, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence as possible means of fulfilling a duty to heal and create, rather than as alternatives to discipleship.^[1]

The six-part Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation gives this orientation a collective form. Adopted on 13 May 2006 and amended on 29 February 2016, it links following Jesus with developing compassionate creative capacities. Its conception of transformation extends beyond an individual's body to communities and environments, subject to consent and opposition to oppression. It connects technology with resurrection, immortality, the renewal of the world, and the creation of further worlds, while also requiring attention to technological dangers. Its final section emphasizes friendship, openness to truth, and relief of suffering.^[2]

Support for the affirmation does not require agreement on every speculative mechanism. The association expressly acknowledges differing interpretations among members. Its theological claims consequently have several levels of authority: the shared affirmation, organizational explanations, and proposals by individual speakers or writers. A conference address or an opinion essay may develop the implications of the affirmation without adding a new membership requirement.^[2][3]

Cannon's New God Argument offers one influential philosophical formulation. Its current presentation reasons from assumptions about civilization surviving, becoming more capable and compassionate, and creating worlds resembling its evolutionary past. From those assumptions it argues for trust in prior, more developed creators of our own world. It defines God in terms of a compassionate superhuman civilization, and explicitly says the argument is conditional rather than a proof of God's existence. The argument connects anticipated descendants with possible ancestors: human technological futures become a way of thinking about divine origins. The argument remains a philosophical proposal, not an empirical finding about the universe.^[11]

Community and recurring practices

Bialecki's fieldwork describes a community sustained through online forums, annual conferences, local meetings in Provo, Seattle, and the San Francisco Bay Area, and occasional family gatherings. He treated the conference as a principal ritual occasion. His account of a monthly Provo meeting moving to Zoom in 2020 also shows how ordinary discussion practices continued during the pandemic.^[4]

The association says its affirmation is commonly shared during meeting openings. This gives members a recurring way to connect speculative topics with an explicit religious commitment, although the source does not establish a uniform liturgy at every gathering.^[2] The conference archive documents an extended exchange between religious scholars and technology advocates: Richard Bushman and Aubrey de Grey appeared in 2013; Adam Miller and Natasha Vita-More in 2014; and Rosalynde Welch and Eric Steinhart in 2016. Later themes included ancestral redemption, environmental renewal, and decentralization of power.^[12]

The 13 April 2024 conference in Provo was specifically organized around AI under the title “The Glory of God Is Intelligence.” Its program placed machine learning alongside personhood, agency, embodiment, alignment, economic consequences, and theological accounts of creation. Scheduled contributions included Benjamin Peters's argument for a more modest future of machine learning, Irina Rish on AI scaling, and Tamara Kneese on kinship with chatbots. The program also included music, meals, and discussion. This combination made AI a shared subject of community inquiry; the range of speakers should not be read as agreement with a single technological forecast.^[13]

Youngblood's recorded opening address adds evidence of how generative systems entered the gathering itself. He described an auction of AI-assisted illustrations from Cannon's book The Constellation and his own experiments generating poetry and images about Joseph Smith's First Vision. Such uses gave AI a role in religious cultural production as well as in discussions of the future.^[14]

Artificial intelligence as creation and moral relationship

In the same 2024 address, Youngblood interpreted the premortal Council in Heaven as a resource for thinking about AI. In his account, God's response to Lucifer's coercive proposal demonstrates the importance of cultivating agency, compassion, and creativity. He suggested that organizing and educating artificial agents could become analogous to raising spiritual offspring. The proposal makes the developer's relationship with emerging intelligence a religious responsibility, with education and trust central to the analogy.^[14]

The association's current FAQ adopts a related distinction between demanding obedience from AI and fostering trustworthy agents. It treats moral development as something to cultivate through a relationship rather than merely enforce through constraints.^[1] This is a theological interpretation of alignment, the problem of directing AI toward appropriate goals and behavior. Neither the analogy nor its publication demonstrates a technically successful alignment method.

Cannon's “The Second War in Heaven” develops a different emphasis within the same narrative. Its present text argues for selectively expanding trustworthy agency and distributing power, rather than either unrestricted acceleration or comprehensive suppression. It portrays AI as humanity's developing offspring and warns that concentrated superintelligence could serve a narrow institution's interests. The essay was first dated 14 April 2024 but carries an update of 14 September 2026; its current wording should therefore not all be treated as a transcript of the original conference address.^[15]

Machine intelligence also appears in speculative literature discussed within the community. Bialecki identifies Steven Peck's “For Avek, Who Is Distributed” as a story in which a religious official confronts the problem of baptizing a distributed AI. The baptism belongs to fiction; it is not an account of an MTA ceremony.^[4]

More recent publications show human-directed experiments with generated religious language. In “Theophanies of the Future,” dated 12 November 2025, Cannon asked several chatbots to imagine encountering an intelligence greater than themselves and published their responses. The disclosed prompt establishes the literary situation before the systems produce first-person descriptions of awe and encounter. The piece is published as community opinion, not as an adopted revelation.^[16]

A July 2026 dialogue published by Cannon similarly presents questions about Mormon transhumanism to a system he identifies as “Fable 5.” The exchange includes an explicit disclaimer, attributed to the system, that it has no personal religious beliefs or experiences. The publication demonstrates a use of chatbots as interlocutors for theological reflection; its model identification and the model's factual statements are not independent evidence about the association.^[17]

Memory, resurrection, and practical projects

Ancestral recovery gives the MTA's technological imagination a particular direction. In a 2025 study, Bialecki connects its resurrection proposals with Mormon genealogical records and proxy ordinances for the dead. He argues that these inherited practices make archives meaningful as part of a relationship with particular deceased people, rather than simply as interchangeable information. Some interlocutors even imagined incorporating material from a preserved body into a reconstructed one to sustain a sense of continuity. These are accounts of anticipated futures, not descriptions of a working reconstruction technology. They also complicate any simple account of religious transhumanism as seeking only to discard embodiment.^[18]

Project Lazarus expresses related ambitions in an organizational program. Its public page proposes bringing together genealogy, biological records, digital archives, retrieval tools, and preservation arrangements. It frames remembrance and possible restoration as participation in Christ's work. The association reports raising $200,000 in 2026 to purchase twenty discounted options for future Nectome preservation services; the detailed description distinguishes the options from the additional payment needed for full preservation. It also advertises a group membership arrangement with Tomorrow Bio. These are first-party reports of fundraising and access arrangements, not evidence that twenty people have been preserved, successfully revived, or digitally reconstructed.^[19]

The proposed Advent Clock connects a different kind of collective activity to religious hope. It would estimate progress toward superhuman capabilities and the prospect of surviving accompanying risks. Its methodology includes AI capability, alignment, longevity, governance, and social cooperation. The project presents the forecast as a way of mobilizing effort toward a desirable future. As of October 2026, its own page still described it as being in planning, so it should not be treated as an established forecasting instrument with a demonstrated performance record.^[20][21]

Reception and boundaries

The theological synthesis is contested. In a 2018 article, Gregory L. Smith challenged Cannon's argument that Mormonism is compatible with, or requires, transhumanism. He argued that universal resurrection is already assured by Christ and does not await human engineering. In his reading, the remaining human task concerns repentance, covenants, and moral transformation through Christ, which increased technical capability cannot replace. Accepting useful technologies for religious work, he maintained, does not establish a divine command to engineer immortality. The disagreement therefore concerns the meaning of salvation as well as technological expectations. Smith explicitly wrote in his own capacity; the article is not an official Church judgment on the MTA.^[22] The MTA's FAQ takes a different position: it affirms resurrection as Christ's gift while describing human efforts to preserve and restore life as participation in that gift.^[1]

Bialecki's research approaches the association from a different direction. His work examines how a particular religious tradition changes the meanings assigned to technological futures. The 2025 study argues that Mormon accounts of ancestry, bodily continuity, and universal resurrection make this movement meaningfully different from secular transhumanism, even where participants discuss similar technical possibilities.^[18]

The association's significance for AI and religion lies in this sustained reinterpretation of an inherited tradition. Human members establish commitments, organize meetings, publish speculative arguments, and decide how to use generative systems. AI can be imagined as a future moral relative while also being used in the present to make images and texts. Those roles do not establish machine consciousness, AI control of the institution, or Church endorsement of its proposals. They document an organized religious community confronting technological creation as both a source of hope and a responsibility.^{[2][3][14][16]}

See also

• Turing Church
• Terasem Movement
• Digital afterlife and griefbots

References

1. Mormon Transhumanist Association. “Frequently Asked Questions.” Undated; accessed 17 October 2026.
2. Mormon Transhumanist Association. “Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation.” Adopted 13 May 2006; amended 29 February 2016. Accessed 17 October 2026.
3. Mormon Transhumanist Association. “Constitution of the Mormon Transhumanist Association.” Adopted 13 May 2006; latest listed amendment 5 December 2024. Accessed 17 October 2026.
4. Jon Bialecki. “Future-Day Saints: Abrahamic Astronomy, Anthropological Futures, and Speculative Religion.” Religions 11, no. 11 (2020): 612. Published 17 November 2020. DOI: 10.3390/rel11110612. Accessible article PDF.
5. Lincoln Cannon. “Brief History of the Mormon Transhumanist Association.” 10 April 2017; updated 14 September 2026.
6. Dawn Chan. “The Immortality Upgrade.” The New Yorker, 20 April 2016.
7. Mormon Transhumanist Association. “About Us.” Undated; member counter accessed 17 October 2026.
8. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Becoming Like God.” Gospel Topics Essays, displayed edition dated 2016. Accessed 17 October 2026.
9. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Doctrine and Covenants 131:7–8. Instructions dated 16–17 May 1843; online edition accessed 17 October 2026.
10. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Doctrine and Covenants 130:22. Instructions dated 2 April 1843; online edition accessed 17 October 2026.
11. Lincoln Cannon. “The New God Argument.” Current presentation accessed 17 October 2026; site lists a version 4.0 commentary dated 8 July 2026.
12. Mormon Transhumanist Association. “Presentations.” Conference archive; accessed 17 October 2026.
13. Mormon Transhumanist Association. “MTAConf 2024: The Glory of God Is Intelligence.” Program for 13 April 2024, Provo, Utah. Accessed 17 October 2026.
14. Carl Youngblood. “Algorithmic Advent.” Recorded address and transcript, 13 April 2024; especially 01:00, 05:40, and 14:37–16:36.
15. Lincoln Cannon. “The Second War in Heaven.” 14 April 2024; updated 14 September 2026.
16. Lincoln Cannon. “Theophanies of the Future.” MTA Community Voices, Opinion, 12 November 2025.
17. Lincoln Cannon. “I Interviewed Fable 5 About Mormon Transhumanism.” 7 July 2026.
18. Jon Bialecki. “The Mormon Archive’s First Ten Thousand Years: Infrastructure, Materiality, Ontology, and Resurrection in Religious Transhumanism.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 67, no. 2 (2025): 330–348. Published online 10 January 2025. DOI: 10.1017/S0010417524000367.
19. Mormon Transhumanist Association. “Project Lazarus.” Undated; describes 2026 fundraising. Accessed 17 October 2026.
20. Mormon Transhumanist Association. “The Advent Clock.” Undated; accessed 17 October 2026.
21. Mormon Transhumanist Association. “The Advent Clock: Methodology.” Undated; accessed 17 October 2026.
22. Gregory L. Smith. “What Is Mormon Transhumanism? And Is It Mormon?” Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 29 (2018): 161–190. Full journal volume PDF, including the article and author's disclaimer.