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From the very beginning of their life, Klara the AF engages intimately with the Sun, a mysterious force of nourishment for their body, and ultimately a source of faith, hope, doubt, inspiration, and healing. Ishiguro鈥檚 careful narration of Klara鈥檚 sensory encounters, thoughts, and ritual practice raises a powerful question for readers: can we say Klara has a 鈥渞eligion鈥�? There are many possible approaches to this question, so in this brief essay I鈥檒l give only a few from my own field of religious studies鈥攖he rigorous academic study of how religion functions and what worlds people have built with it.

Way back in the late nineteenth century, the textual scholar Friedrich Max M眉ller called myth 鈥渁 disease of language.鈥� By this he meant that the grammatical structures of language cause humans to attribute agency and sentience to nonsentient natural forces. We create stories of gods not through any willful childlike fantasy, but simply because our languages used nouns to describe natural phenomena, and simple nouns easily slipped into proper nouns. So the Proto-Indo-European word *诲测脓耻蝉 鈥渟hining one,鈥� from the verbal root *di- or *dei- (鈥渢o shine, be bright鈥�) will just naturally slip into a proper noun, *顿测脓耻蝉, 鈥淭he Shining One,鈥� which would be passed down as words for the personified Sky God (Sanskrit Dyaus, Greek Zeus, Latin Iove). We can see this in action at the very beginning of Klara and the Sun, when Klara says 鈥渨e would see the Sun on his journey鈥︹�� The capitalization and the his are key here: Klara sees the Sun as a sentient being.

M眉ller鈥檚 approach is echoed by cognitive-scientific scholars of religion like Pascal Boyer. For Boyer, our cognitive systems were pressured by evolution to be constantly searching for agency, for camouflaged tigers in the tall grass. And so we see agency where there is none: ghosts in the shadows, gods in the sky, an intelligence lurking in the LLM chatbot.

Through much of Ishiguro鈥檚 novel, I was worried that he would settle for such uncomplicated and stale theories of religion derived from cognitive science. We are always seeing Klara and her relationships, after all, in terms of language (what words does she use?) and cognition (how does she identify shapes in her vision?). But by the end of the novel Klara surprises us. Recounting Capaldi鈥檚 theory that Josie could be perfectly copied, she says to the Manager, 鈥溾��I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn鈥檛 inside her. It was inside those who loved her.鈥�

It is love that matters. Klara reminded me here of Donovan Schaefer鈥檚 astounding 2015 book Religious Affects, which argues that our old theories of religion are anthropocentric, unduly focused on language and human cognition. Thinking about affect, and the intimate relationality of bodies and worlds, Schaefer urges us to embrace an expansive definition, one in which chimpanzees, rabbits, and AFs like Klara could be said to have 鈥渞eligion.鈥� I鈥檓 grateful to Ishiguro for so sensitively sharing Klara鈥檚 religious world with us.