While purporting to be religion-friendly, CBS’s recently canceled God Friended Me glorified New Age notions, particularly a form of transhumanism. A Silicon Valley religion based on eugenics, transhumanism would improve humans by prolonging life, augmenting intelligence and enhancing biology with artificial intelligence, using computer algorithms.

In the TV series, a young and personable atheist, Miles Finer (Brandon Michael Hall), who happens to be the son of a prominent Harlem minister (Joe Morton) receives “friend suggestion” messages on his cell phone from a mysterious “God account.” He soon learns that he is expected to help out those people under difficult, wrenching and life-changing circumstances, perhaps to save their lives or their health or their livelihoods or their relationships with loved ones. Some of those who assist him to help others become dear friends and trusted fellow travelers. These include Rakesh (Suraj Sharma), a computer genius of Muslim background, and Cara (Violett Beame), an investigative reporter.

An avowed atheist, alienated from religion after his mother’s early death from being run over by a drunk driver after surviving cancer, Miles refuses to believe that there is anything divine about the “friending” messages, even though he repeatedly witnesses how accurate and effective and transformative they are. So, he and his friends embark on a quest to discover the source of the salvic computer algorithm, even as they are bringing comfort and assistance to the designated individuals. In an episode about an atheist thinker finding God, writer Jessica Granger suggests that the God Account could be a “massive military experiment.”

Miles operates a podcast from his home in which he reports on his adventures and on his quest to discover the originator of the God Account. His defiant approach bucks any authority that might guide the messages or assignments. Still, that skepticism adds a credibility and trust factor to the interaction between Miles and his wards.  Brandon Michael Hall’s Miles is so winsome and pleasant that one cannot help believing that strangers would open up to him. Indeed, the series is well-cast with likable actors.

But God Friended Me does more than provide moving tales of people being helped through emotional and physical and spiritual hurdles. Yes, a lot of the writing was moving, though perhaps in a manipulative way, given the sweet, neatly wrapped episodes and their New Age biases. The show tried to please those who attended church on Sunday mornings as well as those who didn’t. It spoke in the language of the church, even citing scriptural verses, but it seemed preoccupied with other realms and matrices.

Indeed, God Friended Me was the latest in a tradition of CBS series that played to the churched while preaching to the unchurched: Touched by An Angel, Eli Stone, Joan of Arcadia, Person of Interest and Living Biblically.

God Friended Me was a cross between Joan of Arcadia and Person of Interest.  Joan of Arcadia was preoccupied with a god who assumed (or commandeered?) different human forms in order to communicate with a chosen teenager, and Person of Interest postulated a super computer (actually, two competing ones) that could anticipate pain and crime and crisis by operating through longstanding public utilities grid apparati. In the name of civil liberties, Person of Interest rejected the deification or the glorification of artificial intelligence.

God Friended Me apotheosized its computer program while pretending not to do so. It featured a corporation which, as writer Andre Edmonds put it, could form a new division to develop the first app that can not only monitor someone’s financial identity, but that can analyze and identify potential fraud before it happens.  The God of the monotheistic religions often appears limited (especially in some modern theologies which prefer a non-omnipotent deity) because that God leaves human beings free to make moral decisions on the basis of revealed guidance. But this show posited a basic app that can prevent immoral acts -- thus one-upping the biblical God?

 Even more startling was the suggestion, by writers Lara Azzopardi and Devanshi Patel, that a computer programmer named Henry Chase (“Falcon”) could create an algorithm that, with “enough information,” could prevent events before they happen. Chase’s sister had been killed in an accident and he therefore turned to “predictive analysis” to prevent such heartbreak in the future.

Thus, “faith” as defined by this series entailed both controlling the future technologically and preparing for the future psychologically -- a multisided self-help approach.

Writer Robert Hull had Miles’s Episcopal minister father impart to his son early in the first season: “Faith is not just about religion, but about believing in what you’re doing, about helping people,” and about friendship. Faith is “your belief that you are making a difference in the world.”

Hull also had Rev. Finer tell Miles that he would rather that father and son would commune together with God and not a god account. “Your mother used to say that anything that makes you smile is God. In all my years as a reverend I haven’t heard a better definition of what I believe.” So, God is anything that makes you smile? This is the wisdom of a minister appointed bishop?

At times Hull paid lip service to skepticism regarding New Age people. Regarding a celebrated self-help guru, he has Miles observe: “It’s sad that people actually buy into this stuff.” He even has Rakesh quip about “two people taking orders from an internet deity.”  Even so, from the start, the series took a definite New Age turn with talk about how “the universe is trying to tell us, me, you something” and “soul mates.”

Hull’s “theological” observations extended to the penultimate episode. (4-26-2020). Rakesh is able to save the God Account because he has based his Soulmate Dating App on its algorithm. Miles concludes that the true miracle is not a burning bush or the parting of a sea, but “the miracle we create ourselves,” that “we’re able to give to one another” the miracle that changes lives in a profound way. “As long as I’m doing good,” he says, “it doesn’t matter who’s whispering in my ear,” whether God or a secret artificial intelligence computer project. But the series was so intrigued with the promise of artificial intelligence that it suggested time and time again that super computers were not only an enhancement of human powers, but of divine powers.

Writer Steven Lilien closed the series on a note of deliberate ambiguity. While the family hopes that cancer surgery will restore the health of Miles’s sister Ali, his father exhorts Miles to pray for Ali and for the family to get through their ordeal because “Prayer is action.”  Ali had wanted Miles to bring her mother’s Bible, but only so he would find a letter she had written to him, just in case she died, telling him not to lose his sense of wonder and to keep his heart open to all possibilities. Like faith, prayer here is an exercise in possibility thinking.

In the final episode, a teen claims that while in a coma he was instructed by an angel. He knows things that he could not possibly have known. It is then discovered that his grandfather visited him and told the comatose lad these things. But he still knew one thing that the grandfather had not told him. It would seem that the series hedged its bets between the spiritual benefits of angels and those of computers. It featured church interiors consistently. In the end, however, it sent Miles off to the Himalayas on a spiritual quest, invoking a New Age scenario while heralding the transhumanist dream of artificial intelligence enhancing both God and people.