Don't Die: Somebody Just Made Up a New Religion, I Guess

What Bryan Johnson's religion of not dying tells us about ourselves

Photo by Mathew MacQuarrie on Unsplash

Contemporary people are weird about death. Even as we gain more tools to extend life, we’re also developing new ways to end life. We’re afraid and uncomfortable with death, in part, because we have lost our story of rebirth, of resurrection (this is what T.S. Eliot was on about in his great poem The Waste Land). As Christians, of course, we still have an answer to death; it has been conquered for us in Christ and we will rise again bodily. And so, while we mourn like Christ at Lazarus’s tomb, we don’t mourn like those who have no hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13). One way the contemporary weirdness about death appears is through a hope and striving that it will not ever come, embodied in figures like Bryan Johnson, who has just announced on Twitter (as one does in 2025) that he is “building” a “new religion” called “Don’t Die.” The premise of this “religion” is that the most important thing in life is existing, and this is true on an individual and collective level (the person, the Earth, the species). According to Johnson, this religion of not dying is “the grand unifying theory of existence.” And one of the great things about it is that it is perfectly measurable. You can download an app to track your own Don’t Die score. Of course there’s an app.

As I read Johnson’s thread outlining his newly built religion, it struck me that this was a religion perfectly designed for the contemporary world. It touches on each of the vulnerable spots of the modern person while leaving him or her (relatively) free from judgement. And yet, I’m confident that despite responding to the felt needs and anxieties of contemporary people, hardly anyone will take up Johnson’s call to be a “Don’t Die Citizen.” In fact, as of this writing, only 11,775 people have taken his religious pledge; his goal is a billion. This isn’t going viral. But why not? It could be because people think Johnson is too extreme, which is understandable. Or it could be that he’s not charismatic enough to start a religion. But I think the real reason is that contemporary people are too possessed by their lives and the flow of entertainment to pause and consider death, or in this case, not-death.

Johnson’s appeal has many points that should be attractive to contemporary people. For example, it addresses our fears about AI. Part of the goal of his religion is to align AI to the goal of extending human life and eventually “merging” with AI, which is how we will “beat death” (there’s always a story of rebirth; the only question is if it’s a good and true story). Here, AI is channeled toward positive human potential rather than being a force that undermines or destroys our civilization. That sounds nice. In addition, Johnson calls this religion a “game”: “Don’t Die is the universal game; the highest-order meaning-making game.” Contemporary people love to gamify everything, to assign points and rewards to everyday life. According to Johnson, that’s all life is: one epic game. And as I said earlier, everything can be assigned a value. This is important for us, because we love to be able to measure everything. Here again we find the power of technique at work. We want to maximize efficiency. In fact, we could go so far as to say that Johnson’s religion is technique as a religion. Assign everything a value, measure everything, maximize everything, and collectively we can outlast even entropy, which is the mask of death. Johnson promises that this system provides “a sturdy foundation for morals and ethics,” although he doesn’t say what that foundation is. “Not dying” and “not killing” doesn’t actually take us that far in ethics, which would be appealing to contemporary people who want to be free to pursue lifestyles of sexual freedom. Finally, where this religion does restrict us is helpful. It tells us what to “eat and drink.” One of the anxieties many people face comes from choice paralysis and decision fatigue. Johnson relieves us of that fatigue by making a choice for us.

All of this should be appealing to contemporary people. But as I said, I don’t think anyone will care. Johnson will continue to be viewed as a strange, fringe character on Twitter who has too much money and too much vanity. And I think there are a few reasons for this.

Some will be attracted to his techno-optimism, but just how AI will play out in the future, and our ability to “merge” with it remains highly speculative. I think the danger of the techno-optimists is that they have read too much science fiction (I love science fiction, to be clear), and they expect the future to unfold in a predictable, positive way. When reality is much much merkier than that. Technology brings with it all kinds of positives and negatives. The founders of Instagram didn’t set out to create a technology to destroy the body-image of teenage girls, but they did. Already we’re seeing some of the downsides to AI. Who knows what the unintended consequences will be once it really gets going? And who knows what the limits to it will be? Although there are some techno-optimists who have a utopian view of AI, I suspect a lot of people have mixed feelings about the technology.

In addition, aside from mass political/cultural movements driven by negative solidarity (“We’re against those people!”), I don’t see masses of people being moved today, which is to our shame. I think that most people just want to be left alone to do their own thing and live their life and get what pleasure out of it they can. They don’t want a philosophy of life. They don’t want a program. They don’t want an app. They don’t want a religion. They just want to be left alone and given enough resources to pursue their own happiness. They are apathetic. Of course, as I explored in You Are Not Your Own, this kind of autonomous individualism leaves people feeling alienated, anxious, empty, purposeless, and alone. We aren’t meant to each pursue our own private definition of happiness (which ends up being defined by marketers anyway). We’re designed to know God and enjoy him forever. So this apathy is unsatisfying, but to a lot of people the alternative is frightening: surrendering their autonomy to God. Johnson provides a third way: surrendering a small bit of your autonomy (some lifestyle choices) for the sake of living longer as an individual.

As I said, this ought to be appealing, but most people just aren’t that disciplined. Because one thing that Johnson’s plan does require is self-control. And that, I suppose, is the one area where he’s going against the grain of culture. It is self-mastery for the sake of a larger, more powerful Self, but it is still self-control, and we have been conditioned to abandon ourselves to our desires. “Building” a Spartan-like religion simply isn’t going to fly in a consumerist society.

And yet, something similar is demanded of us as Christians. No, we don’t have an app and we don’t measure everything and life is not a “game” and our goal is not to live as long as possible. But self-control is a Fruit of the Spirit. We should be mindful of what we eat and drink. We should be mindful of how we care for our bodies, which are temples of the Holy Spirit! Where Johnson seeks to preserve self daily, we are called to die to self daily.

But this leaves us with an alarming prospect. If Christianity demands self-control, and if Americans are opposed to self-control and just want to be left alone, does the gospel have any better of a chance than “Don’t Die”?

Of course my answer is “Yes!” For one, we have the Holy Spirit working in the lives of hearers. But it’s also the case that, despite Johnson’s insistence otherwise, “Don’t Die” does not provide meaning to life. “Don’t Die” is a description of life, not a meaning. It doesn’t tell us what this not-dying is for. And it doesn’t tell us when it would be appropriate to die. It doesn’t take that into account at all. But the gospel, with Christ’s crucifixion at the center, has always assumed that there are times when it is appropriate to die. The martyrs of the past and the present testify to this. As Paul writes in Philippians 1:21: “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” In the gospel there is a telos to our living and our dying. Part of the challenge before us is entering into the lives of people who are content to be discontent, living in anxiety and autonomy and rebellion from God, numb to themselves and in denial of their own souls. That is the topic of my first book, Disruptive Witness.

“Don’t Die” won’t go viral. But it serves as a marker of a culture that is afraid of death and lacks a meaningful story of rebirth. We have that story and it’s a true story. We need to share it with the world.