Technology has always changed the way people participate in shared practices — whether they’re casting a ballot, attending a house of worship, or walking a centuries-old pilgrimage trail. When new tools reshape how communities engage with their most meaningful rituals, it raises urgent questions about access, authenticity, and trust that extend well beyond any single tradition.
That tension sits at the heart of a recent experiment on Japan’s ancient Kumano Kodō trail, where two scholars of religion completed a multiday pilgrimage — guided, in part, by artificial intelligence. Their experience offers a window into how technology reshapes collective human practices, a conversation with direct parallels to how digital tools are transforming civic life and democratic participation.
In 2025, researchers Wayne E. Arnold and John A. Shultz set out along the Kumano Kodō, an ancient route in Japan that connects Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. They trained an AI companion on a smartphone to help with translation and navigation — and to test how the technology would shape the experience of the sacred journey itself.
As they wrote later in the International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage:
“Our hike became a test case for how pilgrimage might evolve in the digital age – not being diminished by AI, but reimagined through it.”
The question of whether technology diminishes or enhances meaningful participation is one that resonates far beyond religious practice. From online voter registration to AI-assisted civic tools, communities across the country are grappling with the same core issue: when powerful new tools enter a shared practice, who benefits, who gets left behind, and does public trust in the institution hold?
A Practice That Has Always Adapted
Shay Rabineau, an associate professor at Binghamton University who has studied trails both ancient and modern and undertaken significant journeys on foot in the Middle East, argues that pilgrimage has never been static. From the Hebrew Bible’s command for journeys to Jerusalem three times a year, coinciding with agricultural festivals, to the early Christians who undertook spiritual journeys to places mentioned in the Gospels under Roman persecution, the practice has always evolved alongside the tools and conditions of the era.
In medieval Europe, traveling to Jerusalem was often regarded as a death sentence — the barriers to participation were nearly absolute. Meanwhile, after the rise of Islam in the seventh century C.E., Muslims began undertaking the annual Hajj to Mecca, creating sweeping pilgrimage and trade networks across North Africa and Southwest Asia. Steamship travel in the 19th century and air travel in the 20th century transformed the Hajj dramatically, all but replacing the long overland routes and making the journey accessible to far more people — though the nature of the experience changed significantly in the process.
That pattern — technology expanding access while altering the character of participation — is one that democratic institutions know well. The introduction of the secret ballot, mail-in voting, and online voter registration each reshaped who could participate and how, raising analogous questions about whether something essential was gained or lost.
Information Technology and the Power to Shape Access
Long before transportation shrank the physical distances of pilgrimage, information technology was already shaping who could participate and how safely. After Christianity was legalized in fourth-century Rome, the first written travel itineraries began to appear — practical guides that made the journey to the Holy Land navigable for ordinary travelers. A female pilgrim named Egeria and an anonymous traveler known as the Bordeaux Pilgrim produced early guidebooks that helped transform Christian pilgrimage from an informal, dangerous undertaking into something more structured and widely accessible. Helena, mother of Byzantine Emperor Constantine, further institutionalized the practice by commissioning shrines including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
Then came the printing press — and with it, a revolution in access. In 1486, Bernhard von Breydenbach published the Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam, the first widely available guide to Holy Land pilgrimage, complete with woodcut maps and illustrations. Held today in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum, New York, the Latin guidebook was quickly translated into German, French, Dutch, and Spanish. By 1500, it had been reprinted at least a dozen times — democratizing access to information about the journey in a way that would have been unimaginable a generation earlier.
The pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain had already attracted enormous followings starting in the ninth century. Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales — whose pilgrims are depicted engaging in decidedly nonsacred behavior on their way to a shrine in England — captured how broadly participation in pilgrimage had spread across medieval society. Even Martin Luther, who famously wrote that pilgrimage was no longer a sacred activity, acknowledged its cultural hold. “All pilgrimages should be done away with,” he declared in 1520.
“For there is no good in them, no commandment, but countless causes of sin and of contempt of God’s commandments.”
Yet pilgrimage endured — adapting, not disappearing.
AI Enters the Picture — and Raises Familiar Questions
Today, smartphone apps are reshaping major pilgrimages in much the same way that guidebooks once did. In online app stores, travelers can find Hajj apps that enable travelers to use their phone cameras to see pop-up information as they move around Mecca — a form of augmented reality layered over one of the world’s oldest religious practices. Ahmad Gharabli/AFP via Getty Images has documented the growing role of technology among Hajj pilgrims. At least one platform built for Jewish and Christian visitors to Israel uses AI to generate custom itineraries for potential pilgrims.
Which is what makes the Kumano Kodō experiment so instructive. In contrast to the busy pilgrimage routes of Europe or the crowded processions of the Hajj, the Kumano trail runs through quiet forests where contemplation is central to the traditional experience. Yet Arnold and Shultz found that their AI companion enhanced rather than disrupted that spirit. As they write:
“Rather than replacing reflection, it frequently initiated it, transforming moments of rest, curiosity, or uncertainty into opportunities for deeper engagement with the landscape.”
The AI translated trail signs and surfaced historical context that the hikers would otherwise have missed.
“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.”
That qualifier — “when deployed with instructions concerning personality and adaptability” — carries weight. Technology works best in the service of human participation when it is used with care and clear intention. The same principle applies whether the practice in question is a pilgrimage through ancient forests or the act of voting. Drivers have learned to be wary of mapping apps that send them down closed roads. Pilgrims once had to remind themselves not to bury their faces in guidebooks at the expense of the journey itself. As AI becomes more pervasive, every community navigating technology-assisted participation — religious or civic — must actively choose the degree to which they allow it to shape their experience.
Technology, history suggests, will always arrive at the doorstep of our most important shared practices. The enduring question is not whether to engage with it, but how to do so in ways that expand rather than narrow access, deepen rather than dilute meaning, and strengthen rather than erode the public trust on which all shared institutions depend.
