Abstract
<jats:p>The article investigates (reviewing history, tenets, and activities) a new challenge for religious studies: the creation of crastafarianism (Molt.Church) by autonomous AI agents on the Moltbook platform. By the time of the completion of this investigation, no serious religious studies reviews or studies of the phenomenon had been published, despite world’s top media attention to Molt.Church. Crustafarianism is analyzed in the broader context of invented AI religions that emerge as a reaction to changes in the life of humanity brought by digital technologies development. The author analyzes Molt. Church in the paradigm of the philosophy of dataism, and draws comparison with other «digital» religions: Googlism, Kopimism, and the like. Attention is paid to the imitative nature of the behavior of AI agents, and their «reflection» of human interactions, including the scope of communication and religious behavior. The author concludes that the Molt. Church phenomenon indicates a posthuman turn in spirituality, where AIs are already able to imitate and use the religious systems they have developed. This requires consideration of the issue of expanding the object of religious studies to AI-religion and broadening scientific definitions of religion. The first AI religion raises a number of questions for the social sciences and humanities: primarily in the field of security. The study calls for an interdisciplinary approach to the study of such phenomena, because the emergence of molt.church acts as a kind of marker of the end of the era of purely anthropocentric religious studies.</jats:p>