Wikipedia’s “neutral” voice masks a secular orthodoxy shaping how billions encounter religion through Google, AI, and voice assistants.
Newsroom (02/01/2026 Gaudium Press ) Wikipedia has become the invisible editor-in-chief of the digital age. Its millions of entries dominate Google search results, power Siri and Alexa, and seed training data for artificial-intelligence models. For billions of people, Wikipedia is not just a reference tool—it is the default authority on what is and is not true.
Yet, beneath the surface of this open-source project lies a subtler influence: a secular worldview shaping how the sacred is described, categorized, and often diminished. As one recent analysis observed, Wikipedia has become a kind of “digital magisterium,” a high priest of secularization. It governs the religious imaginations of modern life not by decree but by description.
The Rise of the “Wikivoice”
The cornerstone of this influence is Wikipedia’s institutional tone, known internally as the “Wikivoice.” Officially, it’s meant to assert uncontroversial facts in a neutral register. In practice, it often operates as a theological filter—determining what counts as fact and what must be relegated to “myth.”
Take the article on Yahweh, the God of Israel. The entry begins by characterizing Yahweh as an “ancient Semitic deity of climate and war,” effectively recasting the foundation of Jewish and Christian monotheism as a local tribal god. Or consider the “Genesis creation narrative,” which opens by calling the biblical account of creation a “myth,” defined as a “symbolic narrative of how the world began.” For believers, these are not folkloric curiosities but sacred truths.
Such framing reveals what one might call the neutrality paradox: Wikipedia’s tone of objectivity is so confident, it often leaves no room for the believer’s voice.
When Skepticism Becomes Dogma
There is, of course, nothing controversial about analyzing sacred texts through a secular lens. Biblical criticism and historical analysis have been staples of scholarship for centuries. The problem arises when these interpretations—rooted in an academic, secular worldview—are presented as objective fact.
The entry on the Septuagint, for example, explains that scholars “agree” the ancient Greek Bible was written by Jews in the Ptolemaic kingdom, while the traditional account of 72 translators working in unity is labeled a “Jewish legend.” One narrative is tagged as history, the other as folklore.
What emerges is not a neutral encyclopedia but a theology of secular humanism—an epistemic hierarchy in which faith is treated as anthropology and belief as myth.
The GASP Worldview
Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s co-founder, has given this drift a name: the GASP worldview—Global, Academic, Secular, and Progressive. It’s not that this perspective shouldn’t exist, but that it has quietly become the default. When GASP becomes the operating system of the Internet, the line between scholarship and creed begins to blur.
The machinery behind this shift is both intellectual and structural. The intellectual engine is “biblical criticism,” a discipline explicitly designed to understand Scripture without reference to the supernatural. Structurally, Wikipedia’s immense footprint means that interpretations written by a few editors can shape how billions see religion across the digital ecosystem.
Power in the Hands of the Few
Wikipedia’s transparency logs tell a revealing story. In many religion-related articles, a disproportionate amount of content comes from one or two editors. In one case, nearly the entire section on “biblical criticism” was written by a single contributor who declared on his profile that “dominant scholarship is defined by what is historically verifiable.” For subjects intersecting belief, that claim is not just methodological—it’s metaphysical.
In effect, a handful of anonymous volunteers now serve as the curators of digital orthodoxy. They are the unseen theologians of the web, presiding over what billions unknowingly absorb through search engines and chatbots calling on Wikipedia’s data.
The Case for Transparency
Critics propose a simple remedy: sunlight. Wikipedia could disclose when one editor has authored the majority of a major article or explicitly tag sections as representative of “critical-academic” perspectives. Downstream platforms—search engines, voice assistants, and AI models—could flag that the information originates from a particular interpretive framework rather than from a neutral script of truth.
The issue is not the existence of secular scholarship but its quiet enthronement as digital dogma. By presenting one worldview as universal fact, Wikipedia risks becoming less an encyclopedia than a creed—a catechism of modern rationalism disguised as neutrality.
When a handful of editors become the unseen priests of “Wikivoice,” neutrality is no longer freedom from ideology. It is ideology itself, written in the language of fact.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from UnHerd and INfoCatholica
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