I recently watched a Netflix documentary (Don’t Die, 2025) about Bryan Johnson, a Silicon Valley tech guru taking the biohacking movement to an extreme. Biohacking involves various lifestyle changes, including diet and use of advanced technologies, to extend the human lifespan, all in the pursuit of becoming immortal. The filmmakers parallel Johnson’s exit from his Mormon faith with this newfound “religion of the body.” He indeed believes he has found a religion—one that frees him from burdensome thinking and questioning in favor of mechanistically doing whatever his body “tells” him. His body becomes his god. In his own words, “Our minds, which we think are our primary tools of problem-solving, are actually the source of our self-destructive behaviors. So, I would argue, the mind is dead.”[1]
For Johnson, this means shutting down independent thinking in favor of following an algorithmic determination of daily bodily needs; he performs over 100 tasks to reach his body’s “ideal state.”[2] Further, beneath this ritualistic form of worship is the philosophical and quasi-religious ideology that existence is the ultimate virtue. Bryan ends the search for meaning outside of himself and internalizes it to such an extent that he literally lives to live longer.
Contrast this with the New Testament concept of renewing the mind. While New Testament authors indeed recognize the reality of “futile thinking” and “darkened understanding” (Eph 4:17-18), they never call time-of-death on the human heart. Rather, we’re urged to offer our bodies as living sacrifices (Rom 12:1), humbly serving for the good of the Christian community (vv. 3–8), loving what is good, hating what is evil, practicing hospitality, rejoicing with those who rejoice, mourning with those who mourn, etc. (vv. 9–21). In other words, biblical authors exhort New Testament believers to renew their minds by feeling, valuing, and acting in particular ways.
This optimistic approach to the human mind imbues us with hope for continued purpose beyond such an empty thing as sheer existence. For those who follow Christ, this highlights the power of regeneration and the confidence found in being saved not just from separation from God, but also for continual growth in all aspects of being human in relationship with God, the world, and with humankind; for rightly ordered loves. However, even for those outside of the Christian faith, common grace[3] imbues all of humanity with the capacity to pursue what is good and to experience human meaning-making beyond the self.
Thus, as a much better person to emulate, Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) offers a fictional depiction of a mind that is renewed and renewing. The 2024 film Small Things Like These[4] is centered around the true story of the Irish Magdalene Laundries, workplace “asylums” for young girls deemed sexually promiscuous, orphaned, or seen as socially abnormal by the Roman Catholic Church. Rather than being places of physical and spiritual care, the laundries were horror houses of forced slave labor, abuse, and neglect. A gravesite at the Dublin laundry revealed 155 young women who had died while in the care of the nuns from the convent.[5]
Bill Furlong is the son of a woman much like these girls, his own father never having been present in his life. Bill and his developing awareness of the Magdalene laundries form the central theme of the film. The film’s creators make a strategic choice to provide only small hints of the horrors happening behind closed doors. By this, they allow the viewer to develop his or her own awareness alongside Bill—to never quite know, but to feel that something is terribly wrong. By this, they take viewers on a journey with him, inviting them to think and feel after him and to potentially come to the same conclusion: that compassion is greater than self-preservation and truth is more important than comfort. They do this in three key ways.
Director Tim Mielants first invites the audience to join in the monotony of Bill’s ordinary life. Participating in a responsive reading in church, washing his hands, shoveling coal, and lying awake at night are all offered as opportunities for him to think, to feel, and to worry. Whereas his wife (Eileen Walsh) struggles to see beyond the concerns of their immediate family, Bill worries whether Mick Sinnot’s boy has enough food to eat. The camera often focuses on his emotional responses to the scenes before him. These are the small internal things that propel him to act. Bill mourns with those who mourn. Whereas biohacker Bryan crafts a daily routine that frees him from the burden of thinking, Bill submits the mundane aspects of his life to think and feel in light of a God who is “compassion and love, slow to anger and rich in mercy” (Ps 108:3).[6]
Second, the filmmakers parallel Bill’s current experiences with equivalent or contrasting past ones. In these quiet moments of Bill thinking, he often returns to similar events that shaped his present worldview. When he sees manipulative interactions between men and women, his mind wanders back to when he witnessed genuine love. When he sees human suffering, he’s brought back to his own experience of extreme loss and is driven towards empathy. When he meets a young girl from the laundries who reminds him of his mother, he remembers the people who made his mother’s experience so different from hers. Bill is someone who has suffered much, but he has tasted both love and loss, and he pursues being someone who loves others now. These are the small external things that have shaped him to love what is good and so to hate what is evil. Bryan finds the reduction of life to sheer existence as the only solution to the existential suffering he experiences. Bill uses his experiences of both suffering and restoration as avenues for developing in virtue—for rightly oriented affections and actions that stem from this.
Thus, these small internal and external things are intertwined to lead Bill to make small choices of his own. When he first meets Sarah (Zara Devlin), a young girl who begs him to take her away from the laundries, Bill doesn’t quite understand the situation, but he allows himself to be alarmed. In case she is in real danger, he tells her his name and where she can find him. Sarah plagues his thoughts. He is taken on the journey that is the film because he refuses to allow her to be out of sight, out of mind. Once he becomes convinced of her situation, he chooses hospitality in a way that pits him against the power of the Roman Catholic Church and incurs social stigma for him and his family. I won’t tell you what he does. I hope that you’ll watch the movie yourself. However, more than anything, I hope you’ll accept the invitation to participate in small things like these, the same as Bill Furlong, the same as we’re called to do as those shaped by the love of Christ.
Living in a world brimming with brokenness, sin, and injustice is not an easy task. Bryan’s bodily worship works as a form of escapism that fills his days with a socially isolating regimen that provides a false sense of control. Yet, as Katie Drummond points out, Bryan Johnson is going to die.[7] New Testament authors exhort Christ followers to do more than merely exist and escape the suffering happening in the world while we wait for that same day. Rather, the hope of the gospel imbues us with the courage to be a part of restoration in this life while we wait for our final resurrection hope. As those working in Christian bioethics, we seek to think ethically and theologically about the body, such that we’ll steward this bodily existence well in imitation of Christ, faithfulness to God, pursuit of being human well, and using our embodied presence to be restorative in the world around us. As this piece hopefully evidences, this should not be the task of academics alone, but a shared mission with the church as a whole.
References
[1] Bryan Johnson, quoted in Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, directed by Chris Smith (Netflix, January 1, 2025).
[2] McKenzie Beard, “Bryan Johnson’s 14-Step Morning Routine for Anti-Aging—Including 91 Pills, a Hair Growth Cap, and Drinking a ‘Green Giant,’” New York Post, January 13, 2025, https://nypost.com/2025/01/13/health/bryan-johnson-14-step-morning-routine-for-anti-aging-including-91-pills/.
[3] Common grace is understood as God’s giving of good things to all of humanity. Thus, even post-fall, God sustains the world, saves people from the effects of sin, transforms individuals and cultures, and uses those outside of the faith to accomplish his purposes. For more on this concept, see Gayle Doornbos “Common Grace for the Common Good: Shaping our Theology of Work,” Logos: Word by Word, April 3, 2025, https://www.logos.com/grow/hall-common-grace-theology-work/#h-common-grace-meets-the-fall.
[4] Small Things Like These, directed by Tim Mileants (Big Things Films and Wilder Content, February 21, 2024). The film is based on the novel by Claire Keegan: Small Things Like These (Grove Press, 2021).
[5] Rene Ostberg, “Magdalene Laundry,” Encyclopedia Britannica, September 6, 2025, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Magdalene-laundry.
[6] Note that this is the version of the text Sister Mary (Emily Watson) reads in the church recitation scene.
[7] Katie Drummond, “Bryan Johnson Is Going to Die,” Wired, July 21, 2025, https://www.wired.com/story/big-interview-bryan-johnson/.