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Sometimes the pope knows how to nail some theses to the door, too.
In his first encyclical, Pope Leo XIV articulated a message all human beings need to hear—a protest this Protestant can gladly join, against the tech-bro utopia on offer right now. On this matter, every Christian should listen to the pope—both in his warning and in his underlying hope. What’s at stake is the very meaning of the soul.
In Magnifica Humanitas, Leo contends that the accelerating speed of artificial intelligence is not just a technological development or a foreseeable economic crisis but a spiritual and civilizational test that forces us to face what it means to be human. And the danger, the pope rightly warns, is not so much that artificial intelligence will become too humanlike but that human beings will become more like machines.
The encyclical argues modern society is increasingly shaped by a “technocratic paradigm” that prizes efficiency, control, optimization, and power above human dignity, reducing people to functions and relationships to systems.
Using the biblical contrast between the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah, Leo moves beyond a simplistic dichotomy of “technology good” or “technology bad” and looks at the two paths technology can take—toward domination, homogenization, and dehumanization or toward communion, solidary, and rehumanization. And he sees what’s really behind the rush toward the posthuman path, in which we view weakness, dependence, mystery, and even personhood as problems to engineer away.
The pope’s words have already been met with disdain by those in whose interest it is to put such questions in abeyance until the economy, global security, and personal routine are inextricably set in the sort of laissez faire AI arms race that will far exceed that of nuclear proliferation. Nuclear weapons, after all, cannot design other nuclear weapons. US interior secretary Douglas Burgum remarked in a television interview that it is not “part of the role of being pope” for Leo to say what he did.
As a Protestant, I of course have vigorous disagreements with my Catholic brothers and sisters about whether Jesus’ promise to build his church “on this rock” (Matt. 16:18) applies to an unbroken chain of succession from Peter. But surely we can all agree that a higher authority on matters of what it means to be God, or to be human, is not the office of the secretary of the interior.
But Burgum represents Washington’s deference to Silicon Valley. Part of that compliance is prudent. After all, these are not simply resolved questions. If the United States Congress were (to imagine the most extreme possibility) to outlaw AI, that would be the equivalent of “banning the bomb.” The latter would not denuclearize the world but would put the United States and its allies at the mercy of hostile countries with nukes—most notably, China and Russia. Moreover, Washington officials know the precarious state of the world economy is quite possibly teetering atop the AI industry.
Silicon Valley points out things of which we should rightly be afraid but then argues the only alternative is to hand limitless power to the smart people who can innovate their way to the future. Vast economic inequality, potential mass unemployment, and psychological degeneration are part of the price of progress if they happen, they say, and we can think of something to do about them then. Or we can ask our machines to think of something.
What’s even more unsettling is that the “smart people,” the tech bros we are told to trust, have in many instances shown themselves to be creepily cold to any aspect of humanity that is not quantifiable and consumable. Some of them have shown themselves to be, in their own personal lives, eerily utopian—seeking to find ways to immortality by uploading their brains to the cloud or rejuvenating themselves with blood transfusions from younger men. And some have them have shown themselves to be just as eerily dystopian—building elaborate bunkers for themselves for if and when their “move fast and break things” mantra moves fast enough to break everything.
Leo’s Tower of Babel imagery gets at this very dynamic. After all, Genesis tells us the Babel project was grounded in two psychological impulses. One of them was utopian: “Let us make a name for ourselves” (Gen 11:4, ESV throughout). The human desire was for glory and self-exaltation—escape the limits of creatureliness and become like gods. The second impulse was dystopian: “lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” What was present was the odd mixture of pride and fear.
Ironically, the biblical account does not discount the possibilities of technology. In Genesis, the wisdom of God actually concurs with the prehistoric tech bros about their own power: “And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them” (v. 6). The confusion of their language (hacking the algorithm?) was, like the exile from the Garden, not a pique of revenge but an act of mercy.
Our technologies have advanced, but human nature has not evolved out of these same dreads: fear of mortality, of weakness, of dependence, of limits, of being forgotten. Babel is not ultimately an Icarus story of humanity getting too big. It is not so much about arrogance as about panic. It is about getting comprehensive control: creating power and community in a world that feels dangerous and lonely.
We are in a Babel moment now. The problem is not that human beings are capable of creating artificial intelligence; the problem is that we are capable of creating artificial intelligence without first asking what it means to be human beings. We are not even psychologically prepared for the smartphone and social media age, which is now almost 20 years old. Indeed, that technological “revolution” is closer to the metaphor of the wheel than to the Space Station, when compared to where AI is going—but we are still confused about how to live in this era.
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In fact, we are even struggling to know how to sin as human beings rather than as machines. As Axios noted a few weeks ago, teenage sexual activity and alcohol usage are now dramatically down. Casinos are not nearly as full as they once were. This is good, and we would think there is reason to celebrate—until we look into why all these things have dropped. It’s not because of a resurgence of chastity, fidelity, and prudence.
Instead, vices of connection (bad enough) have been replaced with vices of isolation (even worse). Sex has been replaced with pornography. Happy hour at the corner bar has been replaced with solitary weed smoking. The poker table has been replaced with online betting. Heated, animalistic vices replaced by cold, machinelike vices does not a revival make. The solution, Silicon Valley tells us, is to head even more quickly in the direction we are headed, with even less thought to where we are going and who is taking us there.
But the Christian vision of reality is strikingly different. The image of God is not reducible to one replicable thing—intelligence or decision-making or even language, though all these are necessary aspects of it. There is something integral about what it means to be human that cannot be chopped up into analyzable bits, much less replicated by disembodied elemental powers.
The Logos is not algorithmic. The Word that created all things and in which all things hold together is about communion (“the Word was with God,” John 1:1), personality (“the Word was God”), and incarnation (“the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” v. 14).
We cannot face an AI era if we do not apprehend at least something of that, even though we cannot comprehend it in anything approaching its full weight of glory.
Let us remember, though, that the Babel story is not Frankenstein. The account does not end in horror. The breaking apart of the people is not the endgame but the beginning. What came after all that was one human told to “go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (Gen. 12:1). “And he went out, not knowing where he was going” (Heb. 11:8). But that solitary person heard his own name called—repeatedly. He heard himself personally addressed. And his response was not with technique or mastery or control. His response was simply “Here I am” (Gen. 22:11).
Babel led to that call. And that call was grounded in a promise. And that promise was born in the human technology of a feeding trough, died on the technology of an execution stake, and walked out of the technology of a burial cave. That promise has a human name, body, and voice. “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” (1 Pet. 2:7), and what he’s building is not made with human hands (vv. 4–5).
We will not know exactly what we ought to do at every step in the new age of machines. But we know how to start. We know how to remember that the voice that said Adam, where are you? is the same voice that speaks for us: Here I am.
Christians have many differences; our communion is splintered all over the place. But every once in a while, someone comes along to remind us of the God-ness of God and the humanity of humankind—and how both are held together in the person of Jesus. That has always sounded strange. It will sound even stranger in the era in front of us. But when it comes to the most important questions of the AI age, Pope Leo is right and the tech bros are wrong.
Russell Moore is editor at large and columnist at Christianity Today as well as host of the weekly podcast The Russell Moore Show from CT Media.
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