White American evangelicals trade the image of God for the god they invented and now worship.
As the Vatican prepares to release the encyclical magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s call to safeguard the human person in the age of artificial intelligence, those of us who spent thirty years inside the Evangelical apparatus are watching with a strange, dissonant recognition. The encyclical centers a global perspective on the communities actually affected by AI—the workers forced to “behave a whole lot more like machines and a whole lot less like human beings,” as Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan explains—and insists that societies must build an economy that creates humane working conditions for all. It is a beautiful argument, if one is still capable of reading scripture plainly. Because here in the American South, the church has spent the last decade preparing for a very different technological future.
We know this machine. We built the theology that summoned it. In the Evangelical apparatus we moved in for thirty years, we did not fear the singularity. We prayed for it as a kind of techno-rapture. We taught that the church must take dominion over the seven mountains of culture, explicitly including the tech sphere. We looked at the architects of artificial intelligence—figures developing systems that now rival the governments that fund them—and we called them modern-day Cyriuses.
We told our congregations that the digital payment systems and global networks Silicon Valley was building did not resemble the “mark of the beast” mentioned in Revelation 13:16-17; we told them they were the infrastructure for a restored, unified Christian empire that would finally force all nations to worship the true God under a frictionless, borderless global economy. The legalism was breathtaking. The text of Revelation describes a system that marks humanity for economic exclusion and political subjugation. The American Evangelical reading described a frictionless economy that would finally allow the Gospel to sweep across borders. The chasm between what the text actually says and what the apparatus wants it to say has finally met reality.
Pope Leo’s new encyclical centers the human person. The Catholic tradition has always had a language for this: the imago Dei. Genesis 1:26-27 reads plainly—“So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them”—but American Evangelicals have systematically rewritten this chapter to serve the machine. To the techno-legalisms of the American Right, the human body is a unit of production, the mind is merely data, and the goal of spiritual life is to transcend biological limits altogether. They want to merge with the algorithm.
But Genesis 1:26-27 does not describe a license to transcend humanity; it describes the weight of it. To bear the image of the Creator is to embody the Creator’s mercy, the Creator’s limits, and the Creator’s finite, physical presence in the world. The plain-language reading of the imago Dei commands us to look after the human neighbor precisely because they are a vulnerable, mortal creature. It forbids us from dismantling the human person in the name of progress. The Magnificat, which Mary sang while carrying the God who would become flesh, is blunt about what that means in economic terms: “He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.” For thirty years, the Evangelical apparatus traded that promise for a gospel of market-clearing individualism—teach the poor to code, not to hunger for justice—and now it watches, bewildered, as the machine it blessed eats jobs and spits out data points.
As rural community clinicians, we see the dismantling on our panel every day. We treat the geographic-orphan patients who drive ninety minutes because algorithmic healthcare systems have replaced their county hospitals with centralized data mines. We see the children whose social and emotional development has been flattened by AI tutors that optimize for attention rather than human flourishing, exactly as Sullivan warned. We watch the deacons in our own women’s ministries panic because they have bet their entire theological inheritance on a Silicon Valley savior, only to find the machine does not care if they are saved. We watch people being told that their economic value is purely functional, that if an algorithm can do their work for ten percent less cost, they are an inefficiency to be smoothed over.
It is a quiet indictment of the American religious Right that a Catholic Pope in Rome—the same institution fundamentalists mock as the Whore of Babylon—has articulated a defense of the human person that Evangelicals abandoned for the golden calf of Big Tech. The prophet Jeremiah preached against the architects of injustice who built their houses by unrighteousness and made their own people work for nothing, warning that to ignore the poor is to fail to know God. The Evangelical apparatus has spent decades building a digital temple to the same sin under a new name. Now Pope Leo challenges world leaders to think about a global economy that leaves no child behind, that safeguards the worker, and that refuses to treat human beings as raw material for an algorithm. The Evangelicals who spent decades preaching the Seven Mountains Mandate and teaching their flocks to embrace the machine are now asking how to plug themselves back in.
We must hold this standard symmetrically. The secular technocrats on the Left worship the algorithm too, justifying algorithmic surveillance and resource rationing in the name of equity and safety. But the American Right built the machine with the most noise, the most money, and the most explicit biblical justification built into its code.
The AI companies are now competing to develop products for a global market that require people to trust them in their daily routines, including in our schools and our workplaces. The question for the church—and for every parent watching their child learn from a screen—is not which algorithm will save the world. It is whether we will recognize the image of God when we look at the child in the exam room, or whether we will worship the machine they built to replace him.