Why are religious institutions paying so much attention to AI right now?
Because AI is no longer just a technology story.
Religious leaders do not typically devote 43,000-word position papers to cloud computing. They don’t create commissions to study Kubernetes. They don’t issue warnings about CI/CD pipelines, observability platforms or software development frameworks. Yet around the world, religious institutions are increasingly devoting time, resources and intellectual capital to understanding artificial intelligence and its implications.
That fact alone should make everyone in the technology industry stop and think.
The reason isn’t that AI has become a religious issue. It is that AI is increasingly becoming a human issue. The debate is moving beyond coding assistants, content generation and productivity gains into questions of meaning, work, authority, morality and the future organization of society itself. Those subjects have historically been the domain of religion, philosophy and culture.
The latest and perhaps most significant example came this week when Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas, a 43,000-word encyclical devoted largely to artificial intelligence and its impact on humanity. The document is almost certainly the most comprehensive statement by a major religious leader on AI to date. More importantly, it signals that one of the world’s oldest institutions believes AI deserves the same level of attention once reserved for the Industrial Revolution.
That comparison is not accidental.
Leo deliberately signed the encyclical on the anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the landmark 1891 papal document that addressed the social and economic upheaval created by industrialization. That earlier encyclical helped shape Catholic thinking on labor, workers’ rights and economic justice for generations. By linking his AI document to that historical moment, Leo is making a very clear statement. The Church does not view AI as another technology cycle. It views AI as a societal transformation with potentially profound consequences for how people live, work and interact.
What’s striking about Magnifica Humanitas is that it is not an anti-technology document. Leo acknowledges the potential benefits of AI and repeatedly emphasizes that technology itself is not the problem. His concern is what happens if societies become organized around machine efficiency rather than human flourishing. Throughout the encyclical, he returns to themes of dignity, agency, labor and concentrated power. He warns that a small number of organizations may increasingly shape the moral frameworks embedded in AI systems and questions whether societies are adequately prepared for the economic and social disruptions that may follow.
In many ways, Leo’s central question is remarkably simple: What happens if humanity succeeds in building systems that can perform more and more tasks traditionally reserved for human beings?
That question is not unique to Catholicism.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the current debate is the degree of convergence occurring across religious traditions that often disagree on fundamental theological matters. Jewish scholars have raised concerns about delegating moral reasoning to machines while simultaneously exploring how AI can expand access to religious education. Buddhist thinkers have examined whether machine intelligence can ever approach consciousness, wisdom or compassion, often concluding that intelligence and wisdom are fundamentally different things. Many Protestant leaders see value in AI-powered teaching tools while maintaining that spiritual guidance ultimately requires human relationships. Hindu communities have experimented with AI-powered assistants capable of discussing sacred texts while acknowledging the limitations of machine understanding.
The language differs. The underlying concerns are surprisingly similar.
Human beings are more than economic units. Intelligence is not wisdom. Technology should remain subordinate to human values. Moral responsibility cannot be outsourced to machines. The concentration of power should be viewed cautiously. These themes appear repeatedly across traditions that otherwise hold very different views about the nature of existence itself.
That level of agreement should not be dismissed lightly.
What these religious traditions seem to recognize is that AI is beginning to enter territory historically occupied by human institutions. This is something I explored just a few weeks ago in my Techstrong.ai article, Hello God, It’s Me, Claude. The point of that piece was not that AI was becoming a religion. It was that people increasingly interact with AI in ways that resemble how previous generations interacted with trusted advisors, teachers, counselors and, in some cases, spiritual authorities.
For most of human history, if you wanted guidance, you turned to a parent, a teacher, a mentor, a rabbi, a priest, a minister, a trusted friend or maybe the old guy at the end of the bar who had seen a few things.
Today, an increasing number of people turn to AI first.
That doesn’t make AI a religion.
It does mean AI is beginning to occupy social space that was previously filled by human institutions.
Religious leaders see that immediately because they are in the business of understanding how people create meaning, establish trust and make decisions. They aren’t worried that ChatGPT is becoming God. They’re asking what happens if people begin outsourcing parts of their humanity to systems that have no humanity of their own.
That concern may sound abstract today. Then again, concerns about industrialization sounded abstract before factories transformed society. Concerns about social media sounded abstract before smartphones reshaped politics, culture and human relationships. History is full of examples where the second-order effects of technology proved more consequential than the technology itself.
To Silicon Valley’s credit, there are signs that at least some AI companies recognize the magnitude of these questions. The appearance of Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah alongside Pope Leo during the unveiling of Magnifica Humanitas was symbolically important. It suggested that portions of the AI industry understand that technical innovation alone cannot answer every question raised by increasingly powerful systems.
Major AI developers have spent the past several years discussing alignment, safety and governance. Many have engaged with ethicists, philosophers and religious leaders. Some of this is undoubtedly risk management. Some is public relations. Some may reflect a genuine recognition that the hardest problems surrounding AI are no longer technical.
Building larger models is difficult.
Determining how societies should adapt to those models may be even harder.
This brings me back to a question I raised earlier this year in Has AI Gotten Out Ahead of Its Skis?
At the time, I was focused largely on economics, infrastructure and the pace of development. The concern was not whether AI worked. The concern was whether our institutions were prepared for its success. Were labor markets ready? Were educational systems ready? Were businesses, governments and regulators ready? Were we investing so aggressively in AI that we were assuming solutions to problems we had not yet fully understood?
Pope Leo’s encyclical raises many of the same concerns from a different perspective.
His focus is not data centers, GPUs or model performance. His focus is humanity.
Have we become so captivated by capability that we’ve stopped asking what these systems should be used for?
Have we become so focused on efficiency that we’ve neglected dignity?
Have we spent more time discussing what AI can do than what society should do with AI?
Those are not anti-innovation questions. They are governance questions. They are questions mature societies should be asking before disruption arrives rather than after.
The technology industry often responds that innovation has always created disruption and that humanity has always adapted. That is true. The Industrial Revolution created new industries and new jobs. The internet created opportunities nobody could have predicted. Every major technological shift has produced winners, losers and eventually a new equilibrium.
The flaw in that argument is not that it is wrong. The flaw is assuming adaptation is automatic.
The transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial one was not painless. Neither was the transition to the digital age. New institutions had to be built. New laws emerged. Educational systems evolved. Labor protections developed. Societies adapted because people recognized the disruption and acted.
That is precisely what Leo and many other religious leaders appear to be arguing today. Not that AI should be stopped. Not that progress should be feared. But that civilization should spend at least as much time discussing the consequences of success as it spends celebrating new capabilities.
Shimmy’s Take
The most important thing about Pope Leo’s encyclical may not be any specific recommendation it contains.
It may be the fact that it exists at all.
Religious institutions tend to think in decades and centuries, not quarters and product cycles. They are rarely early adopters of technology trends. They are even less likely to devote major intellectual resources to technologies they believe are passing fads.
When leaders from multiple faith traditions simultaneously begin focusing on the same emerging technology, it is worth asking why.
The answer is not that they’re worried about better coding assistants or more effective marketing tools.
They’re looking further ahead.
They’re asking what happens when intelligence becomes infrastructure. What happens when machines increasingly function as advisors, teachers, companions and decision-support systems for billions of people. What happens when work, authority, community and even meaning begin to shift.
The AI industry often talks about changing the world.
Religious leaders are beginning to ask a more important question.
What kind of world are we changing it into?
