AI Has a God Problem Stretching From the Vatican to the Baptist Pulpit

Pastor Joseph Hutchinson began a recent Sunday sermon by pointing to the Book of Revelation, the final part of the New Testament best known for apocalyptic prophecy. And he quickly argued for how artificial intelligence will fit into end times.

“AI wants to be God,” the pastor warned those at Gospel Light Baptist Church in Orangeburg, S.C.

The sermon, the 74-year-old later told me, was inspired by the questions he was getting from the congregation, which numbers around 150. In his roughly 50 years preaching, Hutchinson says the anxiety he is hearing about AI outranks everything. Wars. Economy.

“The more you see people that are projecting doom and despair coming out, then the more people say, ‘Well, the preacher must have been right, and the Bible must be right,’ ” Hutchinson told me.

Already a polarizing political issue this fall, the AI industry’s latest challenge is emerging from the pulpit. Unlike recent generations of technology, the Christian community appears poised to put its stamp on AI early in an attempt to ensure it benefits all of humanity rather than a few tech billionaires.

The risk for the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic is getting further sideways with a large swath of the American populace, some of whom are already unhappy with AI data centers and Flock cameras in their communities.

“A lot of pastors are realizing when people get freaked out about institutions they depend on, they try to find their voice to advocate for themselves and their communities. And churches are really good at giving people a vehicle for advocating for their vision of the common good in broader society, especially in parts of the country like where I live in the Midwest,” said Meghan Sullivan, a philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame.

Earlier this month, the National Association of Evangelicals issued a policy statement on AI. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) held a summit on the topic in August. And Pope Leo XIV published a rare encyclical in May on “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.”

History is replete with moments when new technology—so powerful, so complex as to be almost magical—stirs primal fears. After the U.S. dropped atomic bombs to end World War II, the New York Times invoked Old Testament language when writing that the technology had “sowed the whirlwind.”

Today, AI carries its own whirlwind of change. With potential good and bad so intertwined, it is hard to know if the technology will bring a brighter future or darker days. Cures for cancers, untold scientific discoveries, sustainable abundance. Yet also rogue AI hacks, job losses, and the very meaning of work up for debate.

One of the self-inflicted challenges for AI creators is that the tech community has framed much of the public conversation, intentionally or not, in language that resonates with the Christian community. That raises concerns about whether they can be trusted, especially with the baggage tech-at-large carries from the ways, some religious leaders say, it failed to ensure social media didn’t become harmful.

The theme of a higher power creating AI in its own image only for it to rebel against its creator is a familiar one to those who study the Bible. The idea that people in AI labs think they have a power akin to God to create a new kind of consciousness is unsettling, if not blasphemous, to some. And, for others, there is a certain hubris seen in tech leaders chasing a technology that on one hand promises to make them incredibly wealthy while also suggesting it is only safe within their control.

In his May encyclical, the pope drew comparisons to the Tower of Babel, a cautionary tale that appears in the first Book of Genesis around an effort to build a tower that reached to the heavens in a bid to guarantee stability and power that displeased God.

“The risk of dehumanization—of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means—is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise,” the pope wrote.

Since then, the pope hasn’t let up, including on social-media platform X where a robust debate is playing out among AI’s creators.

Maybe that’s why in recent days, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tried to distance his company from a report by the New York Times that rival Anthropic unsuccessfully lobbied the Vatican to change its views on whether AI could have a consciousness.

“I am very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models, and think it is a real safety issue,” Altman posted on X a weekend ago.

Those raising concerns can’t be dismissed as simply Luddites. Many faith leaders tell me they are hoping to steer a technology to ensure it is beneficial to humanity—not harmful.

“There’s a reason why the faith community is having a moment because they’re beginning to see that this is a technology that is actually addressing…not only the consequential horizontal societal issues that are at stake, but it’s actually raising the larger question of what does it mean to be human?” Walter Kim, president of the evangelical’s association, said.

During that recent Sunday sermon in South Carolina, Hutchinson’s Siri assistant squawked from his iPhone as he connected how all of the surveillance aspects of AI would be powerful in Revelation’s apocalypse.

When it comes to AI, the pastor is hopeful it will find amazing cures for illnesses and he agrees with President Trump that America shouldn’t slow down development at the risk of letting China get ahead.

It’s just that he also sees a power being created, which he cautioned his flock to remember, could be misused.

“I see what it’s leading to in the future and that doesn’t scare me, but it bothers me for the other people that aren’t ready,” he said.

For you see, Hutchinson is ready for the rapture. He’s just not so sure others are prepared for the coming tribulations.