Christian Theologians React to the Pope’s AI Warning

The broader church has not always loved popes named Leo.

Pope Leo X in 1520 described Martin Luther as a “wild boar from the forest” destroying the church. Pope Leo XII asserted in 1824 that Bible societies “produce a gospel of men, or what is worse, a gospel of the devil!” And in 1883, Pope Leo XIII encouraged devotion to the rosary and to the Virgin Mary.

Yet Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas is getting some love from the broader church. This papal encyclical, published on May 15, asserts the magnificence of humanity in the time of artificial intelligence. Leo declares that humanity can choose one of two paths—either building the Tower of Babel or rebuilding post-exilic Jerusalem. Encouraging us to take the latter path, Leo said, “Let us not be afraid to get our hands dirty on the ‘construction site’ of our time.”

Whom does Leo invite to this construction site? Everyone. This encyclical is decidedly ecumenical. Coming from the Greek root oikos (“house”), the word ecumenical means “the entire world” or “the whole house.” Leo’s audience for this encyclical is not just the Catholic church but the entire world. He stated, “I address this heartfelt appeal to all the Catholic faithful, to all Christians and to all men and women of goodwill. … I ask everyone to abandon the construction of yet another Tower of Babel.”

So how are Leo’s words resonating within the whole house of Christianity? Perhaps unsurprisingly, theologians from Protestant and evangelical traditions were mixed in their reactions to the Magnifica Humanitas, ranging from appreciative to critical.

Some hear Leo as too anxious about the future of AI. According to Jay Kranda, innovative tech pastor at Saddleback Church, “The more convinced you are that AI is going to take over everything, the less I think you actually believe in the uniqueness of God’s creation called humanity. We are special because we are made in His image. That is not a line AI crosses.”

Suggesting that Leo may have underplayed the magnificence of humanity, Kranda said, “I respect a cautious read of the moment. I just don’t want us so ‘doomer’ about the machines that we downplay how central humanity is to God’s plan. My take is AI has way more ability to enhance our world than end it. But it is a tool. And you and I have to wield it wisely.”

Justin Lester, the pastor of Friendship Baptist Church in Vallejo, California, resonated with the encyclical’s theological take on technology and power. Lester said, “The encyclical’s insistence that technology is never neutral and that power concentration is a theological problem, not merely a policy one, stands as its most important contribution. Naming extractive mining as the physical foundation of AI infrastructure is precisely the kind of structural honesty the larger church has too often avoided.”

Yet for all that good, Leo’s words sound a bit banal to Lester: “We did not need a papal encyclical to understand that technology in the hands of empire is a weapon.”

Lester would have liked to hear more from Leo on the church’s past abuses of power and exploitation. “Buried deeply in the document is a note on slavery,” he added. “The church built theological scaffolding for the first industrial revolution’s most profitable labor system—chattel slavery. The same ecclesial body that handed slaveholders Scripture and called it sanctification is now the one sounding the alarm about extractive AI infrastructure and the exploitation of the Global South.”

Some hear echoes of previous popes in Leo’s words. John Dyer—a professor at Dallas Theological Seminary and frequent writer about technology and faith—said, “At the risk of oversimplification, we can trace papal commentary on technology over the last 50 years as a dialectic movement from optimism to pessimism to realism.” Dyer hears Leo’s words as an ongoing papal conversation about technology within an ever-changing world. 

Leo’s realism is something that Dyer appreciates in Magnifica Humanitas: “Pope Leo XIV takes a carefully measured, realistic approach that avoids being easily categorized as optimistic with perfunctory warnings or pessimistic with obligatory glimmers of hope.” Dyer said he also appreciates that Leo recognizes how tech companies exert profound power in the world today.

If Protestant responses skewed somewhat critical, Leo may have found a more receptive audience in theologians representing other traditions, who praised his emphasis on human dignity.

Constantine Psimopoulos, a bioethicist in the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, is a Greek American Christian from the Orthodox tradition. He hears a timely word in Leo’s encyclical: “Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas arrives at a decisive moment in human history, inviting us to recover what is most sacred and irreducible about the human person in the age of artificial intelligence.”

According to Psimopoulos, Leo’s vision for human flourishing aligns with the social ethos of the Orthodox tradition. Humans have a magnificent moral responsibility and, Psimopoulos pointed out, “Magnifica Humanitas reminds us that no algorithm can replace the sacred depth of the human person created in the image and likeness of God. As we become, in some sense, co-creators shaping AI in our own image, we bear immense moral responsibility for what we encode within it—beneficence or maleficence, solidarity or exclusion, wisdom or mere calculation.”

Noreen Herzfeld, a professor at the Roman Catholic St. John’s School of Theology and Seminary, hears Leo issuing a call to resist present and future forms of enslavement: “[Leo] critiques how the power of AI currently fails to promote the common good,” she said. “Leo sees evidence of this ‘new slavery’ in the women and young of the third world who label AI’s training data, at low wages and in sweatshop conditions, and the men who mine the rare earth metals needed for its hardware.”

Herzfeld wonders who will actually hear Leo’s message: “Will Silicon Valley’s tech bros have ears to hear this call?  Perhaps not, but we’ve already seen, in a growing backlash, that the rest of us have the power to refuse to be their slaves.”

A. Trevor Sutton is a scholar of technology and the author of Between Hurry and Heaven: Recovering Purpose and Presence in a Distracted Age.

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