The Twin Fallacies of Christian Nationalism and AI Maximalism

Here are two questions I think about a lot:

How does Christianity restrict someone’s use of technology?

How does Christianity restrict someone’s stratagems in politics?

These questions come from a conviction that the claims of Christ in Scripture are such a nature that one cannot believe and obey them without experiencing some kind of limiting principle on their technology and on their politics. In other words, if you really take Christ seriously, your tech use and your politics will bear a conspicuous mark. Let me give a few examples, starting with politics.

Your political enemies may be lying all the time. This lying could be effective. People are generally easily tricked, and even when they aren’t, they’re often willing to believe lies if those lies serve a desired emotional end. What’s more, your political enemies might genuinely be wicked or bad people, but perhaps they have done a good job covering that wickedness. Thus, the only way you can persuade others of their wickedness is by saying things that technically are not true. Your justification will be that, since the lie’s job is to convince people of something actually true (the wickedness of the other side), the lie is noble and necessary.

But here’s the problem. If you take the Bible seriously when it says the Lord hates lying lips, you cannot finesse your way out of the fact. Thus, even when bearing false witness would offer a clear fighting advantage, and might even serve the greater good, your politics cannot make peace with bearing false witness without, in some way, setting aside the claims of Christ. In that moment, Scripture forces you to choose one or the other. Either you will walk with a limp politically (because you are compelled to be honest and so cannot always return fire for fire), or you will walk with a limp spiritually (because you are dishonest and live under your God’s displeasure).

When I read someone who identifies as a Christian nationalist, or someone who advocates for Christians to be more insulting, degrading, or hateful in the public square, the question I always want to ask them is: Can you identify one way in which being a Christian disadvantages you in political competition? It sure feels like the goal of some is to get to a place where there is no such disadvantage. What some want is to close the gap between what unbelievers are willing to do and what believers are willing to do. The logic is that unbelievers’ lack of scruples give them power and control over society, and since a Christian’s job is to stick up for truth and goodness, we will only be able to do that if we’re willing to do the kind of things that give a side power and control over society.

Some people respond to this by saying that Christians should not desire power. There’s some truth to that, but that feels like the least urgent response. A better response would be to grant the premise—sure, Christians should compete for influence and control in society—but then to ask, “How does Christianity itself limit what we can do in order to achieve that?” That question has to be answered before we can go any further, because people who say “it doesn’t” don’t live in the same moral universe as people who admit that it might.

+++

Could we apply the same question to technology?

Let’s try to imagine how we could persuade someone that their AI girlfriend is a bad idea. We would start with Genesis and show that Eve bears God’s image like Adam does, and it’s this fact that makes her a suitable sexual partner for him. We could dig deep into the biblical theology of idols, how attributing sentience to nonliving things is a hallmark of those who reject God himself. We could point out the masturbatory logic of AI companions: They cannot make love to you, so you are obliged to use their words and content as tools of your self-love. We could remark on the fruitful design for human sexuality, and the fact that robots intrinsically cannot conceive children, making a sexual relationship with them contrary to God’s design.

All of this makes sense of what a Christian knows from Scripture. Christianity offers a limiting principle for the use of technology. But the example above is a very obvious way. There are less obvious ones, too. For example, if AI is an unsuitable sexual partner due to its not being made in the image of God, doesn’t that make it an unsuitable counseling partner as well? If attributing sentience to nonliving things is a symptom of spiritual confusion, why ask that nonliving thing to evaluate a sermon or theological statement? If a robot cannot conceive children, how could we trust it with parenting questions that require understanding children?

Christians who are AI maximalists remind me of Christian nationalists, in the sense that they do not seem prepared for the question of how their faith constrains their lives. What both groups tend to do is argue a kind of flat theological sovereignty over both politics and technology. They reason upward from the fact that God owns nations and silicon, to the conclusion that can be done with nations or silicon becomes virtuous merely by the fact of a Christian’s doing it.

This reasoning is very wisdom-poor. It fails to pay close attention to the way our lives are structured, and interrogate those structures for Christian truth. This has very practical implications for the church, by the way. Most people are aware that pornography is a big deal in many evangelical churches, with huge numbers of both men and women caught up in its churn. The way most evangelical resources treat this problem is through accountability and spiritual activity—but rarely through intentionally disrupting the person’s relationship with technology itself. In other words, we are far too shocked that people whose entire mental and emotional lives revolve around the internet discover that their inertia in the real world invites sexual curiosity and exploration in the fake one.

Going deep into Christianity’s wisdom forces us to reckon with realities that limit us. Politically and technologically, everything in the modern world invites Christians to suspend these realities and try to triangulate their faith to accommodate non-Christian patterns of life. We have feared we will be left behind if we don’t destroy cultural opponents. Now we fear we will be left behind if we don’t join an inhuman technological revolution. These are related deceptions. We may indeed be left behind if we constrain ourselves with honesty or humanity. The question is, “Left behind by whom?” Perhaps the movement leaving us behind is headed to a place we shouldn’t want to go.