The Political Theology of AI
In 1245, as imperial propagandists were trading barbs with Pope Innocent IV, the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II accused him of abetting sin and meddling in imperial politics (for good measure, Innocent had called him prenuntius Antichristi, the harbinger of the Antichrist). Today, the accoutrement may have changed—the emperor is naked and the pope is wearing Nike sneakers—but the script hasn’t.
Pope Leo, Trump recently railed on social media, is “weak on crime, and terrible for foreign policy.” In the uproar that followed, one thing got lost: Trump was right. But if the pope is weak on crime, it has nothing to do with a meek Midwestern demeanor; it is the consequence of a statute limitation. His duty is not to pass judgment and to punish. These are divine prerogatives. His remit is not to hasten the Last Judgment. It is to transform the mystery of the apocalypse’s deferment into an expansive time for the spread of the Gospel and the practice of Christian virtues.
The crisis that has been brewing for some time between the Trump administration and the Pope has to do with this restraining function of the Church as a historical force. It is not surprising to see it reaffirmed in Leo’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, which calls for a power “capable of slowing things down.” Because AI is eroding the distinction between temporal and spiritual power, it is a territory over which Pope and Emperor will vie for authority. By promoting the breakneck development of AI to buck America’s decline as a global power, Washington has embraced Silicon Valley’s apocalyptic millenarianism. Inevitably, this sets the Trump administration in collision course with the Church, an institution that was established against accelerationists of all types, doomsters or boomers.
Although Magnifica Humanitas carefully considers all the dangers inherent in AI, from a global arms race that extends the spectrum of war into less perceptible frequencies to a political economy working against the “interdependency” of people and nations on which the notion of common good is premised, this inventory is not its most significant contribution.
What is really at stake in the encyclical is a more intractable problem. For the first time in recent memory, the Church faces a power that claims for itself the Auctoritas, the legitimacy of the divine Logos, now incarnated in large language models, and bestows it upon the Potestas of new empires. Henry Kissinger wasn’t far off when he mused that “some might attribute a kind of divinity to the machines themselves” as they would create new political orders and new realities.
To fuel its unfettered development, Big Tech has assumed the apocalypse as its historical horizon and has taken upon itself the role of tiding humanity over by unleashing a demiurgic force that can redeem it as much as it can destroy it. Simultaneously unchartered technological fulfillment and messianic prophecy, AI comes with the promise of “humanity training its replacement,” as Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff have recently put it. Such posthumanist visions of a different kind of peregrinatio are a direct challenge to the idea of the church as the sole custodian of humanity. Unavoidably, AI finds itself in direct competition with the Church over pastoral hegemony. The theological scuffles Peter Thiel or J.D. Vance have recently gotten themselves into are only the superficial symptom of a widening rift.
The result is a doctrinal obligation for the Church to stand up against the imperial fantasies of world-historical greatness powered by AI. This is the uncompromising message of Magnifica Humanitas. How it will affect Catholic Trump supporters and whether they will opt for theological bricolage, individual schism, or political defection is anyone’s guess. But the document throws down the gauntlet and clarifies the terms of the conflict between the Pope and the new Emperors. It goes far beyond the trite calls for regulating AI or ensuring “alignment” and recognizes that AI has become an alternative moral infrastructure. The true meaning of the encyclical is to be found not in its diplomatic pieties about the potential benefits of technology, but in the universal exhortation to entirely “abandon the construction of yet another Tower of Babel.”
The Tower of Babel was an engineering feat that aimed for the sky. It was premised on “a single language, a single technology, a single direction” and generated incomprehension, divisions, and conflict. As today’s tower builders have their sights on Mars, the different way of building common infrastructures that Magnifica Humanitas offers as a model is our only hope to avoid war and chaos. Premised on realism, on the painstaking but necessary work of politics, on the participation of all, and on the universal destination of the goods created in common, it is the only possible way of building an infrastructure for human life.
