Recently I co-led a boundary training for pastors on the topic of responsible AI use. As expected, the people in the room had varying levels of knowledge of the technology. Some were already using AI any way they could. Others had varying challenges even accessing the Zoom room we were in. Still others were anti-AI justice stalwarts who noted the health risks (such as cognitive atrophy), the harms to poorer communities (including potential increases in utility costs), the lack of regulation and education, and the climate injustice of those water guzzling data centers. I count myself among the last group, but I had to admit my own AI use—both known and unknown. Most of us are already using AI in our search bars or on our phones. The technology has become so stealthlike, working in the background of the apps on our devices, that many of us don’t realize how much we are coming to depend upon it.
I’m an ordained clergyperson, not an expert on AI. My part in the boundary training focused less on what the technology is or how to use it and more on checking in with our ethics and our integrity as we confront an increasingly augmented reality that feels inevitable. The technology is new, overwhelming, and scaling at an unprecedented pace, but every advent of new technology has required us to rethink how humanity can live and work with it. To prepare for the training, I turned to some of my favorite spiritual thinkers. As a Thomas Merton scholar, I became especially fascinated by the Trappist monk’s writings from the 1960s on technology.
Merton was concerned with the impact of nuclear weapons, computers, mass media, industrial agriculture, and other modern-day tools on human thriving and the spiritual life: “Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and to religion. But it presents a great temptation,” Merton writes. He considered that while the use of machines is helpful, “there can be a deadening of spirit and of sensibility, a blunting of perception, a loss of awareness, a lowering of tone, a general fatigue and lassitude, a proneness to unrest and guilt which we might be less likely to suffer if we simply went out and worked with our hands in the woods or in the fields.”
That AI could blunt our perception and deaden our sensibilities seems apparent already: We are bombarded with altered images we can’t tell apart from reality, deep-fake synthetic media that challenges our perception of truth. This fast-paced distortion of reality is part of all our lives now, even without our consent. The autonomous weaponization is simply too much to keep up with.
We’ve also all seen the ways technology has assisted us, saved us time, and even saved lives. During the pandemic we celebrated disembodied ways to see and hear each other. We benefited from medical advancements made possible with advanced technology.
But those benefits didn’t reach all of us. As Pope Leo recently pointed out in his encyclical on AI, the assumption that new technology will benefit all people ignores the evidence. He suggests that transformations in the design stage must prioritize a way to prevent disparities, or else we will continue to create disparity and inequity at the structural level. “Today,” he writes, “justice requires access to the benefits of innovation, including care, knowledge, tools and opportunities.” In other words, without regulation, education, and access, we are spiraling further into an asymmetrical imbalance between the poor and the rich, a gospel message we’re all too familiar with.
I heard echoes of Merton in Leo’s encyclical: Technology isn’t inherently bad, but we have a spiritual obligation to examine our relationship to it. In a 1967 letter, Merton writes that “technology could indeed make a better world for millions of human beings. It not only can do this, but it must do it.” But he goes on to say that technology falters when it no longer pays attention to anything other than its own naive progress.
This obsession with progress at all costs seems to be the ethic of technology. In Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, created from Merton’s compiled notebooks from 1956–1965, he writes that technology “has its own ethic of expediency and efficiency” and suggests that efficiency only seeks more efficient paths, “even if what is done happens, for example, to be genocide or the devastation of a country by total war.”
Pope Leo similarly addresses the ways technology’s promises tend to fall short, and instead of emancipation it brings us “new forms of global subordination,” contradicting “the fundamental principle of human dignity.”
Both Merton and Leo are cautiously optimistic about technology; it’s just that all the things AI might do for us may also alienate us “from our own being and our own reality,” as Merton writes elsewhere of technological advancements. And when we lose touch with our being, with what makes us utterly and uniquely human, we lose touch with God.
Mulling this over, I thought of what C. S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity: “All the things which enable a bad man to be effectively bad are in themselves good things—resolution, cleverness, good looks, existence itself. . . . Do you now begin to see why Christianity has always said that the devil is a fallen angel?”
I honestly haven’t thought much about angels, and I haven’t thought about C. S. Lewis in years. I definitely wouldn’t have connected either of them to AI. When I think of angels, I think of the verse from Hebrews: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it” (13:2). To me, the angelic begins with the human. It starts with human connectivity to the Divine and to each other.
But turning over Lewis’s words, I thought of how many AI developers talk about their creations in mystical terms. I also thought of how often I turn to technology when I might once have turned to prayer. Instead of praying to St. Anthony to find my misplaced phone, I look up “Find Friends” on my computer and hit “devices” to see where it is. St. Anthony is obsolete, and my device, or the access to information through my device, is my saint. And in times of medical crisis or challenge, we turn to Google or another AI tool for diagnosis. The feedback loop has me reaching for knowledge instead of wisdom. We are by now well aware that our attention spans have been co-opted by algorithms, notifications, task-switching, and productivity culture. We are losing our patience and stamina for liminality and unknowing. Are we also losing our ability to hear the voice of God?
In his rarely published 1967 essay “The Angel and the Machine,” Merton writes about the “death of God” as “one of the most significant features of our modern world”—and he lays the blame at the feet of technologies that have limited our capacity to “hear the voices of heavenly messengers.”
Merton suggests that the more the machine takes over for us, the less connectivity and interaction we have with angels, with the unknown, with the silences of our faith. He argues that by living in a technological civilization we are essentially also living in “a civilization without angels . . . that is to say that we have placed the machine where the angel used to be: at the limit of our own strength, at the frontier of our natural capacity.” The angel has been displaced by the tiny computer that is always in my pocket or hand.
It’s been long-debated whether Sophia (or Holy Wisdom, or Spirit) can only operate between and among human beings or if Sophia can use technology to communicate with us. Plenty of people think Spirit can use technology, which is why Spiritualism exploded during the 19th century in tandem with the invention of the electric telegraph. Just as technology allowed humans to speak across vast physical spaces, mediums channeled messages from the spirit world. The two didn’t seem so far afield from each other. I think we can find a useful metaphor here for understanding the technology of our time.
Merton suggests that the embrace of technology, or “the machine,” has meant losing touch with our humanness, this divine presence in our midst, which he calls the angelic. He says we have forgotten the concept that to live by faith is to not live by sight (2 Cor. 5:7). And as we have replaced the invisible angels with the fully visible machine, we have replaced our faith with the world of invention. Merton goes on to say, “And though the world of the machines is in itself something of a mysterium tremendum (it becomes so more and more with computers performing in an instant mental operations that man could never hope to perform in years), yet the machines are ‘our’ angels.”
Returning to Lewis, how can we discern the angels from the fallen angels? The tech that helps from the tech that harms?
Merton writes of authentic angels that they prove nothing, not even themselves: “They efface themselves entirely in their messages. Yet it is by the silent power, the all-embracing clarity of their messages that we know them.” Merton writes that we hear God through these authentic angels, and therefore [God] “also speaks to us their identity, revealing in them strange and sacred personalities which bear witness to him [God] in his [God’s] utter hiddenness.”
But our view of the Divine and the angelic is becoming more and more obstructed. Aspects of technology are inarguably a part of that obstruction, tugging us away from our own humanness and therefore our communion with the Divine. Pope Leo writes that “we must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace.”
As we increasingly turn to these technological angels, we neglect our true angelic encounters with one another. The fumbling over my words when I encounter a loved one in grief or heartbreak. The missteps of relationships in the process of learning how to move through rupture and repair, and discovering our uniqueness. The neighborly encounters of checking in and following up. The connections made of our flesh. Those are the precise moments that make us most human and the moments when God speaks.
Even as I write this, the unfolding mystery of the machine has taken on new advancements, ones that might suggest I re-evaluate my thoughts on it all. It has made me hesitant to even write or think about these things. I wonder if making us fearful, thoughtless, complacent, and disconnected is a feature of the tech and not a bug. How do we engage with it with authenticity and integrity, without losing our humanity?
“More than ever we need the angels,” Merton writes, “not to replace our machines but to teach us to live with them . . . . Who knows? Maybe our technology itself calls for angelic guardians who are ready to come if we let them.”
Maybe those guardians and angels are us.
This is what I ultimately wanted to share with the pastors on my Zoom call: Let’s focus less on handwringing about the technology and how we use it and more on loving and protecting our neighbors, ourselves, and our connection with our Creator. If we stay in the headspace of trying to understand, we might never get to the embodied space of showing up to care. Our good stewardship of AI begins with reinforcing connections made of dirt and flesh, the care for our earth and each other, that we might not lose touch with the angelic in our midst.
