Michael DeLashmutt , Religion News Service (RNS); Why Protestants should read the pope’s encyclical
"Bookending the text is a striking biblical contrast between Babel and Jerusalem. The question, the encyclical insists, is not whether humanity should embrace or reject technology altogether. The deeper question concerns what kind of technological civilization we are constructing. Are we building systems ordered toward domination, uniformity, surveillance and self-magnification, like in Babel? Or are we building systems that strengthen communities, preserve human dignity and serve the common good, like in the Bible’s Jerusalem?
The fight, in other words, is not really against the algorithms. It is against the oligarchs.
I have been studying theology and technology for more than 20 years, often using science fiction as a dialogue partner for questions that can otherwise feel abstract or distant from ordinary life. Reading “Magnifica Humanitas,” I repeatedly found myself thinking of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson: posthumanism, autonomous warfare, transnational corporate sovereignty and technologically mediated forms of salvation and domination.
There is something genuinely surreal about reading a papal encyclical over morning coffee and encountering discussions of autonomous weapons systems and posthumanism on the Vatican website. Twenty years ago, this would have sounded absurd. Today, it sounds descriptive.
And perhaps that is what struck me most while reading the document. The questions of speculative fiction have become the questions of our lived political reality.
But rather than leaving us trapped inside a techno-dystopia, the encyclical concludes on a note of solidarity and hope that refuses the fantasy that history is ultimately decided only by those behind the code.
Near the end of the document, Leo XIV quotes J.R.R. Tolkien: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set.”
Cyberpunk fiction often imagines salvation or damnation arriving through systems so large that ordinary people become irrelevant. Tolkien’s moral imagination works in almost exactly the opposite direction. The real work of preserving the world happens locally, concretely and relationally — not by mastering history, but by tending the fields nearest to us. And not by escaping creaturely limits, but by inhabiting them faithfully.
That may be the deepest challenge “Magnifica Humanitas” poses both to Silicon Valley triumphalism and to AI apocalypse rhetoric alike. The problem is not simply the machine. It is the temptation toward Babel: the concentration of language, power, capital and imagination into systems that no longer recognize human beings except as inputs, outputs, consumers or data points.
Against that temptation, the encyclical proposes something almost stubbornly unfashionable: subsidiarity, solidarity, shared discernment, limits, community and the common good.
In other words, the answer to AI is neither anti-technology retreat nor surrender to technological inevitability. It is the recovery of politics, moral responsibility and theological imagination at a human scale.
And perhaps that is why Tolkien appears at the end of the document. The Shire is not important because it is powerful. It matters because it is worth protecting from those who believe that power itself is greatness.
In the end, the encyclical circles back to one of the oldest theological questions imaginable: What kind of world are we building, and who is it for? That question cannot be answered by engineers alone, markets alone or even states alone. And Leo XIV’s deepest warning may simply be this: Christians are not free to leave the answer to the oligarchs.
(The Rev. Michael W. DeLashmutt is dean of the Chapel of the Good Shepherd and senior vice president at the General Theological Seminary in New York City, where he also serves as associate professor of theology. His most recent book is “A Lived Theology of Everyday Life.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)"
