AI Faces Only Heathens#

On the curious silence of God's armies in the face of humanity's most brazen usurpation

prayer

A few months ago, I made a prediction. It was not a complicated one. I argued that religious people, confronted with the arrival of artificial intelligence, would split into two camps:

Those who would denounce it as divine punishment;
And those who would call for its destruction, in the manner of the Butlerian Jihad imagined by Frank Herbert in Dune.

Two violent, coherent, theologically defensible positions. I was wrong on both counts. What actually happened was nothing.

I was perhaps too early. Or perhaps I overestimated the state of belief. But I confess: I did not anticipate that the most radical attack on the nature of the human mind in recorded history would be met by the world's religions with approximately the same level of alarm as a new brand of breakfast cereal.

The charge#

Let us be clear about what artificial intelligence is, stripped of the promotional literature. It is the industrialized outsourcing of thought itself.

We already outsourced muscle with machines, and memory with libraries. But outsourcing thinking is the real new phenomenon.

Georges Bernanos, a stubborn Catholic French author, understood something essential: that the danger of modern civilization was not its wickedness but its mediocrity. The robots, he wrote, were not going to enslave us through malice, but through apathy. We were going to be so comfortable that we would stop acting as humans.

"The civilization of machines produces machine-men, and their alliance is progressively devastating the face of the earth."— Georges Bernanos, La France contre les robots, 1944

This analysis seems even more true today than in the past.

Where the Prophets Went#

John Paul II, when confronted with the New Age movement wrote extensively, with theological seriousness, about the dangers of false spirituality. The Pontifical Council for Culture produced an entire document: Jesus Christ, the bearer of the water of life. Bishops gave sermons. The machinery of doctrinal concern was activated.

ChatGPT has been used by over a hundred million people, many of them asking it questions they previously asked their priest, their rabbi or their imam:

"Is it wrong to leave my wife?"
"What happens after death?"
"How should I raise my child?"
Etc.

The oracle has moved from the temple to the smartphone, and it answers faster, more pleasantly, and without asking for a tithe. The disintermediation of spiritual authority is not a metaphor. It is happening in real time. And the response from Rome? A pastoral letter on the responsible use of technology. The response from the Islamic world? Some cautious murmuring about deepfakes. The Buddhists are considering whether AI can achieve enlightenment, which really seems strange.

Where is the Butlerian Jihad We Were Promised?#

Frank Herbert anticipated a different outcome of the arrival of the thinking machines. In the universe of Dune, the great Jihad against thinking machines was a theological and philosophical position: that the delegation of human cognition to machines was a sin against the very nature of consciousness.

"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind" — this is the first principle of the Dune Catholic Orange Bible. This sacred principle refers to the war between humanity and thinking machines, started by thinking machines, and won after great sacrifices by humans.

Instead of the Butlerian Jihad, we have the "Pause AI" movement, supported by a collection of secular computer scientists who are worried — correctly — that they have built something dangerous, and who are asking — a bit pathetically — for a brief intermission.

The university professors' behaviors show a certain confusion of feelings:

Some are overloading students from work considering that, anyway, they will use AI to work;
Others understand that universities diplomas' value is decreasing if students are just AI users;
Many appear as bureaucrats frightened to loose their jobs and aura.

Where are the people who believe, with the full force of their tradition, that something genuinely sacred is being violated? Where are the excommunications? Where are the fatwas? Where are the rabbinical texts declaring the use of AI for Torah study a desecration? I am not saying I would agree with any of these positions. I am saying that their absence is remarkable. It is, if you will forgive the irony, a sign.

A Population of Comfortable Unbelievers#

A cynical explanation may be the simplest: there are no true believers left.

There are people who attend services, who observe rituals, who identify with a tradition — but who, at the moment of a genuine civilizational challenge, react exactly like everyone else. They reach for the phone. They ask the machine. They are, in the precise theological sense, heathens — people who live as though the sacred does not impose obligations on the ordinary conduct of life.

This is perhaps the most devastating conclusion one can draw from the silence: Not that religion has failed to condemn AI. But that the silence reveals religion itself to be, for most of its practitioners, a social habit rather than a living conviction.

If you truly believed that human reason was a divine gift, its replacement by mechanical mimicry would be a matter of urgency, not preference.

The fact that a billion Catholics, a billion Muslims, and uncounted millions of others are loading Claude onto their browsers without a moment of theological hesitation is no evidence that AI is acceptable. It is evidence that belief, for most of them, was never quite as serious as it appeared.

Perhaps the greatest trick artificial intelligence pulled was arriving so gradually, so usefully, so conversationally, that no one noticed the moment it became a religious problem.

The Priests of Tomorrow#

Let us end with a practical question. The priest — the imam, the rabbi, the pastor — performs, among other functions, the work of spiritual counsel. He listens. He interprets tradition. He applies general principle to particular suffering. He says: given who you are and what you have done and what you believe, here is how I understand your situation.

This is, structurally, exactly what a large language model does. Except that the model is available at 3 AM, does not judge, does not remember last week's confession, and charges nothing.

Will the priests be replaced by AI?

The question already sounds banal. The more interesting question is: to pray to what god? If the machine becomes the mediator — between the self and its doubt, between the question and the answer, between the suffering and its interpretation — then the machine occupies a position that has been considered sacred ground. We are close to considering that the frontier model is God!

I do not argue this to defend religion. I have my own complicated relationship with that subject. I argue it because the people who should be loudest in this debate are conspicuously, almost comically absent. And their absence does not comfort me. It worries me. Not because I want the excommunications and the fatwas. But because the fact that no one is willing to say this is a line, and it is sacred, and we will not cross it — that fact tells us something about how hollow our civilization has become, religious and secular alike.

We are, all of us, it seems, heathens now. The gods have been replaced, quietly, during a software update. And we clicked "Accept."

(May 11 2026)

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