A recently published research paper stated that in August last year,

• 39 percent of the U.S. population aged 18-64 used generative AI.
• More than 24 percent of workers used it at least once in the week prior to being surveyed.
• And nearly one in nine used it every workday.

The adoption of generative AI in the United States has outpaced the adoption of both personal computers and the internet.

This might be George Orwell’s 1984 or the “brave new world” Aldous Huxley wrote about almost a hundred years ago, one of the most banned books in the United States, even before the rise of Trump. We are becoming familiar with the effects of the intervention in politics by the new masters of the universe who have transformed media and social media: for example, Elon Musk becoming something like the co-president of the United States and trying to influence the upcoming elections in Germany.

We do not yet know what this means for religion, theology, and the church.

The future of Christianity does not depend on secularisation and disenchantment but on new and less subtle forms of enchantment.           

Theological shifts in the Digital Age

First, some 30 years ago, the internet came, and it changed the way in which many people are reached by religious discourse — who they listen to, what kind of material, where, and how.

To paraphrase a famous song, the internet killed theology stars, marginalised established religious authorities, and made possible the rise of new voices that dwarfed the presence of theologians and church leaders in the mass media of previous generations (newspapers, radio, and television).

These changes in the kind of religious teaching, preaching, and catechesis are part of the death of mass culture: the Netflix effect, the “Marvelisation” of cultural products, and the worshiping of the banal.

The internet normalised new forms of anti-intellectualism: the collapse of both high culture and popular culture was fueled by new media and social media (in some countries more than others), where popular online preachers, proudly not belonging to academia, redefined the relationship between knowledge and one of its most important producers in Western history—the Catholic Church.

Now academic theology and official church teaching are just two of many available platforms to “get religion,” and they are much less influential, more selective, more regulated, censored, and self-censored than platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X), TikTok, and YouTube.

On these new platforms, the new oracles operate, endowed with a kind of infallibility much more usable than papal infallibility.

You can be skeptical as much as you want against theological-academic stardom and church authorities, but those voices undoubtedly contributed to the work of building a religious, spiritual, and intellectual tradition.

It’s unclear what the contribution of podcasters, body-builder priests, and prayer apps funded by Silicon Valley titans will be to the living tradition.

“Now academic theology and official church teaching are just two of many available platforms to “get religion”, and they are much less influential, more selective, more regulated, censored and self-censored than platforms like Facebook…”

Now it is AI’s turn.

It is very evident if you are a teacher these days.

Schools, colleges, and universities are scrambling to come up with strategies to deal with these changes without a master plan because this technology is always many steps ahead of any instructor or administrator. University leaders and faculty know that, already in 2024, generative AI (especially ChatGPT) was accessed more than 100,000 times per day in the network of an average mid-size university, predominantly by students.

It is true that Google and Meta are now making it part of how we use the internet, but not all of those daily 100,000 accesses are unintentional.

A significant amount of AI is used to replace the thinking involved in writing.           

This is changing the way we work, but also how we think and imagine, and it’s not just a product that you can choose not to use.

AI companies have released open-source models in an attempt to gain market share.  The interaction of these technologies in social media, with the integration of AI creations as “users,” is questioning more and more the meaning of “social” in those platforms.

Navigating AI’s theological challenges

Something like this already happened with theological entrepreneurs on the internet in the last two to three decades, and it will continue even more with AI.

The digital world is no longer an alternative; it is transforming the real world.

AI will continue this trend in ways that are difficult to anticipate.

Theology and the churches are at a particular disadvantage.

Governments or regulatory agencies are not able to deal with AI in protecting citizens’ rights.

The church is even less interested or able to intervene to protect the faithful’s rights.

Theologians are starting to talk about this, and a new kind of division is emerging between enthusiasts and critics of these technologies.

One of the most consequential articles for theology and the church in the last hundred years was Gerard Philips’ “Two Trends in Contemporary Theology,” published in 1963 during Vatican II.

Philips (a Belgian theologian and one of the most influential experts at Vatican II) argued that there were two types of theological minds in Catholicism.

The first type, wrote Philips, “moves with ease in the world of abstract and imperturbable ideas, with the risk of locking oneself in, of confusing concepts with the mystery that surpasses them, and of erecting a watertight partition between teachers and the men they should challenge.”

Philips wrote that the second type of theological mind has instead a different approach to modernity: “He risks ignoring the fundamental requirements in favour of a passing and uncertain fashion.”

This theological mindset “is convinced that his view of the truth does not identify itself in all its forms with the truth itself […] He has a greater sense of history, and if he considers any definition sanctioned by the church as irreformable, he nevertheless believes it to be susceptible to deeper illumination and a more lucid statement.”           

The future of theology in an AI-driven world

This bipartition that Philips described was very visible at Vatican II and remained one of the most defining for different and opposing theological and religious positions in the post-Vatican II period.

Then, the internet and AI came.

They are much more than just a technology, and they are redefining the fault lines within theological thinking in Christianity, especially for Catholics — theologians and non-professional theologians.

Given the politicisation of our religious discourse, the usual characterization of “liberal versus conservative” will continue to shape and often distort our theological imagination.

But a more urgent and interesting division is starting to emerge around the different views of AI’s impact on our ability to think, feel, and experience the divine in an authentically human way.

“A more urgent and interesting division is starting to emerge around the different views of AI’s impact on our ability to think, feel, and experience the divine in an authentically human way.”

The agenda of the industry pushing these new technologies is pretty clear.

Less clear is the response of school and university administrators and those who shape high-level policies in education.

Even less clear is how the church’s thinking will address this issue, navigating the two extremes of AI doomsterism and naïve enthusiasm for anything new.

The impact of AI on the church also occurs at a time when theological thinking is being abandoned as part of mass culture.

It would be a disaster if the answer came down to new forms of close-minded traditionalism and a tendency to re-clericalize and “aristocratise” the access to the real sources of thinking.

It’s not just about religion and theology. But thinking theologically is one of the last things that stand between us and the replacement of human critical thinking or, more likely, the monopoly of that thinking by new elites.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
• First published in La Croix International. Republished with permission.