THE SANDSTONE JOURNAL: Tell me your thoughts on God (then we can talk about AI)

By Lynnee Jacks

If you are concerned about AI’s threat to humanity but you are not thinking about God, you have missed the point.

Today town halls across the country are packed with a bi-partisan representation of a unified collective. We are all saying the same thing: no one wants this.

We do not want your data centers, your AI overviews, or any more outsourcing of our humanity.

Yes, even despite the impetus that it will bring us into the future, cure disease, and all sorts of glowing promises about progress.

Because we know what happens at these kinds of threshold moments of technological progress.

We know this doesn’t end well for us.

There is a collective memory—call it oral tradition, passed down as myth and allegory —or call it the wisdom of the Holy Spirit—but it’s the sort of fragile prophecy that we all know in part. History is the evidence: there is a written record of the push and pull. The rise of expansion and progress and then again, a contraction into decline and suffering.

God emerges in the in-between.

What we do without him is ultimately done in spite of him. What happened when someone flew to close to the sun? The danger of hubris is our oldest story, and we have never done well to heed the wisdom of those who came before us.

A Threshold Moment

When Pope Leo XIV addressed the world on the matter of AI, the world looked up at once, just for a moment, from our collective scrolling. Not because the majority of us are a God-fearing people or because we hold the Vatican as any kind of authority in our personal lives—but because we understand that a statement from a world power marks a cultural moment.

A man spoke from a seat of power and influence.

It just so happens that his message is intertwined with what we think of God—and maybe, what God thinks of us.

On Tuesday morning, when headlines streamed in outlining the Pope’s main points and theological implications around the future of AI, I imagined one collective breath held at the height of a grand collision. For a moment, despite all we disagree on about progress and about God, we could hear the truth of wisdom in a few words—in the asking of a vital question:

“Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”

Pope Leo XIV uses the allegory of the Tower of Babel: man’s vision of progress—building towards heaven, without the authority of the creator behind it.

“Babel thus reveals the limits of any effort that, however grandiose, arises from self-affirmation, sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing.”

He goes on to compare it with the rebuilding of Jerusalem: a narrative that shows how the city is reborn, “Not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all: men, women, priests, artisans, heads of households and young people all play a part. It is an undertaking with God at the center, which rebuilds relationships before rebuilding with stones.”

His thesis finds its power in simplicity. He depicts humanity as being at one of countless threshold moments—the kind we know from myth and legend. It’s a cyclical question and answer: what happens when we are faced with the choice between a difficult path, and the inevitability of our own destructive nature? What happens if we partner with God for a better outcome?

Those who are closest to the realities of this technology treat it with a reverence that understands the spiritual weight hanging in the balance. And like many thought leaders in conversation around the ethics and philosophical implications of AI, the famous psychologist Carl Jung was not a church-going Christian. But he did know that “The whole world is God’s suffering.”

Jung laid the foundation for our modern understanding of archetype: the way old stories play out in broad strokes and in small fractals, from the thematic dramas impacting nations, to the individual symbols that dictate our personality and temperaments. His influence is central to how we make meaning of our history and sense of our future. He understood that life is am embodied act of prophetic acts, always in cycle.

So when I look for an authoritative voice in a time like this, I am not looking to the business professors or the economists or to any one religious leader.

Like Jung, the prophets and mystics among us know that truth is about the whole and not just the parts. When we understand this, we realize that we cannot engage, at least not thoroughly, in any real defense or criticism of where the world is headed, without yielding to a bigger story.

Pope Leo closes his allegories of Babel and Jerusalem by stating that we do not need to say “yes” or “no” to technology—but rather decide between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem. He challenges us to decide if we are a people that will dominate the heavens by our own will—or in collaboration with the God who has asked us, time and time again, to trust him with another path.

This sort of spiritual language may fall on deaf ears, especially those like mine, which have deconstructed their old religions. It’s the exact kind of language I often shy away from in favor of terms that encompass a softer, more equitable sort of spirituality. But the truth is that the world is changing and urgency is rising, and there is not enough time left to dance around careful words.

I am not a practicing Catholic and I wouldn’t label myself as the kind of Christian that my family would understand, but I am a God-fearing lover of Jesus, who has never been quite bold enough to say those words publicly, in this exact order.

So say you heard it here, first.

But what if we all could admit that we have thoughts on God?

Despite God’s persistence to be included in matters of every kind, we skirt around his name far too quickly. People say they want to deep conversations about dreams and faith, but when was the last time they muddled through discomfort long enough to really get somewhere?

What if we talked more honestly about what goes on behind the closed doors of our psyches—the strange places our algorithms bring us late at night? I am certain by now we all have scrolled past something that prodded us ever closer to God in all his paradoxical peace and terrifying truth.

Having grown up in cult-adjacent evangelical circles, where exorcisms and and tongues once scared me away from anything to do with the idea of a benevolent God—I spent years praying in secret, afraid that my search for truth might see me ostracized from the world of comfortable agnosticism, or even the relative safety of fringe spirituality that at the very least appeared exotic and adventurous.

So I digressed and I deconstructed, and all the while, I sought new kinds of experiences that altered my dopamine and convinced me I was becoming one with something: with universal energy or some un-named divinity.

And yet, I returned.

Like our friend Carl Jung, after all this searching, “I found that all my thoughts [still] circle around God like the planets around the sun.”

And so today I find it at the very least, compelling and important, that the world paused to hear an exhortation on the state of the world as it relates to God’s will.

Because we are at a threshold moment.

We have seen the writing on the walls and are near powerless to stop it. So then, do we need a new power to save us from ourselves? Or do we need to, finally, submit ourselves to the truth we already know?

Wherever we stand in our individual beliefs and the positioning of our hearts, we do understand the weight of this moment.

We understand that every question asked today is inextricably tied with the soul of humanity—and if we ever believed in God, if we ever hope to, then we must bring his name into the conversation.

*https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas-ai.html