The image of Pope Leo XIV standing at the Vatican on May 25, 2026, alongside an Anthropic co-founder, presenting his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (“The Greatness of Humanity”) to the world, would have seemed improbable five years ago. For those of us who have spent years examining artificial intelligence through both a national security and biblical lens, it registered as something long overdue.

The head of the Catholic Church dedicated his first major teaching document entirely to artificial intelligence, warning that humanity faces an “epochal turning point” and calling for AI to be “disarmed” from what the document describes as logics of domination, exclusion, and war. For once, Rome and the evangelical community are sounding recognizably similar alarms, and the reasons deserve careful examination far beyond denominational interest.

The battlefield evidence for the Pope’s concern is anything but abstract. Ukraine has become the world’s first large-scale AI-assisted drone war, where cheap autonomous systems now identify targets, breach armor, and close with enemy positions at a pace that compresses human decision-making nearly to zero. Iran’s proxies have acquired comparable capabilities, including precision targeting and autonomous navigation once confined to major-power militaries, now proliferating to rogue states and terrorist organizations.

China’s military planners pursue what Beijing openly calls “intelligentized warfare,” integrating artificial intelligence into command systems, surveillance, and battlefield targeting as the pathway to strategic dominance over the United States. I document the full scope of that rivalry in “The New AI Cold War: Liberty vs. Tyranny in the Age of Machine Empires,” where the core argument is that authoritarian AI is ideology encoded as infrastructure. The values Beijing embeds in its surveillance systems and weapons exports are already reshaping governance and warfare beyond China’s borders, and they leave little room for ambiguity about where that trajectory ends.

Pope Leo’s encyclical confronts a specific moral danger with unusual directness. He argues that moral judgment depends on conscience, personal responsibility, and the recognition of human personhood, qualities no system of calculation can supply, and that it is therefore impermissible to entrust lethal or irreversible decisions to artificial systems. The document establishes three requirements for legitimate military AI use: traceability of decisions, meaningful human control over lethal action, and international rules capable of slowing the technological arms race.

Once machines begin selecting and engaging targets faster than human beings can deliberate, accountability evaporates. Conscience does not fail loudly in such conditions; it migrates quietly from soldiers and statesmen to opaque algorithms that no court can cross-examine, no chaplain can counsel, and no commander can hold morally responsible.

Isaiah 31:1 understood the dynamics of this temptation well before the age of autonomous systems: “Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help, who rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many and in horsemen because they are very strong, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel or consult the Lord.” The prophet’s rebuke addressed rulers who substituted superior hardware for covenantal wisdom. The architecture of that rebuke fits our moment with uncomfortable precision.

The danger, however, runs deeper than battlefield autonomy alone. In “AI for Mankind’s Future: A Christian Perspective on the Hi-Tech Revolution,” I traced how the same technologies transforming warfare are quietly reshaping moral formation in families, schools, media, and churches. Algorithms serve as the default arbiters of truth for entire generations. Machines can process information at an extraordinary scale, but they carry no conscience, bear no moral guilt before God, cannot love or repent, and possess no capacity to recognize the image of God in another human being. When society treats algorithmic outputs as though they carry moral authority, the result is the misplaced trust Jeremiah called cursed, a quieter version of the idolatry that hollows out every civilization willing to practice it.

Pope Leo’s specific warnings about autonomous weapons deserve particular attention from evangelicals who take just war seriously. His insistence that lethal decisions cannot be delegated to artificial systems aligns with the biblical principle that moral accountability before God is personal and cannot be transferred to code. Where Christians bring a distinct contribution is in grounding that argument not merely in human dignity, as the encyclical does, but in the imago Dei: the image of God that every machine, however sophisticated, cannot possess and cannot honor.

Where I would part ways with the encyclical is on its suggestion that just war theory has become “outdated” in the age of autonomous weapons. Just war criteria, including discrimination between combatants and non-combatants and proportionality in the application of force, grow more urgent, not less, when algorithms threaten to replace human moral judgment. Abandoning that framework would not discipline AI warfare; it would remove the last principled vocabulary for evaluating it.

America’s political leadership has not caught up to these stakes. The Trump administration correctly recognizes that AI will shape the future balance of power between the United States and China, and surrendering AI leadership to Beijing would be strategically ruinous. But across both parties, the temptation to allow Silicon Valley executives and defense contractors to set pace and direction without meaningful ethical guardrails rests on a false premise: that restraint is indistinguishable from weakness. Every arms race in history has demonstrated that speed without governance produces weapons no civilization knows how to stop.

The trajectories I have been tracking, from battlefield autonomy to AI-enabled surveillance to algorithmic governance of entire populations, converge in ways that should press every reader of Scripture toward sustained reflection. In my forthcoming book “The Final Algorithm: When Artificial Intelligence Meets the End of Days,” due from Defender Publishing this July, I examine the biblical architecture of Revelation 13: a system given authority to speak, to track, and to compel conformity across an entire population. Recognizing that architecture in today’s AI infrastructure requires no imagination; it is advancing faster than any governance framework designed to contain it.

Jeremiah warned a nation that had substituted political confidence for covenantal faithfulness: “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord” (Jeremiah 17:5). When a civilization routes its moral decisions through systems with no conscience and no accountability before God, that curse is already in motion, and Christians cannot afford to watch from the sidelines. Congressional representatives need to hear from constituents insisting that lethal targeting authority remains under human command. Church and community leaders who treat AI’s corrosive effect on moral formation as a technology curiosity rather than a discipleship priority are ceding ground by default. The commission Daniel carried in Babylon still stands: hold the line on behalf of the image no algorithm can replicate.