On May 24, 1844, an inventor named Samuel Morse tapped out the inaugural message to travel by electromagnetic telegraph. The dots and dashes raced through copper wires connecting Washington to Baltimore. His choice of words was striking, as revealing as it is enduring: “What hath God wrought?”
Some 179 years later, when a colleague demoed ChatGPT for the first time at a department meeting, I think I muttered much the same.
For religious believers, jaw-dropping breakthroughs in technology—the wheel, the printing press, the steam engine—naturally invite divine attribution. They signal a world transforming dramatically and possibly irrevocably. They can leave us confused and, by turns, anxious and hopeful.
Ours is just such an era.
From the dawn of the internet in the 1990s to social media’s emergence a decade later to the AI upheavals of today, digital change feels like the only societal constant. We shape those tools of technology and they, in turn, shape us. And we’ll believe differently because of them: a revolution of both mind and spirit.
For just as early Christianity was defined by the affordances of oral communication and, later, the development of writing, so, too, will the texture of faith be molded by digital conditions and values. Our relations with others—that social fabric animating the theological—can still thrive in those spaces if we’re thoughtful and deliberate about them.
Woven throughout the articles of this issue are varying names for the same central challenge of online lives: navigating the physical-versus-virtual; the profound-versus-superficial; the real-versus-fake.
AI is the apex of that. Such systems seek to read, think, speak, feel, and relate on our behalf. The Catholic Church will have to be a voice that articulates meaning and dignity on behalf of humanity against an AI intrusion that is, by definition, soulless.
This digital world therefore confronts us with a new context for an otherwise timeless question: If God hath wrought this, what does it now mean to be human? And how might we find God therein?
One could be forgiven for feeling less than hopeful about the prospect of “digital humanity.” For many, that’s a contradiction in terms. Scratch the surface of any number of societal scourges—fragmentation, polarization, alienation—and technology feels like a contributing culprit.
Smartphones were addictively designed; algorithms programmed to incentivize emotional extremes. Mix in a generation of vulnerable young people beta-tested by powerful, wealthy corporations eager to “move fast and break things”—and break things they did.
Social media overflows with likes—human affection superficially tallied as influencer currency—but Christian love, agape? Less so.
In public opinion surveys, AI remains consistently unpopular. That’s because it doesn’t just threaten to automate out of existence countless forms of labor. Machines have been doing that for hundreds of years. AI threatens to overtake habits of the heart that have long formed the basis of friendship, feeling, and faith.
When the pandemic hit, and “social distancing” further atomized humanity, lives once lived in three dimensions suddenly felt depthless in Zoom rooms. And, yet, if Matthew 18:20 has it right, when “two or three are gathered in [Jesus’s] name, I am there among them.” Thank God for dependable Wi-Fi!
This is why the tech pessimists are only half right.
...much like those Dickensian factories of old, the dignity and humanity of workers ought to be at the forefront of Christian concern.
“Digital humanity” can be a sneer, sure—for all the evidence piled above that technology hollows out our capacity to be full, present, empathetic people of God. Yet, as many of the articles in this issue equally demonstrate, technology can also hallow out our potential as humans as well.
It feels like Pope Leo XIV is especially attuned to the promise and peril of this fast-arriving future. He’s no digital native, but then-Robert Prevost reportedly designed the first website for his Augustinian order in the early 2000s. More consequential, still, was his name choice: a nod to Leo XIII, whose papacy grappled with the turbulent aftermath of the Industrial Revolution and thus incubated central tenets of Catholic social teaching.
Much as heavy machinery transformed and reordered the world of the 1800s, digital technologies seem poised to unsettle our century (as they already have, abundantly). And much like those Dickensian factories of old, the dignity and humanity of workers ought to be at the forefront of Christian concern.
We don’t tend to see that labor—mining rare earths, say, or moderating disturbing content—behind the clean sheen of smartphone glass. But our digital world cannot run without it. Or them. Pope Leo, I believe, will bear that in mind—and in heart.
His “Magnifica Humanitas” encyclical, released this summer, is a testament to that. It has a pastoral protectiveness woven throughout: a call for safeguards against the threat that AI poses to workers, children, and people who seek peace in the world. And at a time when widespread unemployment is frighteningly forecast, it foregrounds that labor is not just a means to a paycheck, but a means to meaning and self-worth.
And it’s not just workers who are unsettled. As AI is increasingly normalized, we’re on the cusp of radical cultural change, too. Social relations that seem inauthentic now may well cease to be stigmatized as such in the near future—if Silicon Valley has its way. Indeed, part of what tech companies seek to simulate are relationships built upon faith: the most durable of foundations.
With more people turning to chatbots for friendship, therapy, romance, and even deepfake reanimations of deceased loved ones, calls will grow to affirm the “personhood” of what is, ultimately, just complex math.
Catholicism affirms the fundamental dignity of all human beings. If we reach an age of AGI (i.e., artificial general intelligence), large language models (LLM) will seduce many to be included in that category of consciousness. But an LLM is intrinsically derivative—and humans are created (and creative) in God’s likeness.
“We are born as originals, but many of us die as photocopies,” the first millennial saint, Carlo Acutis, cleverly lamented of social media conformity. That yearning that drives people online is, not coincidentally, the same yearning that drives people to faith: a desire for authenticity.
We seek from authentic spirituality that which the modern, mediated world often does not provide: a wholeness of true self. And yet, following the Jesuit ideal of “meeting people where they are,” the Christian message must go into that world and adapt to those imperfect conditions. From Archbishop Fulton Sheen charming audiences on broadcast TV to Pope Francis shattering Instagram records to C21 durably “praying it forward” on Zoom—week in and week out—there is ample legacy of this.
For without communication, there can be no community. And for many who can’t always find that community in “real” life—say, the LGBT Catholics that Father James Martin, S.J., welcomes—that online space is vital, soulful, and, frankly, real.
The internet is a place of miracle databases and cathedral-tour TikToks and biblical podcasts and prayer apps galore. Finding God in all things means finding God there too.
In the end, for me, finding God is but an exercise in focus. That’s important to keep in mind because those same digital industries have designs on our attention more than anything else. Our eyeballs—and, in turn, our minds—form the basis of their billion-dollar industries.
Mindfulness is, therefore, a countercultural act against them. And being mindful of others in our lives—in that practice of a relational faith—is equally countercultural.
In some ways, one of my favorite parts of the Mass is the silence that precedes it. It’s a prayerful unplug—a mini-digital detox, if you will—from the many distractions that came before and the many that await us afterwards on our phones. Perhaps what we need most from our dazzling new technologies is a time and spacefor reflection—away from them.
As I often tell my students, the greatest gift you can ever give someone you love is your attention. God hath wrought that for us too.
Guest Editor Michael Serazio is a professor and chair of the Department of Communication at Boston College who studies media production. In addition to earlier books on advertising and sports culture, he is the author, most recently, of The Authenticity Industries: Keeping It “Real” in Media, Culture, and Politics from Stanford University Press (2023). A former journalist, he has written essays for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other publications.
