Pastor Joseph Hutchinson opened a recent Sunday sermon at the Book of Revelation and worked his way to artificial intelligence. “AI wants to be God,” he told Gospel Light Baptist Church in Orangeburg, S.C. About 150 people belong to the church. Hutchinson is 74, and he told Tim Higgins of the Journal that the sermon grew out of their questions. In roughly 50 years of preaching, he says, no worry has outranked this one. Not wars. Not the economy.
Higgins's point is that the AI industry's newest critic is the pulpit. This time, he writes, the churches want a say early, while the technology is still taking shape. They want it to serve everyone rather than a small circle of billionaires. Some of the same people already resent the AI data centers and surveillance cameras showing up in their towns. Meghan Sullivan, who teaches philosophy at Notre Dame, says a church gives people a ready way to push for their idea of the common good.
The institutions are moving. The National Association of Evangelicals put out an AI policy statement this month. In August the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) held a summit on the subject. And back in May, Pope Leo XIV gave it a rare encyclical, on protecting the human person in an age of artificial intelligence. He likened the project to the Tower of Babel. Walter Kim, the evangelical association's president, says AI raises the question of what it means to be human. OpenAI's Sam Altman posted that he's uncomfortable with anyone giving religious force to AI models, and called it a safety issue. Wednesday's paper added separate news about the pope. He had part of a lung removed and was diagnosed with cancer, at 71.
Siri interrupts
Higgins notes that new technology has always stirred old fears. After the atomic bombs ended World War II, the New York Times reached for Old Testament language. Then there's the comedy. Mid-sermon, as Hutchinson described AI's power to watch everyone, the Siri assistant on his iPhone squawked back at him. He isn't against the technology. He hopes it finds cures. He doesn't want the U.S. to slow down and let China get ahead. “It bothers me for the other people that aren't ready,” he said.
Our read
This is Behavioral, with a Career edge. Two things in Higgins's column are useful to a saver. The first is the anxiety itself. When a 74-year-old pastor says AI fear outranks war in his pews, that's a reading on the public mood, and fear is a bad portfolio manager. Mega-cap tech and the AI build-out are held at weight in the model books. Nothing was added this week, and nothing was sold on a sermon. The second thing is that values questions about technology are now mainstream. Faith-minded investors have asked them for years. The practice runs Shariah-screened funds in three of its model books for that reason.
The piece of your own plan this story touches is the holdings list inside your biggest fund. Most people have never read it. This week, open the fund's page and look at its top ten holdings. If a company there is one you'd object to owning on principle, that's a real planning input, and there are screened funds built for it. If you're fine with the list, you've at least answered the pastor's question for yourself. You pick the umbrella before the clouds roll in. Bring the list when we next talk, and we'll go through it together.