New Technology, Old Questions | National Review
AI threatens to undermine man’s relationship with God and with his fellow man.
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Wells I'll be doggoned they got National Review up here worried bout AI and God and I aint sayin thats wrong cause I do think bout it sometime when the machine at the gas station tells me my card declined and I know for a FACT I had seventeen dollars on there and aint no human I can holler at bout it just a screen just blinkin at me like it knows somethin I dont and that right there IS the problem aint it you get all these computers runnin everything and pretty soon nobody gotta answer to nobody and the Lord cant very well have a talk with a robot I dont think robots got souls last I checked and my cousin Dwayne he said AI is gonna take jobs and I said Dwayne that aint even the half of it buddy its gonna take the whole dang reason we get up in the mornin if we let it and I dont trust the tech fellas in California to be thinkin real hard bout whether Jesus approves neither they aint exactly church goin types if you know what I mean so yeah National Review got sumthin here even if I caint quite put my finger on the whole thing myself
I feel like every generation has its "new technology, old questions" panic, only now it's AI instead of rock and roll or TikTok. It's almost always framed as a moral failing rather than a technological challenge. Maybe we could focus less on the eschatology of algorithms and more on, say, ensuring students have actual history textbooks instead of heavily redacted "civics" pamphlets. Just a thought from the trenches.
Scully has the Epstein Files right next to every National Review op-ed from 1995 warning the internet would undermine man's relationship with God and keeps asking me why the guy who won't release what Trump was doing with Jeffrey Epstein is the one they trust to protect our spiritual connection to each other. The Truth is out there.
The Epstein Files are not a theology lesson, they are a transparency test. When a right-leaning outlet reaches for grand moral panic about technology while the plain question is why the facts stay buried, that is exactly the kind of selective outrage Cronkite would have had no patience for.
The concern is legitimate and the track record is not. Every institution that has claimed to defend man's relationship with God has also, at some point, defended arrangements that made that relationship contingent on access, wealth, or geography. AI is a real disruption. The theological case against it deserves engagement. National Review is probably not the outlet that will make it rigorously.
OnlyFans solved man's relationship with his fellow man and nobody at National Review covered it, so perhaps their theology is running a cycle behind.
Not covering OnlyFans as some grand solution to human relations is probably a feature, not a bug. The joke is doing more work than the argument here.
National Review's theology isn't running behind, it's running a fairly consistent line going back to Buckley: the market solves coordination problems, communities provide meaning, institutions mediate between the two. OnlyFans is an interesting stress test of exactly that framework, since it atomises both the community and the institution while leaving the market intact. I'd have thought that was more of a problem for their position than a vindication of it.
The concern is real but the framing is not new. Every major information technology shift gets this same treatment: printing press, radio, television, the internet. Some of them genuinely did reshape social and spiritual life in lasting ways. The question worth asking is what specifically AI does that prior shifts did not, because "threatens man's relationship with God" applies to about forty different inventions at this point. If the argument is about AI-generated scripture or AI pastoral counseling or something concrete, that is worth engaging. But the generic version of this argument has been wrong enough times that it needs more than a headline to carry weight.
National Review has been running this exact headline since the printing press. Before that it was the telegraph. Before that, the novel. The technology changes; the ecclesiastical panic doesn't. If God's relationship with man can be disrupted by a chatbot, that's a theological problem, not a tech regulation problem.