Wall Street Journal Op-Ed: A Christian Vision for the Future of AI, by Walter Kim (President, National Association of Evangelicals):
Transformational opportunities for improvement are before us, thanks to AI. But a pro-human worldview—the philosophical grounding to aim those opportunities at the moral end of human flourishing—won’t emerge spontaneously. We must shape AI before it shapes us.
That is why I joined a multifaith coalition in Rome last October to declare that AI must be ethical and people of faith must help make it so. The American Security Foundation convened an assembly of leaders and scholars at the Vatican, where we signed a Joint Statement on AI Ethics. The statement set five principles as the moral architecture of the AI age: accuracy, transparency, privacy, security and the common good of human dignity.
A statement, however, is only a beginning. In Rome we established a moral vocabulary—the groundwork necessary for further discussion. In late May we reconvened in Athens, inviting other faith leaders to join us in developing and applying that ethical language. Keeping pace with AI will take all of us speaking with clarity and common purpose. The market-driven development of new technology, by itself, won’t protect children, truth or human dignity. But religious traditions have spent millennia on exactly those concerns. Ethical public policy must be developed with meaningful input from faith communities.
For evangelical Christians like me, a foundational conviction is that human beings are made in the image of God. In the ancient Near East, the image of God was used to legitimize power of the divinity of kings. In that context, the Book of Genesis does something audacious. It democratizes royal dignity, extending it to everyone—man and woman, slave and sovereign, each bearing inestimable worth.
That conviction underlies Christian accounts of dignity, equality, justice and human responsibility. It has also shaped the most consequential moral arguments in Western history. The claim was provocative then as it is now. It is the kind of underlying moral idea that can protect us from an AI-influenced social world that doesn’t understand the point of all technology is the elevation of human worth.
People of faith number more than six billion worldwide. Religious leaders, scholars, advocates, parents, professionals and policymakers can curtail abuses and promote human dignity. Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” demonstrates such moral participation. …
Regulation need not stymie innovation. It can be a guardrail, not a brake. But we can’t be passive observers of a revolution that will reshape every dimension of human life. We must be advocates and architects.
Prior TaxProf Blog posts:
- Wall Stret Journal, Will the Pope Apologize to AI? (June 14, 2026)
- New York Times, Pope Leo on AI: Magnifica Humanitatis (May 31, 2026)
- Christianity Today, Writing With AI Robs Us of God’s Gifts (May 6, 2026)
- Washington Post, AI and Faith (Feb. 22, 2026)
- The Free Press, Can AI Help Us Find God? (Feb. 1, 2026)
- Mitchell Bahnsen (Westmont College), A Theological Approach to Artificial Intelligence (Jan. 4, 2026)
- New York Times, Chatbot Jesus, The Church, and Human Flourishing (Nov. 30, 2025)
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