Washington Post: Would Jesus Like Waymo? Baptists Have Thoughts. (2026):

Would Jesus like Waymo? The Rev. A. Michael Charles Durant doesn’t think so.

“Jesus either walked or rode a beast,” Durant said in an interview at the Tenth Street Baptist Church in Washington, where he serves as pastor. “He would be opposed to technology that was opposed to people, and I believe that this is opposed to people.” …

In recent months, Durant has joined local Baptist pastors and other top leaders in the National Baptist Convention — which bills itself as the largest Black religious organization in the United States — in opposing autonomous vehicles, including in the District, where the D.C. Council is weighing a bill that would legalize their commercial operation.

Although the pastors echo arguments from labor unions that autonomous vehicles will cut into the bottom lines of ride-share drivers, some of whom are congregants, their rationale centers on a more existential concern: that robotaxis threaten what it means to be human.

“God created us to be interdependent,” Durant said from his green-carpeted office. “The greatest danger is not that humans will be not needed, but that we create an environment where humans don’t need each other.”

Their opposition to autonomous vehicles comes as religious communities grapple with artificial intelligence and what the technology means for the human condition and all its messy beauty.

“Automation can dehumanize humanity. The Book of Genesis declares that God created man, and then he breathed into man’s nostrils, and man became a living soul,” said C.H. Johnson, the pastor at Christ Missionary Baptist Church in Maryland. “If we’re not careful, technology can rob us of our humanity, can rob God’s creation of our humanity.”

Noreen Herzfeld, a professor at St. John’s School of Theology and Seminary in Minnesota, who studies the intersection of religion and technology, said she hadn’t previously heard of religious communities specifically opposing autonomous vehicles. But she said many religious groups are worried about artificial intelligence.

“Religious communities are concerned about AI becoming a substitute for the relationships that matter, and that would be human-human relationships and human relationships with God,” she said. …

Boise Kimber, president of the National Baptist Convention, said his concern about driverless cars extends to broader worries about AI.

“I see AI becoming a handicap to humanity. It it does not allow us to practice real life,” he said.

But for now, he’s focusing his attention on robotaxis, in part because he sees driving as an inherently human act.

“Jesus walked on the dusty roads of Jerusalem,” he said. “I think he would say, ‘Let’s have a human being behind the wheel of an automobile.’”

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