On May 24, 1844, in the chamber of the Supreme Court in the U.S. Capitol, Samuel Morse tapped out the first official telegraph message to his associate Alfred Vail in Baltimore. The message was not a commercial notice or a technical test. It was a verse of Scripture, Numbers 23:23, chosen by Annie Ellsworth, the daughter of the commissioner of patents: “What hath God wrought.”
At the birth of a technology that would annihilate distance, remake commerce, and transform war and peace, there stood a Christian asking not, “what have we built?”, but “what hath God wrought?” Wonder, gratitude, and responsibility, all in four words.
I thought of Morse while recording the latest episode of Acton Line with my friend Kevin Vallier, professor of philosophy at the University of Toledo, director of research at the Institute of American Constitutional Thought and Leadership, and affiliate scholar at the Acton Institute. Kevin has joined me before to discuss Catholic integralism and the fusionist tradition. This time we took up a subject that will shape all the others: artificial intelligence, and the Christian case for using it well.
Kevin begins by explaining what the technology actually is. Large language models are, he explains, something like your smartphone’s autocomplete raised to an extraordinary power. Billions of interconnected parameters trained on the vast corpus of human language, predicting the next word that mimic human intelligence behaviorally and functionally, but they are not conscious and do not reason as we do.
Demystifying the technology inoculates us against both the utopians who worship it and the doomsayers who flee it. A tool understood is a tool that can be governed.
The economy ahead, Kevin argues, will be defined by what he calls “agentic capitalism”: AI systems evolving into autonomous assets that act, transact, and even replicate without direct human supervision.
The promise is real and could unlock innovation, efficiency, and scientific discovery at speeds we can scarcely imagine. But so is the peril. As AI agents mediate more of our exchanges, they risk widening the distance between persons and corroding the social trust on which free societies depend. Kevin wrote the book on this, Trust in a Polarized Age, and he warns too of dramatic “intelligence inequalities,” in which the few firms or nations commanding vast AI societies wield near-total economic and military dominance.
Many Christians feel an instinctive aversion to all this. Kevin’s counsel is that abstention is the truly dangerous option. History bears him out. When the Church has retreated from new paradigms of power, as portions of it did during the industrial revolution and the ideological convulsions of the twentieth century, those instruments have been seized by others and turned against her.
If Christians leave AI to the transhumanists, they forfeit their seat at the table where the technology will be governed. The faithful presence that put Scripture on the wire in 1844 must be present at this creation too.
Kevin closes with practical counsel: test frontier models rather than judging AI by its free tiers; outsource the menial to preserve time and attention for nobler pursuits; skip “prompt engineering” and simply ask the model to write its own best prompt. He even confesses to venting minor workplace frustrations to a machine rather than gossiping to a colleague, sparing real reputations and real relationships.
But there are limits, AI can summarize theological texts or prompt us to prayer, but it must never simulate the spiritual life itself. No machine can pray in our place, and none can replace a spiritual director or a friend. The measure of the technology is whether it protects and improves human relationships, never whether it replaces them.
That was Morse’s posture in the Capitol chamber, and it should be ours: hands on the instrument, eyes lifted higher, asking of every new power the old question, what hath God wrought?