Pope Leo Thinks Nehemiah Can Lead Us Through the AI Age

In 1954, the French Christian philosopher Jacques Ellul published a warning that the world was not ready to hear.

In The Technological Society, he argued that the modern obsession with technique—efficiency, optimization, and the relentless pursuit of the one best way to do anything—was quietly fragmenting the human person from the inside. Human beings are “created with a certain essential unity,” Ellul wrote, "and [are] fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.” His remedy was not a retreat from civilization but a more demanding engagement with it: a refusal to accept the world as it is and an insistence on the world as God meant it to be.

Seventy years later, Pope Leo XIV has issued one of the most significant public theological works in a generation. Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence comes 135 years after Leo XIV’s namesake Leo XIII issued his magisterial encyclical Rerum Novarum, and it carries that tradition forward with new urgency into the age of artificial intelligence.

A lot of ink has been spilled (and a lot of anxious conversations have unfolded in Slack channels and group chats) about whether AI is coming for our jobs. It may be, but that concern isn’t sufficient for this age we are navigating. The tech titans racing to become the world's first trillionaires are coming for something far more precious: your heart.

Take for example the thoughts of AI market researcher Daniel Faggella, who in 2023 troublingly argued that he believes AI will become “a posthuman intelligence so capable and morally valuable that you would gladly prefer that it (not humanity) control the government, and determine the future path of life itself.”

In a talk that Faggella claims was attended by “AI founders, researchers from all the top Western labs, and ‘most of the important philosophical thinkers on [artificial general intelligence],” he went on to argue that “The great (and ultimately, only) moral aim of artificial general intelligence should be the creation of Worthy Successor—an entity with more capability, intelligence, ability to survive and … moral value than all of humanity.”

You see? Your heart.

This is what Leo is getting at when he writes of the magnificent dignity found in every human person—you, me, and the barista at your local coffee shop. So then, this is the question that cuts beneath the labor market and goes straight to matters of spirit: Will the machine tell you what to want, who to love, what to fear, and what you are worth?

READ MORE: AI Is the New Gilded Age. Pope Leo Has a Plan

Leo opens his encyclical by quoting Pope Francis’ assessment of the stakes. "Never has humanity had such power over itself," he writes. He then frames the whole of our technological moment around a choice between two ancient building projects.

The first is Babel, from the Book of Genesis. One language, one ambition, one tower reaching toward a greatness that scrapes the skies. It is a story about the temptation to make ourselves the center of everything, to build not for one another or the common good, but for the glorification and extractive benefit of the few. It’s about mistaking scale for meaning and power for purpose.

The second project is Nehemiah's. As told in the Old Testament, Nehemiah was an exiled leader who returned to a devastated Jerusalem and found the old walls turned to rubble, the gates disintegrated into ash, and people scattered and shamed. Nehemiah is devastated, but he doesn’t hire consultants or convene a summit. He walks the broken walls alone in the dark aftermath of desolation, taking honest stock of what is lost. Then he turns to his neighbors and finds ordinary, everyday people living in the shadow of their own ruined gates, and says: Each of you, rebuild the section nearest your home.

Not a triumphal tower. Just a shelter for ordinary, particular, and beloved people, built from below and deeply local, distributed, and proximate. This is a building project rooted in the conviction that every person has a section to own and a contribution that only they can make.

At the center of Nehemiah's project is not the structure but the community. It’s a project made up of people with names and faces, rebuilding something they love together. That image presses the question Leo puts to every designer, investor, and policymaker shaping the age of AI: What are you building toward, and who is it for?

“Technology is never neutral,” Leo writes, “because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.” Every system, every platform, every algorithm embeds a vision of what people are and what they deserve. And the answer to that question determines whether what we are building serves human flourishing or quietly undermines it.

This is why the common good is not an abstraction for Leo. It’s a structural demand.

“Recognizing that every man and woman possesses an inalienable dignity, together with rights that no human power can betray or nullify, requires us to shape the way we live together, including our economic and political choices, and the makeup of our cities,” he writes. “We can describe it as the social expression of the dignity recognized in every person.” 

And that dignity, Leo insists, is unconditional. “No sin, failure, humiliation, or exclusion can affect the profound value of a human life that God has willed and called into being.”

This framework stands defiant against the anti-human designs of many AI oligarchs. You are not a data point, a demographic, or a bundle of preferences to be harvested. You are a person with a face and a history and a calling. As Leo’s papal motto says: In Illo Uno Unum. In the One, we are one.

Consider what that looks like in practice. Imagine a woman in Mississippi working for a small nonprofit, navigating a tangle of federal programs, county databases, and church food pantries, trying to ensure that children in her community are enrolled in every hunger assistance program they qualify for. That work is slow, manual, and exhausting. Families fall through cracks not because no one cares but because the system is too fragmented for any single human being to hold together.

Give her AI—not AI designed to replace her judgment, but AI designed to serve it. In her context, AI can be a tool that cross-references enrollment data, flags qualifying families who haven’t applied, and surfaces at-risk children before a crisis arrives. She brings what the machine cannot: the relationship, the trust, the knowledge of which grandmother to call and which church to go through. The machine brings what she cannot do alone: pattern recognition across a dataset too vast for unaided human perception.

This is AI as a tool instead of a crutch. Her work remains, essentially and irreducibly, human. Her vocation is not replaced, it’s extended. Her calling, which is to see and serve the person in front of her, is honored and amplified, not automated away.

This is the Nehemiah model. It’s what it looks like when the power of science and the power of spirit work together for the common good. It’s what Leo XIV means when he calls us to be “builders of communion, rather than architects of Babel.” And it is the answer to Ellul's deepest concern: that technological society would fragment the human person so thoroughly that we would forget what wholeness felt like. We are made for something more than efficiency—we were made for communion.

Ellul wasn't interested in retreating from the world. He was interested in the thisness of the world, his conviction that things could change for the better. He was interested in making sure we understand that your neighbor is not a resource to be optimized or a problem to be solved, but a human being to serve alongside.

Pope Leo XIV is issuing that same refusal, in what may well be seen as a paramount theological reflection for the next century, addressed to a world whose tools have grown almost incomprehensibly powerful.

“The primary choice,” he writes, “is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem.”

The titans building towers will keep building. That is what Babel does. But for those of us who believe that the rejected stone is the cornerstone—that the child going hungry in Mississippi matters infinitely, that each of us has been given a calling and a section of wall—there is another project. Older, humbler, and far more durable.

Pick up your tools. Your section of wall is waiting.

“The primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem.” —Pope Leo XIV