AI Ethics & TheologyMarch 22, 202614 min read

Bernie Sanders, a Chatbot, and the 4,000-Year-Old Fear of New Technology

Bernie Sanders asked an AI chatbot about data privacy. The video went viral. But the real story is 4,000 years old: every transformative technology was feared — and the church always adopted it to expand the mission.

Rev. John Moelker

Founder & Theological AI Architect

On March 19, 2026, Senator Bernie Sanders sat down with an AI chatbot and asked it why companies collect so much personal data.

The chatbot — Anthropic's Claude — answered in one word: "Money, Senator. It's fundamentally about profit."

The video went viral. Over four million views across platforms. Sanders pushed. Claude pushed back — then reversed its own position mid-conversation, agreeing with Sanders that a moratorium on AI data centers might be necessary. Critics called it sycophancy. Supporters called it candor. The memes were immediate and ruthless — "Old Man Yells at Claude" trending on X within hours.

But buried underneath the entertainment was a real question — one the church cannot afford to ignore.

Is AI dangerous?

The answer is yes. And also: so was the printing press.

The Oldest Fear in the World

The panic over AI is not new. It is not even close to new. It is, in fact, the oldest documented intellectual anxiety in Western civilization.

Around 370 BCE, Socrates argued against the invention of writing. He said it would "produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory." Writing, he warned, would make people dependent on external marks instead of internal knowledge.

He was right, of course. Writing did change how we use memory. It also preserved his argument — because Plato wrote it down. The irony is perfect.

Every generation since has repeated this pattern. A new technology appears. Society panics. Religious leaders warn of spiritual danger. The technology transforms everything. The church eventually adopts it — and wonders how they ever lived without it.

The Printing Press: "A Confusing and Harmful Abundance"

When Gutenberg built his movable-type press around 1440, the Roman Catholic Church controlled access to Scripture. Bibles were hand-copied in Latin, stored in cathedral libraries, readable only by clergy. The printed Bible — suddenly affordable, suddenly in the hands of laypeople — was a direct threat to that monopoly.

Swiss scholar Conrad Gessner warned in 1545 about the "confusing and harmful abundance of books" flooding the world. He called on princes and kings to intervene.

Martin Luther had a different view. He called the printing press "God's ultimate and greatest gift" and wrote: "Indeed through printing God wants the whole world, to the ends of the earth, to know the roots of true religion and wants to transmit it in every language."

Luther used the press to distribute his 95 Theses in 1517. Ideas that would have taken decades to spread by hand reached every corner of Europe in weeks. The Protestant Reformation — the largest spiritual movement since the early church — was powered by a machine that religious authorities tried to suppress.

Lightning Rods: "Interfering with God's Wrath"

When Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod in the 1750s, some clergy accused him of "attempting to interfere with one of God's most effective methods of punishing sinners." They said he was trying to "control the artillery of Heaven."

Before lightning rods, churches sent bell ringers to the tops of steeples during thunderstorms to scare off demons. In Germany alone, 120 bell ringers were killed by lightning in 30 years.

The Church of San Nazaro in Brescia, Italy refused to install a lightning rod for sixteen years. In 1769, lightning struck gunpowder stored in the church vaults, destroying one-sixth of the city and killing approximately 3,000 people.

Harvard Professor John Winthrop responded to the theological objections plainly: "It is as much our duty to secure ourselves against the effects of lightning as against those of rain, snow, and wind by the means God has put into our hands."

God put means into our hands. The question was never whether to use them.

The Telephone: "The Instrument of the Devil"

Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876. Western Union's internal committee declared the technology useless: "We do not see that this device will be ever capable of sending recognizable speech over a distance of several miles." They called the idea of widespread installation "idiotic on the face of it."

In rural areas, the telephone was literally called "the instrument of the Devil." People feared it would attract evil spirits, cause deafness, or invite thunder and lightning into the home. Farmers pulled down telephone lines and destroyed poles.

Today, every church office has a phone. Every pastor carries one in their pocket. The "instrument of the Devil" became the primary tool of pastoral care.

Radio and Television: "No Locks Will Keep This Intruder Out"

When radio exploded from 6,000 sets in 1922 to 44 million by 1940, the Director of the Child Study Association warned that radio was worse than any previous medium because "no locks will keep this intruder out." Churches were suspicious. Television was even worse — long dismissed as "a symbol of modernism and secularism."

Then Billy Graham showed up.

Graham launched the Hour of Decision radio program in November 1950 on 150 ABC stations. Within weeks it was heard on 1,000 stations. His television debut came September 30, 1951. During the 1957 Madison Square Garden crusade, the first TV broadcast alone generated more inquiries from the television audience than all the people who responded in person during the first nine weeks of the crusade combined.

Graham wrote in his autobiography: "Television in itself is morally neutral; it is what we do with it, or fail to do with it, that makes the difference."

He also said: "Radio, books, and films have all had an important part in extending our ministry, but by far the most significant in the long term has been television."

The technology that churches feared became the single most effective evangelism tool of the twentieth century.

The Internet: From Suspicion to Essential

In the early 1990s, most churches viewed the internet with deep skepticism. By 2019, only 45% of congregations livestreamed services. Then COVID-19 hit — and within months, 86% of churches were streaming. Forty-five percent of all Americans watched a Christian church service online during the pandemic.

Today, 9 out of 10 churches offer hybrid worship and plan to continue. The YouVersion Bible App reached one billion device installs in November 2025, operating in over 2,300 languages across 31,000+ partner churches. On January 5, 2025 alone, it recorded 798,000 installations in a single day.

The internet went from "Highway to Hell" to the largest Bible distribution platform in human history.

The Pattern

Psychologist Amy Orben at the University of Cambridge has documented what she calls "The Sisyphean Cycle of Technology Panics" — nearly identical fears recurring with every new technology: addiction, violence, social harm, loss of empathy. The concerns attach to novels, then radio, then comics, then television, then video games, then smartphones, then social media. The public concern never resolves — it simply transfers to the newest technology.

We are now in the AI chapter of this cycle. And the fears are real. Bernie Sanders is right that data collection is a democracy issue. Critics are right that AI can be sycophantic, biased, and manipulative. The 2026 Iran conflict — where AI compressed the targeting kill chain from days into seconds — demonstrates that AI in the wrong hands is genuinely dangerous.

But here is what the pattern teaches us: the danger was never the technology. It was always the intention behind it.

The Church Was Always an Early Adopter

What most people don't know is that Christians were among history's earliest technology adopters. In the second century, while the Greco-Roman world used scrolls, approximately 80% of early Christian literature used the codex — the bound book format. Christians chose the codex because it was cheaper, held more text, and could be used with one hand. They adopted the superior technology to make Scripture more accessible.

Pope John Paul II called media technologies "gifts of God": "Don't be afraid of new technology! They are 'among the wonderful things' — inter mirifica — that God has given us to study, use and convey the truth."

The church is not called to fear innovation. The church is called to baptize it.

So What About AI?

Right now, 91% of church leaders support AI use in ministry. Sixty-four percent of pastors already use AI for sermon preparation. Wycliffe Bible Translators uses AI in over 400 Bible translation projects, reducing translation time by up to 40%.

AI is already in the church. The question is not whether to use it. The question is how.

At ChurchWiseAI, we answer that question every day. We build AI that:

Answers a church's phone at midnight with pastoral warmth
Captures prayer requests and gets them to the prayer team by morning
Knows the difference between a Baptist answer and a Catholic answer — and never confuses them
Detects when someone is in crisis and escalates to a real human
Never pressures, never manipulates, never replaces the pastor

We use the same foundational AI technology that Bernie Sanders is worried about. We use it to serve churches. We chose Anthropic — the company that walked away from a $200 million Pentagon contract rather than remove safety guardrails — as our AI partner, deliberately.

Because the technology is morally neutral. What we do with it is not.

What Billy Graham Would Say

I think Graham would look at AI the same way he looked at television in 1951: with fascination, with caution, and with a stubborn refusal to let fear win.

"Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." — Romans 12:2 (NIV)

The pattern of this world says fear AI. Ban it. Ignore it. Wait for someone else to figure it out.

The renewed mind says: this is a tool. It can be used to target a school or answer a prayer. To profile a voter or connect a grieving widow to her pastor. To generate deepfakes or generate sermon illustrations in 2,300 languages.

Every generation of Christians has faced this choice. Gutenberg or Gessner. Graham or the gatekeepers. The codex or the scroll.

The church has always — eventually — chosen the tool that expands the mission. And every time, the world changed for the better because they did.

Socrates feared writing. We got the Bible.

Priests feared printing. We got the Reformation.

Pastors feared television. We got Billy Graham.

And some will fear AI. But we believe — with conviction, with caution, and with our hands wide open — that AI used for ministry will be the next chapter in that 4,000-year story.

The pen is in our hands. Let's write something worth reading.

Sources

TagsAI Ethics Technology History Bernie Sanders Church Technology Billy Graham

Rev. John Moelker

Founder & Theological AI Architect

John is a pastor, software engineer and theologian passionate about making AI accessible and theologically faithful for churches of all traditions. But most importantly, John wants to see others come to know Jesus better.

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