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As readers will notice from my FT Weekend piece on the rise of the new Catholic right, I’m thinking a lot about issues of faith in relation to the US political landscape.
America has in recent decades been a much more religious place than Europe. Our entire history is, of course, based on the freedom to worship. And while numbers of parishioners in many old-line faiths like the Catholic Church are down, there’s a counter trend of rising evangelical worshippers in the US. But as I explain in my Weekend feature, where Catholics go intellectually, evangelicals tend to follow. What’s more, because Catholics represent the single largest faith voting block (they represent over 20 per cent of all American adults), they matter a lot politically.
In today’s Swamp Note, I want to look at how Catholic leaders, along with those from other faith traditions, are beginning to spend more time thinking about artificial intelligence and where it’s taking us. The late Pope Francis weighed in critically on the need to put AI in service to humanity, rather than the other way around, before he died. There are rumours that the new Pope Leo XIV is planning to write his first encyclical on the topic. Faith leaders within many communities see the AI revolution as being quite akin to the Industrial Revolution — a period of volatility in which we might see major disruptions to labour markets, work and family structures, and the direction of religion itself. How voters of faith react to the changes could have big implications in midterm and presidential elections.
I’m glad to have as my partner in today’s Swamp Note Michael Toscano, the director of technology policy for the Institute for Family Studies. He’s Catholic and has worked on successful political campaigns to put age restrictions on social media usage. The IFS also helped craft Republican senator Josh Hawley’s new proposals to have age restrictions on AI companions (which are viewed quite sceptically by many voters of faith, not to mention plenty of others). And Michael chairs a weekly roundtable in which economists, philosophers, policymakers and academics from different walks of life come together to discuss the intersection of current issues with religious belief and tradition.
One of the things on my mind these days is which party in the US has the high ground when it comes to reining in Big Tech. I was a huge fan of the Biden administration’s “New Brandeis” approach to antitrust, which aimed to bring back a discussion of power in the political economy to what had — at least for the last few decades — been a more siloed and technocratic discussion about how to deal with corporate monopolies. Up until the Biden administration came in and put people like Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission and Jonathan Kanter at the Department of Justice (not to mention Tim Wu as an adviser in the White House), the law assumed that if prices were declining for consumer goods and services, there was no monopoly problem in technology or any other sector.
The Trump administration has been on both sides of the Big Tech debate. JD Vance, who is close to tech titans like Peter Thiel, has praised Khan. The administration has on occasion been critical of Silicon Valley monopoly power. But Donald Trump himself filled the front row of his inaugural ceremony with the leaders of America’s largest technology corporations. The White House has also threatened Europe with greater tariffs should Brussels attempt to rein in American Big Tech firms, and has looked to US technology companies as “national champions” in the great power conflict with China.
We all know that the algorithms influence most of what we see and read, as well as how we shop, bank, date and even vote. We also know that both parties take a lot of lobbying money from large technology firms, and even bipartisan efforts to regulate them have yet to really curb their power. The Trump administration has two divergent interest groups, the Big Tech libertarians who like the president’s tax cuts and low regulation approach to governance, and the Maga camp that is worried about algorithmic control. Meanwhile, faith leaders are beginning to agitate for a regulatory framework that creates lines between human work and AI work, and controls around how children interact with AI.
Michael, my question to you is, what worries do you hear from people on your roundtable about Big Tech and AI? And what practical implications do you think it might have in the midterm and presidential elections? Which party has, in your view, the upper hand when it comes to controlling our algo-overlords?
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Michael Toscano responds
Hi Rana, thank you for inviting me to reflect on what are some of the most important questions of our time. It is my view that the political party that develops a coherent response to the threats of ungoverned AI — to our children, work, daily lives, and sense of place in the political and even cosmic order — will rise as the dominant electoral force in this country. Even more so, people in general — left and right, religious and secular, elite and marginalised — will turn increasingly to religious traditions for a shared public language to understand the nature of AI and how we should respond to it, both spiritually and politically.
I do not come to these conclusions lightly, nor do I mean to gloss over the risks intrinsic to such developments. But when weighed against the alternative (ie politically ungoverned and spiritually unbound AI), a mass of people, cutting across entrenched divisions, will come to see publicly minded religion and a vigorous politics that protects them from AI as the less risky and, indeed, unifying option. The intense curiosity that people have for His Holiness Pope Leo XIV’s rumoured encyclical letter on AI will, I believe, turn out to be an early expression of this turn.
This is not just some kind of slippage away from a historic commitment to secular politics, but rather a sign of secular categories failing in the face of AI itself. This failure is simply inescapable, because secularism has fundamentally undermined our ability to collectively articulate why Big Tech companies must not be allowed to force our children to either — as Sam Altman put it — “merge” with “digital intelligence” or simply “fade” from history like a withered and surpassed “evolutionary tree branch”. We still know in our guts that both of these options are barbarous and wrong, but we struggle to say more about their wrongness.
We also know that granting Big Tech CEOs such a power over us is to make them like gods; and it is quite evident that these gods don’t have a future for us. So, many people suddenly find themselves befuddled at their openness to an older set of gods whom they thought they had definitively surpassed. Now, after all this time, these older belief systems seem to offer the possibility of something more hopeful and yet irreducibly divine.
But these CEOs are not gods, despite their best efforts. Like you and me, they are mere mortals. And so, though our multifaith roundtable discusses things like the above, we also turn to politics, one of the primary means by which this struggle will be decided. Many groups, surely, offered expert advice on Hawley’s new GUARD Act, a bipartisan bill that requires age verification to access AI companions — but the credit belongs entirely to him and his courageous colleagues, senators Richard Blumenthal, Katie Britt and Chris Murphy, who co-sponsored the bill.
Our polling at the Institute for Family Studies shows how overwhelmingly popular such legislation is. In a recent survey with YouGov, we asked 2,000 voting age Americans whether Congress should prioritise “preventing states from passing their own AI laws that could . . . slow industry growth” or pass legislation to protect kids from AI chatbots. By a 9-to-1 margin, Trump voters and Kamala Harris voters alike want Congress to choose protecting children over industry growth.
You ask what implications AI will have on the midterm and presidential elections. Admittedly, I don’t know. As the polling above shows, the American people are unified in their desire for lawmakers to regulate AI companies. But in the short term, a lot depends on when and if the AI bubble bursts, if we fall into a recession, and whether President Trump can successfully distance himself from Big Tech companies for having defrauded the American people with false promises of broad prosperity. In other words, can the populist mode of the Republican party be turned back on before the Democrats take up the mantle? We’ll see. The fragmentation within the Democratic party is so severe that it’s ascendance on this issue is by no means guaranteed, even if the Trump administration’s new alliance with Big Tech is simply too deep to disavow.
But I’m a conservative and always have been, so I’m rooting for the president to remember the people who put him in the White House. I would encourage him to look to Hawley for a coherent path forward, to respond to the AI crisis by forging bipartisan consensus that the future belongs to all Americans — indeed, to all humans — not to the false gods of Silicon Valley.
There is the potential for a unifying vision for regulating AI companies. God willing, someone will take it up.
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