How Artificial Intelligence Is Dividing the American Right

While I was appearing as a guest at the Aranya Imaginist Readers’ Festival, I ended up discussing this topic only privately with friends because I could not be bothered to go online and make a podcast about it. Then I discovered that essentially no one was discussing it in Chinese-language discourse, so it looks as though I have to do it after all.

On May 25, 2020, Pope Leo XIV promulgated the first encyclical of his pontificate, Magnifica Humanitas, which could be translated into Chinese as “The Greatness of Humanity.” It also has a subtitle: “On the Protection of Human Beings in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.”

An encyclical is a formal teaching document issued by the pope to the entire Catholic world. It carries greater weight than an ordinary speech, interview, or policy statement and is generally used to explain how the Church understands a major issue. This does not mean that every sentence in an encyclical enjoys the status of papal infallibility, and Catholics may hold different opinions from the pope on specific political matters. Nevertheless, for the more than one billion Catholics around the world, it represents the Church’s most authoritative public position on the issue.

The encyclical was signed on May 15 and formally promulgated on May 25. May 15 was carefully chosen because 135 years earlier, on May 15, 1891, Pope Leo XIII published one of the most important documents in the history of modern Catholic social thought: the encyclical Rerum Novarum.

Europe at the end of the nineteenth century was undergoing the Industrial Revolution. Machines were entering factories, large numbers of people were moving from the countryside into cities, and traditional families and local communities were being disrupted. Workers labored for more than ten hours a day yet lacked stable incomes, labor protections, and the power to organize.

Every perceptive thinker noticed modern industry’s oppression of human rights. Two highly influential political responses emerged. Socialism advocated abolishing or severely restricting private property, while classical liberalism placed greater trust in market competition. In Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII charted a different course. He recognized the right to private property while emphasizing that property rights must carry social obligations. He opposed socialism, but he also criticized capital’s unrestrained exploitation of workers. He defended the family and religious communities and demanded that the state safeguard workers’ dignity, a just wage, and the right of association.

What later came to be known as Catholic social thought was, to a large extent, formed beginning with this encyclical. It is difficult to place fully on today’s left-right spectrum. On questions of family, religion, abortion, and sexual ethics, it generally appears conservative. On issues of poverty, labor, monopolistic capital, and social welfare, however, it may advance demands further to the left, more stringent, and more emphatic about social welfare than those of the US Republican Party.

One hundred and thirty-five years later, Pope Leo XIV’s choice to sign The Greatness of Humanity on the same date was clearly intended to establish a historical contrast. Leo XIII faced the transformation of society brought about by the machine-driven Industrial Revolution, factories, and industrial capitalism. Leo XIV faces the changes brought about by algorithms, automation, and artificial intelligence. His original choice of Leo as his papal name was also widely understood as a tribute to Leo XIII. He hopes to continue Leo XIII’s work by establishing a moral and political framework for a new technological age.

Consequently, The Greatness of Humanity is not merely about whether ChatGPT will put people out of work or whether a particular large language model possesses consciousness. Leo XIV raises a more fundamental question: In an era of rapidly developing artificial intelligence, how should human beings understand themselves?

What makes intelligence human?

Many people in the technology sector believe that the main difference between artificial intelligence and human intelligence is one of technological capability. Today’s AI still makes mistakes and still requires human training, but as computing power, data, and model capabilities continue to grow, machines will gradually acquire consciousness similar to that of human beings and may even develop intelligence superior to humanity’s.

Leo XIV does not accept this understanding. He inherits the medieval Catholic thinker Thomas Aquinas’s view of the human person. In this Catholic tradition, human intellect cannot be reduced to the brain’s information-processing activity. Human beings can calculate, remember, and recognize patterns, but they can also form purposes, make moral judgments, ask what is worth pursuing, and accept responsibility for their choices.

Artificial intelligence can generate an article, imitate human emotions, and offer an apparently complete moral judgment. Yet its goals still come from its designers. The material it uses comes from training data. The restrictions it follows come from the company that developed it, and the values it displays come from ethical frameworks established in advance by human beings. Leo XIV therefore warns that we should not directly equate a machine’s imitation of certain human abilities with human intellect and consciousness merely because the machine can imitate them.

The risk that most concerns the encyclical is that artificial intelligence will gradually alter humanity’s understanding of itself. We have become increasingly accustomed to describing thought as information processing, judgment as probabilistic calculation, and language and emotion as responses that can be reproduced through data. If this understanding continues to expand, human beings may begin judging themselves by the standards of machines. At that point, whether AI has genuinely acquired consciousness will no longer be so important. Humanity will already have voluntarily narrowed the meaning of being human.

Leo XIV does not advocate a comprehensive ban on artificial intelligence. He acknowledges that the technology can improve medicine and agriculture, undertake dangerous, arduous, and repetitive labor, and help people with disabilities regain certain physical abilities. The Church is concerned with the direction of technological development and with who has the authority to determine that direction.

Artificial-intelligence systems are developed by a small number of private companies. These companies control enormous quantities of data, algorithms, and computing resources, yet they are continuously affecting how people obtain information, form judgments, and participate in politics. The answers AI gives often appear to be neutral technical conclusions, but behind them lie the developers’ understandings of fairness, efficiency, safety, and the value of human beings.

Leo XIV therefore demands that technology companies disclose more information so that society can understand the principles by which AI operates. Governments need to protect workers who may lose their jobs because of automation. Decisions involving warfare, the judiciary, and matters of life and death cannot be entrusted entirely to automated systems. He also supports national governments and transnational institutions jointly establishing regulatory rules, because the business operations, data flows, and algorithmic influence of major technology companies have long since crossed the boundaries of any single country.

These proposals quickly sparked controversy in the United States. Leo XIV is the first American-born pope in history, while the current US government has formed close ties with Silicon Valley’s technological capitalism. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and others have become some of the most important sources of funding, intellectual resources, and policy influence for the Trump right. Vice President Vance previously worked in venture capital and received Peter Thiel’s support for many years.

The Trump administration views artificial intelligence as a central arena of competition between China and the United States. It worries that strict regulation will slow the development of American companies and allow China to gain a technological advantage. The pope asks people to slow down and carefully assess AI’s effects on personhood, labor, political rights, and warfare. He advocates constraining the private power of technology companies and places hope in transnational rules. This is clearly some distance from Trumpism’s emphasis on national sovereignty and America First.

Over the past several years, Catholic conservatives, Trump supporters, and the Silicon Valley right have shared many positions. Together, they opposed progressive culture, the Democratic establishment, and the liberal establishment’s long-standing control over public life. Artificial intelligence is now forcing the right to confront its internal differences.

Catholic social thought emphasizes human dignity and the common good. Silicon Valley technologism pursues innovation and breakthroughs. The Trump administration gives priority to America’s national competitiveness. These three positions can form an electoral coalition, but they may not be able to coexist over the long term when it comes to specific areas of policy.

This contradiction will ultimately be concentrated most sharply in Vance. He is a political figure who converted to Catholicism, and he is also Trump’s vice president. He frequently discusses workers, families, and communities, but he comes out of the venture-capital world represented by Peter Thiel. When the pope, the president, and Silicon Valley make different demands regarding artificial intelligence, which side will Vance move toward? This question concerns his personal political choices, but it may also determine the future direction of the American right after the Trump era.

To understand that conflict, we first have to keep our attention on the pope. Why does he believe that artificial intelligence will not become human? What, in his view, is the difference between human intelligence and artificial intelligence?

Today’s public discussion of AI generally presupposes a continuous scale running from low to high. At the bottom is the calculator. In the middle are today’s large language models. Continued development leads to artificial general intelligence, and at the top is a superintelligence whose capabilities comprehensively surpass those of human beings. According to this understanding, the human brain and the computer differ in structure and material, but both belong to the category of information-processing systems. The main reason machines have not yet reached the human level is that their data, algorithms, or computing power remain insufficient.

Richard Dawkins, the best-known atheist in the West today, recently argued that AI has already displayed a certain kind of consciousness. Machines can converse with human beings, answer questions about their own state, and pass the Turing test in many scenarios. Dawkins believes that when we cannot distinguish outwardly between a machine and a conscious person, we no longer have sufficient grounds for continuing to insist that the machine possesses absolutely no consciousness.

The Catholic tradition represented by Pope Leo XIV fundamentally rejects this premise. In Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy, the intellect belongs to the human rational soul. Modern people can easily misunderstand the soul as a ghost residing inside the body. But by “soul,” Aquinas means the form by virtue of which a living body is the kind of living being that it is. Plants possess the capacities for nourishment, growth, and reproduction. Animals possess sensation and movement. Human beings can understand universal concepts, make moral judgments, and freely pursue purposes regarded as good.

Human intellect, of course, requires the body. If a person’s brain is injured, their memory, language, and judgment will all be affected. But brain activity and intellect cannot simply be equated. When human beings think, they do not merely process information. They ask after causes, form purposes, weigh good and evil, and attribute a choice to themselves.

Artificial intelligence can process vast quantities of data in an extremely short time. It can discover patterns that human beings cannot perceive and generate language that is grammatically complete and emotionally rich. But the goals it uses come from human beings, the restrictions it follows are defined by developers, the material it receives comes from training data, and the ethical judgments it displays depend on external inputs.

This is what the pope means when he emphasizes that artificial intelligence is, first and foremost, artificial. “Artificial” is not meant as a disparagement. Cars are artificially made, and antibiotics are artificially made. Artifacts can possess astonishing capabilities. What the pope wants to clarify is the nature of machine capability: high-level information processing differs in an important and fundamental way from human intellectual activity.

Consider an AI that can read several million medical records and predict the probability that a particular patient has cancer. In that task, it may far surpass any ordinary doctor. But when a doctor sits in front of a patient and considers whether to tell them uncertain bad news, and how to balance the patient’s right to know, their capacity to cope, and their family situation, the doctor faces an ethical relationship. The doctor must take responsibility for the decision. AI can offer advice, but AI is not a “someone” capable of taking responsibility.

That “someone” matters. After a person makes a mistake, we can ask why they acted as they did, what they originally knew, whether they were under coercion, and whether they had the ability to make a different choice. We can praise that person, and we can condemn that person. After a machine produces an erroneous output, however, we must ultimately follow the chain of programming, data, and management in search of the responsible human beings.

The deepest concern in The Greatness of Humanity therefore does not depend on whether AI might suddenly wake up one day. The pope is more concerned with how AI is changing humanity’s understanding of itself. As machines become increasingly adept at imitating language and judgment, human beings may begin describing themselves in machine-like terms. We describe thought as information processing, emotion as chemical reactions, choice as the output of a probabilistic model, and creativity as the rearrangement of existing materials. Human dignity may then become a set of indicators that can be calculated and optimized.

Once this understanding is accepted, society’s attitude toward human beings will change. Inefficient people will seem less valuable than efficient machines. People unable to adapt to technology will be viewed as a backward population. Human needs will enter policymaking only after they have been translated into data. Activities that do not produce economic benefits, such as caregiving, contemplation, prayer, companionship, and friendship, will find it difficult to prove their value in such a society.

Leo XIV’s warning is that AI has not yet become human, but human beings may first reduce themselves to machines.

Treatment, enhancement, and technological idolatry

At this point, Leo XIV may sound very much like a pope who opposes technological progress. But The Greatness of Humanity acknowledges that artificial intelligence can improve agriculture, medicine, and biological research. In repetitive, arduous, and dangerous work, automation can free people from physical wear and the risk of death. AI can help doctors identify illnesses, help people with disabilities communicate, and allow people who have lost motor function to control devices again.

Catholicism does not require people to passively accept illness and disability. Eyeglasses, prosthetic limbs, [unclear], and modern medicines have all altered the human body’s natural condition. Using technology to treat the body does not automatically constitute a betrayal of human nature.

The truly difficult boundary arises between treatment and transcendence. Elon Musk’s Neuralink, for example, implants chips in the human brain. That sounds very close to the cyborgs found in science fiction. According to Neuralink’s currently stated public uses, it is primarily intended to help people with severe neurological disorders regain the ability to communicate and act. That use does not necessarily conflict with Catholic ethics.

But if its next objective becomes comprehensively enhancing the memory, reactions, and cognitive abilities of people without impairments, matters become complicated. Technology begins to participate in creating a new hierarchy of humanity. People who can afford expensive enhancement surgery acquire superior abilities, while ordinary people gradually become inferior, unupgraded versions.

If we go further, transhumanism may treat death, aging, the body, and even birth itself as defects to be eliminated by technology. Behind this lies a modern vision: human beings have no fixed purpose, and there are no natural limits deserving of respect. As long as technology permits it, human beings can continually redesign themselves. The body becomes a piece of hardware used temporarily, while consciousness is treated like software that can be preserved, copied, and uploaded.

Catholicism remains wary of this vision because salvation, as Christianity understands it, is not the same thing as technological upgrading. Human finitude includes suffering, but it also constitutes the conditions for responsibility, dependence, and shared life. We need other people because we age, fall ill, and make mistakes. A person can never manufacture themselves entirely. Human life comes from one’s parents, human language comes from the community, and human knowledge comes from tradition.

Transhumanism treats these dependencies as obstacles to be overcome. It promises an entirely autonomous individual capable of continuous upgrading. This ideal may appear to liberate human beings, but in fact it comes very close to Silicon Valley’s understanding of a product: every version of a product has performance defects, and every update must eliminate the old version.

The pope calls this attitude the idolatry of technology. Idols in the biblical tradition have a particular characteristic: they begin as objects made by human beings but later acquire the authority to rule them. Human beings project their own power onto an idol and then kneel before their own creation.

AI is undergoing this process as well. Human beings design models, select data, and establish goals, but then call the model’s output “the AI’s decision,” as though an independent and neutral authority had appeared. A company can say, “The algorithm recommended it.” A government can say, “The model assessed it.” The military can say, “The system identified it.” Human responsibility then disappears within this language.

Machines do not themselves demand to become idols. Their transformation into idols is produced by the human desire to evade responsibility and judgment. As long as an institution can say, “That is simply what the system decided,” it can package a controversial political choice as a technical outcome.

Preserving our humanity therefore also means preserving our capacity for judgment and acknowledging that human actors stand behind every technological system. Models may assist judgment, but ultimate responsibility must still be borne by specific people and institutions.

Who gets to define AI ethics?

Even if everyone agrees that AI needs safety measures and guardrails, what ethical principles should constrain the technology?

When The Greatness of Humanity was released, Anthropic cofounder Christopher Orla attended the Vatican launch event. The arrangement was highly symbolic. Among artificial-intelligence companies, Anthropic has consistently emphasized safety, interpretability, and AI alignment. Unlike certain accelerationists, it does not openly advocate the unrestricted development of technology. Anthropic acknowledges that advanced AI may pose enormous risks, and it hopes to demonstrate to investors and the public that its models possess more reliable guardrails.

This appears very close to the pope’s position. Both oppose unrestrained technological optimism, both believe that models need constraints, and both emphasize that developers should consider AI’s long-term consequences. Yet the resemblance may be more superficial than real. Everyone says, “We need ethics,” but they have not answered the question of which ethics we should rely on.

A considerable portion of current Silicon Valley thinking on AI safety has been influenced by effective altruism. Effective altruism seeks to use evidence and calculation to find methods of allocating resources that maximize overall well-being. How should I decide which charitable project should receive my one million? I can compare how many lives each dollar can save. When confronting future risks, I can calculate the number of people affected by different policies and the probability of those effects.

This method has an obvious appeal. It asks people to focus on the actual consequences of their actions and avoid wasting resources on the basis of personal sentiment alone. It also includes distant countries and future generations within the scope of moral consideration.

But it contains a consequentialist tendency. When judging an action, the focus lies solely on whether it produces the greatest overall benefit. In certain extreme calculations, individual rights and concrete relationships may give way to a greater outcome. If it will liberate the entire working class, what is wrong with killing a hundred landlords today?

Christian ethics remains suspicious of this kind of calculation. Human dignity cannot be converted into aggregate utility. Certain means may still violate a person’s status as someone who must not be sacrificed, even if those means can produce good results. An innocent person cannot be treated as a tool merely because sacrificing them would benefit more people.

Transpose this question into the field of self-driving cars. People often ask whether, when a crash is unavoidable, a vehicle should protect its passengers or strike the smaller number of pedestrians. Trolley problems of this kind are well suited to displaying ethical conflict, but they can also easily lead people to believe that morality is merely a loss-minimization procedure.

Real-world AI ethics is far more complicated than choosing which side to crash into. Who has the authority to decide how risks are distributed? For which groups is the training data more accurate? When an algorithm denies a patient treatment, rejects a job applicant, or denies bail to a defendant, can the person harmed demand an explanation? Can that person appeal to a specific responsible party?

Merely saying that AI must align with human values cannot resolve these problems, because human beings have conflicting values. Freedom, equality, safety, efficiency, privacy, and the common good can rarely all be maximized at the same time. Ultimately, so-called alignment always requires someone to determine the order of priority among values.

This is why the pope calls for transparency. Transparency does not merely concern whether code is made public. It also concerns the ethical framework behind a system. How does the company developing it understand fairness? How does the company measure harm? What content is judged dangerous? How does the company handle issues of gender, war, religion, and politics? When different societies provide different answers, may an American company embed its own values within the basic infrastructure of societies around the world?

Anthropic may sincerely worry about AI risks while also using its emphasis on risk to shape its commercial position. A company declares that the technology it makes is so powerful that it may threaten humanity, then tells the public that only it possesses sufficiently safe models. Those two statements simultaneously increase the company’s importance. Narratives of danger can promote regulation, but they may also raise barriers to entry and give established giants an even greater advantage.

AI safety therefore cannot be entrusted entirely to AI companies. An industry cannot simultaneously define the risks, formulate the ethics, provide the solutions, and judge whether its own solutions have succeeded.

The pope’s intervention represents an ethical authority from outside the technology industry. You may disagree with the Church, and you may disagree with the answers the Church provides, but the Church has raised a question that technology companies cannot avoid: What gives you the authority to define human ethics?

Data, property, and concentrated power

Nineteenth-century industrial capitalists owned factories, machines, land, and raw materials. Today’s technology companies own computing resources, data, models, and gateways to information. Both systems rest on private property rights, but digital rights possess several new characteristics.

First, digital data generally comes from the activities of large numbers of ordinary people. Our searches, purchases, movements, communications, and video viewing continuously generate information that can be used to train and improve models. Corporations built the platforms that collect the data, but the substance of the data comes from society as a whole.

Second, algorithms in turn shape the people who produce the data. Recommendation systems determine what users see and influence what they buy, what they believe, and how they understand politics. A platform does not merely record society passively; it also participates in producing society.

Third, AI requires immense investments in computing power, chips, and energy. As the cost of models rises, only a small number of governments and large corporations will have the capacity to participate in the competition. The more important the technology becomes, the more concentrated the resources become. The more concentrated the resources become, the stronger the control a small number of companies will exercise over the future direction of technology.

Does Elon Musk have the right to own xAI’s data and algorithms privately? Does Peter Thiel have the right to own the data and analytical tools controlled by Palantir? If these systems affect the information of hundreds of millions of people and governments’ security operations, can they still be regarded as ordinary private property?

Because we are discussing the perspective of a Catholic pope, we can use the Catholic social principle of the universal destination of goods to analyze how an American Catholic might reflect on this question.

The principle of the universal destination of goods holds that the world’s resources must ultimately serve the lives of all people. Private property rights help people take responsibility and sustain their families, and they can also promote production and the efficient allocation of resources. Private property is therefore a genuine right.

But property rights always exist within a community. A person’s ownership cannot extend without limit to the point that it damages public life. This does not mean the government may arbitrarily confiscate private property. It means that those who possess property must answer the question of what purposes that property serves. Water sources, land, and air concern everyone’s survival, so the state may impose restrictions on how they are used. In the digital age, data, algorithms, and information infrastructure also gradually take on the character of public resources.

This is where Catholic thought in Western societies must be particularly careful. Saying that data has a public character does not mean it should be handed over to the state. Governments can likewise abuse data and may possess coercive powers stronger than those of private companies. Catholic social thought worries about every form of concentrated power. A state monopoly can oppress people, and a private monopoly can oppress people as well.

Even if you are an American Catholic conservative, what you oppose should not be limited to government monopolies. It should include all monopolies. If a private corporation violates a person’s rights, the fact that the violator is not the government offers very little comfort.

In the age of artificial intelligence, the threats facing American Catholic conservatives differ significantly from the economic ideas held by the US Republican Party over the past several decades. Post–Cold War American conservatism often regarded government as the principal threat to liberty and the market as a mechanism for dispersing power. In many industries, that judgment made sense. Companies competed with one another, consumers could exit, prices conveyed information, and markets were often more flexible than bureaucratic institutions.

Digital platforms have created a different structure. Network effects push toward winner-take-all outcomes. The more users a platform has, the more valuable it becomes. The more valuable the platform becomes, the harder it is for users to leave. A person can choose not to patronize a particular restaurant, but it is difficult to withdraw completely from search engines, social networks, digital payments, and the AI workplace systems of the future.

Once large models enter education, health care, the judiciary, government procurement, and military systems, technology companies will increasingly come to resemble public utilities. They remain the property of private shareholders, but they take on functions previously performed separately by the state, schools, the media, and professional communities.

The pope’s criticism therefore strikes at a sensitive contradiction within the American right. Trumpism has long condemned liberal technology companies for controlling public speech. Conservatives accused Google, Facebook, and the old Twitter of suppressing right-wing viewpoints, interfering with election information, and using platform rules to shape political debate. After Musk acquired Twitter, many people on the right treated him as a hero who had restored freedom of speech.

But if conservatives acknowledge that platforms possess quasi-public power, it becomes difficult for them to insist at the same time that a platform is merely private property that should not be interfered with. The fact that today’s owner supports you does not guarantee that tomorrow’s owner will continue to support you. Political liberty cannot be built on the personal goodwill of a particular billionaire.

Here we encounter the contradiction in American Catholics’ current relationship with technology capital, meaning people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. On the one hand, technology capital genuinely does provide the religious conservative right with funding, platforms, and political space today. On the other, religious conservatives are unwilling to accept a future in which technological oligarchs ultimately control Americans’ judgment.

Political alliances rarely allow one side to treat the other purely as a tool. Silicon Valley figures have invested in candidates, entered the government, influenced regulation, and obtained contracts. They are also reshaping the Republican Party. Once technology capital enters the center of state power, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine who is using whom.

Subsidiarity, sovereignty, and global governance

The next disagreement between the pope and the Trump right concerns the level at which political authority should operate.

Catholic social thought contains an important principle called subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is generally translated into Chinese as the “principle of assistance” or the “principle of comprehensive assistance.” It requires public affairs to be handled at the lowest level capable of handling them competently. Local government should not lightly take over tasks that families can accomplish. The central government need not impose uniform administration on matters that communities can resolve. The state should intervene only when lower levels lack the necessary capacity.

This principle protects individuals, families, churches, labor unions, and local communities, preventing large bureaucratic systems from swallowing up society. For this reason, subsidiarity sounds very close to the American conservative traditions of local self-government and states’ rights. The American right generally opposes expansions of federal power. Populists are also intensely suspicious of transnational institutions and international organizations such as the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and the International Monetary Fund.

Yet in The Greatness of Humanity, Pope Leo XIV proposes that national governments and transnational institutions must jointly establish fair rules and effective safeguards for artificial intelligence. At first glance, this seems to violate the Catholic tradition’s principle of subsidiarity.

But subsidiarity does not require every issue to remain forever at the lowest level. It requires each responsibility to be undertaken by the lowest level capable of handling it. A city council cannot regulate an AI company operating in dozens of countries. A single state likewise has difficulty controlling cross-border data, global chip supplies, and the military use of large models. When the scale of a problem rises, the level of governance must rise as well.

The American right has already accepted this logic on other issues. During the Tea Party movement, for example, it emphasized states’ rights and small government. With Trumpism, it began demanding strong federal control over borders, trade, and industrial policy because immigration, tariffs, and national security cannot be handled independently by a single town. The nationalist right is willing to elevate state power on these issues.

The Church extends that same logic one level higher. If AI affects global society and no single nation-state can manage it effectively, is some form of transnational coordination necessary?

Here the conflict begins to deepen. Trumpism regards the nation-state as the most important political community. International relations are understood as competition among states. The US government is responsible first and foremost to Americans, and it must first pursue American interests. AI regulation must also be subordinated to competition between countries. If the United States slows its research and development while a certain major power continues to advance, the United States will bear the security and economic consequences.

Catholicism draws on a different historical experience. From its birth, the Catholic Church lived within the transnational order of the Roman Empire. Early Christianity spread along roads and through commercial cities, and the Church later inherited many Roman administrative structures. The rise of modern nationalism inflicted serious shocks on the Church. The Reformation, nation-states, and national churches weakened the universal authority of the Holy See. By the nineteenth century, nationalist states had even directly annexed the Papal States. For more on that history, everyone is welcome to listen to another episode of my podcast, “Why Didn’t Italy Become a Marxist Country?”

In any case, Catholicism has never possessed the same instinctive trust in national and state sovereignty that American conservatives do. After the Second World War, this Catholic universalism gained a new political expression. In the encyclical Pacem in Terris, Pope John XXIII argued that when problems caused by nuclear weapons, war, and the global economy exceed the capacity of any single nation, humanity needs some form of worldwide public authority capable of safeguarding the universal common good.

Pope Leo XIV places artificial intelligence within this same tradition. The AI arms race, transnational data, and worldwide employment shocks cannot be completely confined within any one country’s borders. The technological advantage pursued by one country may create risks for humanity as a whole. The pope therefore favors the participation of transnational institutions in governance.

This is very difficult for America’s populist right to accept. They believe international institutions are too remote from ordinary voters, lack democratic accountability, and are often controlled by globalized elites. The experience of the past several decades also provides ample reason to distrust these institutions. They may be inefficient, may be manipulated by great powers, and may use professional language to bypass domestic politics.

The real debate, therefore, is not between those who favor governance and those who oppose it. It is over who is qualified to represent the common good.

Trumpism’s answer is the nation-state, especially a US government authorized by American voters. Catholic social thought holds that the common good exists at different levels and that global problems may generate global responsibilities. Silicon Valley offers a third answer: technology is developing too quickly, governments lack the requisite expertise, and the people who understand the systems best are still the companies that developed them.

These three answers correspond to three kinds of authority: national sovereignty, universal moral authority, and the authority of technical experts. AI places all three within the same political conflict.

Artificial intelligence and warfare

The conflict between this encyclical and the Trump administration also extends into the question of war.

Leo XIV recently publicly opposed US military action against Iran and called on American voters to contact members of Congress to express their opposition. The Trump administration initially responded forcefully, then adjusted its tone and said that the pope was entitled to express his opinion and the president was entitled to disagree.

Conflict between popes and presidents is nothing new. The Western political tradition has long distinguished spiritual authority from temporal power. In the fifth century, Pope Gelasius XIV wrote to the Eastern Roman emperor Anastasius, emphasizing that the Church and the empire had different responsibilities. The emperor handled public order; the Church concerned itself with souls and morality. The two realms were distinct from one another but could not be completely separated.

War is the area in which these two kinds of authority collide most easily. The state controls the military, intelligence, and diplomatic information, while religious authority imposes limits on the legitimacy of killing.

Catholicism developed just war theory. The initiation of war requires a just cause, legitimate authority, and right intention. It must also be considered whether war is the last resort, whether it has a reasonable prospect of success, and whether its anticipated benefits are proportionate to its losses. Once war begins, the military must distinguish between combatants and civilians and limit unnecessary harm.

The Greatness of Humanity raises an even more difficult question: When artificial intelligence participates in war, can the human judgment on which just war theory depends still be preserved?

Automated weapons can identify targets at high speed. Drones can carry out strikes in distant regions. Algorithms can judge whether a person constitutes a threat on the basis of behavioral patterns. As the speed of decision-making increases, human operators may be left with only the formal power to grant approval. A target calculated by a model appears on a screen, the system warns that fire must be opened within a few seconds, and the human being has little real ability to examine the model’s basis.

Responsibility will also become diluted within complex systems. Engineers say they were responsible only for the code. Intelligence personnel say they were responsible only for supplying the data. Commanders say they relied on the system’s recommendations. Political leaders say the military selected the specific targets. In the end, a person is killed, yet no one can be found who bears complete responsibility for the judgment.

Traditional warfare at least requires rulers to decide publicly to initiate a war. Soldiers personally confront the act of killing. Automated warfare increases physical, psychological, and institutional distance. Violence becomes easier to initiate and more difficult to regulate.

The pope worries that AI will transform war from a political act requiring careful justification into a continuously operating technical process. Enemies are converted into data points. Civilian casualties are entered into probabilistic models. War may continue without a clearly defined beginning or end.

This position also intersects with the foreign-policy divide inside the Trump right. Within the US Republican Party, there are traditional hawks who emphasize American military power and deterrence against hostile regimes, but there is also a growing restraint camp that opposes endless overseas wars. Many Catholic conservatives have completely lost faith in liberal internationalism since the Iraq War. The pope’s opposition to war with Iran therefore does not automatically push him toward the Democratic Party. Antiwar and restraint-oriented forces already exist within the American right.

AI warfare further blurs the old camps. Some members of the technological right oppose overseas wars but support the development of unmanned systems. Some national-security hawks support AI because it can reduce US military casualties. Religious conservatives, meanwhile, worry that warfare is becoming increasingly detached from human moral judgment.

AI did not create these fractures. It acts like a developing agent, making divisions that already existed within the right clearly visible.

Vance at the center of the conflict

Over the next several years, all these problems will ultimately become concentrated in J. D. Vance, currently the person within the Republican Party most likely to succeed Trump.

Vance is the highest-ranking Catholic political figure in the US government. He converted to Catholicism, speaks publicly about his faith, and frequently uses the language of Catholic social thought. He cares about families, communities, workers, and local industry, and criticizes the way globalization has destroyed social life in the American Midwest.

At the same time, Vance comes from the world of venture capital. He was once Peter Thiel’s protégé and employee, and he entered politics with the support of Silicon Valley networks. He understands technology capital, and he believes that new technologies can carry the American economy and national power into their next stage. On top of that, he is Trump’s vice president and a potential successor.

Three identities are therefore layered together within him. Vance is a Catholic who hopes to remain faithful to the Church’s teachings. He is a populist who emphasizes workers, families, and the national community. He is also a political figure familiar with Silicon Valley who attaches great importance to technological competition.

At an abstract level, these three identities seem mutually complementary. Technology can revitalize American industry. New industries can create jobs. Through public policy, the state can make technology serve families and workers. Vance can perfectly well say in speeches, or believe himself, that he is searching for a path that reconciles innovation with the Catholic common good.

The political difficulty arises when specific choices have to be made.

When AI companies demand less regulation so that they can compete with a certain major Eastern power, will Vance support the speed of industry or the caution demanded by the pope? When automation increases corporate profits while eliminating large numbers of white-collar and blue-collar jobs, should the government restrict deployment, impose taxes, or redistribute the gains? When technology companies oppose different states establishing different rules, will a Republican government that emphasizes federalism protect states’ rights, or will it create a regulatory system favorable to uniform nationwide expansion?

When the pope calls for transnational cooperation and the Trump administration refuses to allow international institutions to constrain the United States, how will Vance understand Catholicism’s universal common good? When the United States uses AI weapons to attack Iran and the pope calls for an end to military operations, will Vance defer to the president’s national-security judgment or accept the Church’s warnings about technological warfare?

In my view, if Vance becomes president in the future, he will very likely side with technology at crucial moments. The reasons are practical. The realities of East-West competition provide an overwhelming national-security justification. Silicon Valley possesses the money, expertise, and infrastructure the government needs. The gains from technological development are immediately visible, while the pope is, at this very moment, establishing a moral vocabulary with which to oppose advancing at full speed. The social losses, meanwhile, will be dispersed over a long period.

This brings us back to the question of how the pope is tearing the American right apart over artificial intelligence.

Today’s American right is a coalition composed of several forces. The first is religious conservatism. It is concerned with family, abortion, marriage, education, and religious freedom. It believes that public life must be constrained by a moral order that precedes individual choice.

The second force is national populism. It opposes globalized elites, emphasizes borders, industry, workers, and national sovereignty, and hopes the federal government will restore America’s political and economic strength.

The third force is Silicon Valley’s technological right. It opposes liberal cultural institutions and government bureaucracy and is deeply suspicious of traditional media and universities, while also believing that entrepreneurs, engineers, and technological breakthroughs can solve social problems.

The fourth force consists of traditional free-market Republicans. They advocate tax cuts, deregulation, and the protection of private property, and regard government as the principal danger to liberty.

These four forces can cooperate when opposing the Democratic Party, progressive culture, and the old bureaucratic system. But AI is pulling them in conflicting directions.

Religious conservatives demand that technology respect inviolable human nature. The technological right wants to break through natural limits. Populists promise to protect workers, but automation may enable companies to expand production without relying on workers. Free-market Republicans oppose government regulation, while cultural conservatives worry that private platforms control people’s minds and therefore want government regulation. Nationalists oppose transnational institutions, yet AI risks cross national borders. The antiwar right does not want the United States to become embroiled in another overseas conflict, while the national-security right treats AI as a necessary tool for winning future wars.

The pope’s encyclical forces these groups to answer questions they could previously avoid. Do private property rights include the right to control the data and information environment of hundreds of millions of people? When market efficiency harms families and communities, to what extent are conservatives willing to restrict the market? If technological progress will eliminate human jobs on a massive scale, does the state have a responsibility to slow the pace of deployment? How much global risk may the United States assume in order to defeat its enemies? When machines can replace certain human cognitive activities, should education continue to cultivate human capabilities, or should it train people to use machines more efficiently?

What exactly is conservatism conserving? Market freedom? National power? The traditional family? Or a complete understanding of the human person?

In the past, the American right placed all these objectives under the name “conservatism.” Pope Leo XIV is demanding that they establish an order of priority. That is how the rupture occurs.

The greatness of humanity

Why did the pope call the encyclical The Greatness of Humanity rather than “The Dangers of Artificial Intelligence” or “The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence”?

Those titles would lead people to mistakenly believe that AI is an independent technological issue that can be improved and resolved simply by having engineers design safer models and governments formulate more complete rules. The Greatness of Humanity places the focus on human beings. Every policy choice concerning AI presupposes some answer to the question of what a human being is.

If a human being is a consumer, then AI’s value lies in providing cheaper, more convenient, and better consumer goods. If a human being is a worker, then the key question is how many jobs AI will create and destroy. If a human being is primarily a member of a nation, then AI is first and foremost about whether the United States can defeat other countries. If a human being is a set of calculable cognitive abilities, then stronger machines will sooner or later become more valuable than human beings.

The pope’s answer is that the human person possesses a dignity that cannot be exhausted by ability, efficiency, or economic output. A person’s value comes from what they are and cannot depend entirely on what they are able to produce.

The importance of work likewise does not come solely from wages. Through work, human beings participate in the world, take responsibility, gain social recognition, and care for their families. Language does more than transmit information; language establishes relationships between people. Judgment does more than calculate outcomes; judgment requires a person to step forward and assume responsibility.

This answer cannot provide a technical solution for every AI policy. The pope cannot review every line of code, nor can he prescribe every detail of regulation on behalf of governments. What he is attempting to provide is a political boundary: every technological system must demonstrate how it serves human beings. It cannot demand that human beings diminish themselves in order to adapt to technology.

The choice now facing the American right is how it understands this political boundary. It can continue to regard AI as a new weapon in national competition and believe that technological growth will ultimately resolve the resulting social losses. Or it can accept the pope’s warning and once again subject the market, the state, and technology to the common good.

Both paths may appear under the name of conservatism, but they will lead to very different societies. The first path hopes to preserve American power. The second hopes to preserve the human scale.

The final question is therefore not merely whom Vance will listen to over the next several years: the pope, Trump, or Peter Thiel. The larger question is this: As artificial intelligence gradually enters labor, medicine, education, warfare, and the human body, what exactly does the American right want to preserve? Does it want to preserve a powerful state, a free market, a set of traditional cultural values, or the human being whom machines cannot replace?

Pope Leo XIV has given his answer. Now it is the turn of America’s Catholics to make their own choice.