AI will have negative effects on our society and I am not afraid to say it. It already is. That does not make the technology bad.
Christians can and must use the tools that God has given us to fulfill the Dominion Mandate. Our job is to take dominion over God’s creation and that is no small task. The command appears early in Genesis. God tells humanity to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. This has never meant sitting still. It has always meant building, discovering and applying new tools to the world around us.
The task is not to freeze every current job in place so that nobody experiences disruption. That approach failed at the Tower of Babel. The people gathered in one spot, refused to spread out and take dominion, and God confused their languages. Our job as Christians is not to maintain the status quo. It is to fulfill the Dominion Mandate.
AI is the most powerful tool invented since the Industrial Revolution at least. We can and should use it to advance God’s agenda and fulfill the work He has given us to do. I laid out related thoughts in my earlier post Matt Walsh Is Wrong About AI. The core point stands. This technology can serve the church in Bible translation for unreached groups, in accelerating research that reveals more of creation, and in equipping believers with better tools for teaching and charity.
The people who oppose AI because they see the potential for misuse are right to a certain extent. People will misuse it. But that does not mean we ban the tool. That is the same logic used by proponents of gun control. Instead of banning the action of killing people and enforcing those laws they want to ban the tool for all law-abiding citizens.
Just like gun control laws the only people actually stopped from obtaining weapons are those who follow the law. The only people who obtain weapons end up being those who choose not to follow the law or are not bound by it. A gun control law will not stop a criminal from obtaining a gun on the black market because he does not care what the law says. If he is willing to murder people he is willing to work around your restrictions.
If you ban the tool of AI you are not stopping AI from dramatically impacting the world. You are just ensuring that law-abiding U.S. citizens are not the ones who reap its benefits. Instead you leave it to the pagans and to our foreign adversaries in China. They will not hesitate. They will press every advantage while we tie our own hands.
I know some people who follow me are not Christians or disagree with me politically and think gun control laws are a good idea. To them this post is not for you. But if you think you as a Christian can just ignore this technology or oppose its very existence you are taking a blessing and a tool God has given you to fulfill His commands and calling His blessing a curse.
The choice before us is clear. We can pretend the clock can be turned back or we can pick up the tool in front of us and get to work. Dominion has always required courage and wisdom. AI demands both. The negative effects are real. The opportunities to obey God with greater reach and precision are also real. The Christians who recognize this and act on it will be the ones who actually move the ball forward. The rest risk repeating the mistake at Babel by refusing to advance. Tools have always separated those who build from those who merely complain. The printing press disrupted scribes and monasteries yet it put Scripture into far more hands than monks could reach. AI sits in that same line. It will change who holds influence over information, over models of the physical world, and over the pace of discovery. Christians who treat it as a curse hand that influence to everyone except themselves. The Dominion Mandate does not permit that retreat. It requires engagement, discernment, and work. We already see the first waves of job change. Writers who produce average copy lose ground while those who direct AI well gain speed and range. Researchers who query models for patterns move faster than those who refuse the instrument. The pattern matches every prior technological shift. The question is never whether disruption occurs. The question is who participates in the new work. Opposition that focuses only on preservation of current roles misses the record of Scripture and the record of history. God scatters those who camp in one place. He equips those who move forward with the resources at hand. AI counts as one of those resources. It processes text at scales no human team can match. It spots connections in biological data that would take decades to surface otherwise. It translates between languages with growing fidelity. Each of those abilities can advance the command to fill the earth and care for it. Refusing them does not stop the technology. It simply removes Christians from the front of its use. China faces no such hesitation. Government programs there treat AI as a strategic necessity. Private labs chase capability without the ethical limits that slow some Western groups. If American Christians add their own voluntary limits in the name of safety they create a one sided contest. The tool will spread. The only variable is who shapes its application. Law abiding citizens who forfeit access guarantee that adversaries and those who reject Christian conviction will set the defaults. That outcome contradicts any serious reading of stewardship. The gun control parallel holds because the mechanism is identical. Restrict the tool and the compliant lose it while the determined obtain it anyway. The same transfer of power happens with AI. Calls to pause or ban frontier systems sound responsible until one asks who actually pauses. The labs in Beijing do not join the pause. The actors who intend harm do not join the pause. Only the visible, regulated, and conscientious groups step back. That hands the future to the least accountable parties. I reject that trade. The negative effects of AI deserve attention. Reduced demand for certain skills, propagation of falsehoods, and concentration of power in tech companies all require sober response. None of those problems finds its solution in pretending the tool can be wished away. The productive response is to build better systems, teach wise use, and apply the capability to ends that match the Dominion Mandate. That work will not happen through opposition alone. It requires participation. Christians have adapted to every major tool from the written word to the internet. AI follows the same path. It is not a neutral force but it is also not intrinsically evil. It is raw capability handed to moral agents. The agents decide the result. My decision is to treat it as a resource for the work already assigned. The mandate has not changed. The tools have. We either pick them up or we watch from the sidelines while others define what dominion looks like in the next century.
History offers clear examples. The printing press was feared for spreading heresy. It did in some cases. Yet it also made the Bible available to ordinary people and fueled advances in knowledge. The church did not reject the press. It used the press to greater effect. The same decision faces us with AI. We can complain about the negatives or we can apply the tool to the tasks of dominion. Those tasks include understanding creation at deeper levels, reaching people with the message in their own languages, and organizing resources to help those in need more effectively. AI assists in all of those areas when guided by people who take the commands of Scripture seriously.
The gun control analogy fits because the principle is the same. Restricting access for responsible parties does not eliminate the technology. It merely shifts who controls it. In the case of AI the shift would be toward foreign governments and towards groups that do not operate from a Christian framework. That shift weakens our ability to influence the direction of this powerful resource. It hands the advantage to adversaries who already invest heavily in these systems without the same moral considerations. The responsible choice is to engage, to build, to test, and to correct course as needed rather than to step aside.
I wrote about related issues in the post on Matt Walsh. The core issue remains. Opposition that stops at fear misses the opportunity for obedience. The Dominion Mandate calls us to active participation in the world. AI is part of that world now. Ignoring it or condemning it outright does not remove its effects. It only removes our voice from the conversation about how it should be used. Christians have a responsibility to bring truth, wisdom, and ethical clarity to its development and application. That responsibility cannot be fulfilled from the sidelines. It requires learning the tool, applying it to worthy ends, and teaching others to do the same with discernment. The negative effects are real. Job changes will happen. Misinformation will spread in new ways. Those facts do not cancel the command to take dominion. They make the need for faithful participation more urgent. We have the example of past generations who adopted new methods to advance the faith. We can follow that example. The mandate is the same. The opportunity before us is significant. The time to decide is now.