(RNS) — Church leaders, technologists and theologians gathered in Minneapolis the first week of September for a conference called Faithful Futures: Guiding AI With Wisdom and Witness, a symposium meant to wrestle with the promises and perils of artificial intelligence. It was the second in a series of such gatherings, which aspire to be ecumenical, global and practical, structured around Richard Osmer’s framework of practical theology: What is going on? Why is it happening? What ought to be happening? How might we respond?
Across plenary sessions, panels and hallway conversations, the sheer number and range of topics boggled the mind: AI companions and pastoral ethics, environmental impacts of data centers, the question of personhood, fears of mass joblessness, even the specter of artificial general intelligence. In her keynote, game designer and futurologist Jane McGonigal invited participants to imagine futures shaped by technological change in vivid and unsettling ways. The Rev. Christopher Benek, a “techno-theologian,” led TED Talk-style sessions that provided deep insight into the intersections of emerging technology, ethics and ministry. Together, the sessions created a dynamic mix of foresight and theological imagination.
Yet beneath all these threads, I heard a consistent refrain. It echoed not only early critiques of Marxist thought but also the warnings of social thinkers down the years — the Anglican founder of Christian socialism, F.D. Maurice, in the 19th century, or the 20th-century lay theologians William Stringfellow and Jacques Ellul: Technologies cannot be disentangled from the systems that shape them.
The hope that tools might free us from toil is as old as philosophy itself. Aristotle claimed that human flourishing required leisure for contemplation, art and worship. First St. Augustine, then St. Thomas Aquinas baptized this hope, reframing leisure as otium sanctum — holy rest oriented toward God.
Monastic life embodied this rhythm of work and prayer. But the Reformation and the rise of capitalism shifted the meaning: Leisure became not the necessary condition of culture, but a reward for productivity.
By the industrial era, Karl Marx saw in mechanization the chance to abolish drudgery. Machines, he argued in the Grundrisse, could replace the ancient slave caste and usher humanity into the“realm of freedom.” Following his own ideal, Oscar Wilde imagined a world where machines did all the work so people could become artists. The Cambridge University philosopher Bertrand Russell dreamed of four-hour workdays and flourishing culture.
The dream of leisure endured, but under capitalism, it has rarely been realized. Technological progress in fact often intensifies work, or else strips it away from workers but assigns the fruits of their former labor to others. Instead of Sabbath, we get acceleration. Instead of freedom, we get precarity.
This contradiction becomes clearest when we think of joblessness. AI represents the fullest realization yet of Aristotle’s wish: tools that work not only with muscle but with mind. In theory, such a development should release humanity into a society of poets and philosophers, as Wilde and Russell imagined. But in late capitalism, efficiency translates into firings, not freedom. Joblessness reveals the structural failure: The promise of leisure has been captured by profit.
This wealth produced by AI is already concentrating in the hands of a startlingly small cast of techno-elites. Many tech leaders are philanthropic, but their philanthropy does not erase the systems’ orientation toward growth, profit and shareholder return. In such a world, the problem is not only automation but the deeper vice of greed, which bends technological promise toward inequality rather than freedom.
The theological countervision is Sabbath. From Genesis onward, rest is not an afterthought, but the purpose of creation. Hebrews imagines an eternal Sabbath still to come, when rest is consummated in God. Leisure is not luxury. It is holy, eschatological and central to what it means to be human.
As the church continues to engage AI, we cannot stop at technical debates over bias, creativity or pastoral applications. We must also confront the deeper economic systems that shape these tools. Otherwise, our hopes for AI will always be hijacked by profit. At Faithful Futures, I was reminded that our most urgent task is not simply to guide AI, but to witness to another economy — the economy of Sabbath rest, worship and joy.
(The Very Rev. Michael W. DeLashmutt is senior vice president and dean of the chapel at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York City and author of the forthcoming “A Lived Theology of Everyday Life.” His Substack is “Making Theology.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
