Tech Billionaires Want Christians to Believe in AI

In an illustration, a painting of Jesus walking on water is altered to make him appear to be holding a green computer chip. He appears to be walking toward his disciples, who are gathered in a boat nearby. Credit: Nicolás Ortega/“Jesus Walks On Water,” Ivan Aivazovsky/WikiArt

Kiera Butler
May+June 2026 Issue Mother Jones

In early January, a short essay by a little-­known AI entrepreneur turned internet philosopher named Will Manidis went viral on X. The post was mostly an attempt to explain why Boston, where Manidis lived before relocating to New York a few years ago, had failed as a tech hub. He pointed to a suite of reasons for the slow decline of the city’s once-crackling biotech scene, mainly the usual culprits of overregulation and overtaxation. But at the core of Manidis’ argument was something much deeper: The heart of the problem was the growing consensus among Boston’s stodgy elites that there was something unsettling and possibly even dangerous about the rapid pace of technological development. That mounting uneasiness about tech—and especially artificial intelligence—lay beneath the decisions that sealed the fate of Boston’s tech scene.

“The average American understands AI is a thing that wastes water, skyrockets power costs, and scams their grandparents in exchange for exposing children to deviant sexual content, sports gambling, and all other manner of sin,” he writes. “If we cannot articulate why innovation is a moral imperative, we can expect the entire technology industry to end up like Boston. First taxed, then looted, then exhausted. And we’ll be stuck wondering where it all went.”

Manidis, who describes himself as a Christian, writes about religious matters on X and his Substack. When I called to talk with him about this idea of tech as a “moral imperative,” he used a theological metaphor: “The mix of oligarchs and tech people and tech money and tech politics and the tech right,” he told me, “they’ve just been unable to communicate a coherent apologetic.”

His term—apologetic—refers to the project of defending the mysteries of faith to nonbelievers. The Christian tradition of apologetics is rich. Its brightest lights include St. Paul, Thomas Aquinas, and C.S. Lewis—all of whom made the case for their faith not by biblical invocation or surrender to the divine, but rather through engagement, rational arguments, and evidence. Manidis believes AI needs those kinds of defenders, because the public appears to be losing faith in it.
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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/04/ai-religious-right-christianity-thiel-katherine-boyle-trae-stephens/