Episode 50 Transcript
Gretchen:
Well I have to start the show today with a big "Hey y'all," because I have Jason Thacker on the pod and he's joining me from Nashville, Tennessee. Let me give you a short version of the 411 on Jason before we go: he's the director of the Research Institute for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. He also serves as the chair of the research and technology ethics program there. He's a college instructor, a writer, and a speaker on topics of human dignity, ethics, technology, digital governance, and AI.
He did his undergrad at the University of Tennessee, and he earned his M. Div.—that's short for Master's of Divinity—at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he's currently working on a PhD.
I got to know Jason because of the work I'm doing on the Christian voice in AI ethics, and it turns out Jason was the lead drafter of a document called "Artificial Intelligence: An Evangelical Statement of Principles." We're going to get into all of that on today's show; but Jason Thacker, welcome, and thanks for bringing that Big Orange energy to the podcast today.
Jason:
Thanks so much for having me, Gretchen. I'm looking forward to it.
Gretchen:
Before we dig in on the work you're doing Jason, I want you to tell us a little bit more about the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, more commonly known as the ERLC. What is it? Why did the Southern Baptists think we need it? And what's the value add in what I would call a crowded field of institutes, projects, commissions and centers?
Jason:
We are the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, so we speak to a number of ethical issues. Religious liberty issues, obviously from our name; but broadly a set of public policy issues. We do that through our Washington DC office, where we focus on engaging the federal government, as well as state governments; our Nashville office has a lot more of our resourcing, a lot more of our research. Our whole goal is to educate and equip the local church to engage on some of the most pressing ethical and public policy issues of the day, and do so from a thoroughly Gospel position of understanding God's Word, how He's formed and made us in his image, and how we're to interact in the world around us.
The ERLC is actually a pretty old organization; we've been around for a very long time, depending on how you date us. We're a merger of a couple of different commissions of the Southern Baptist Convention. So we've been around in some form or fashion since around the beginning of the 1900s. The Southern Baptist Convention is a pretty old denomination; it's one of the largest Protestant denominations in the United States, and we've been involved on the public policy front from the very beginning.
But our whole goal is to educate and equip the local church. That's what we do through resourcing, through advocacy, and hoping to proclaim a Gospel vision for engaging in the public square.
Gretchen:
Well, I didn't know we'd have to carbon date you! I had no idea you'd been around for more than a hundred years. Talk to me a little bit about how you equip the local church—small C, capital C? Are you talking mostly for the Southern Baptists, or are your resources available to the Church writ large?
Jason:
They're available to the Church, writ large. A lot of the positions and the ways that we engage these things, while distinctively a Southern Baptist voice, are also seeking to equip wider evangelicalism and Protestantism on engaging these issues. Because the reality is, while I'm convictionally Baptist, many of our convictional Baptist beliefs are also just Christian beliefs.
Whether it's human dignity issues, pro-life issues, marriage and sexuality, Biblical justice issues, international issues, or religious freedom, there [is] a lot of overlap between the things that we're advocating, or the ways that we're educating and equipping, amongst the broader Church, whether it's here domestically in the United States, or even internationally.
But obviously we bring some Baptist distinctives to that, specifically on the religious freedom front. Religious freedom or religious liberty is a key or a core element of what it means to be Baptist. Our resources are available on our website; we do a lot of podcasting, magazines, printing, publishing, things like that. And then also through a lot of our work through research, and the public policy arm that we do as well. It's something that Southern Baptists have commissioned or entrusted us to speak on behalf of our churches, but also to speak to our churches, on these really pressing issues of the public square.
Gretchen:
I'd like to dig into the specific policy document that you recently published, called "Artificial Intelligence: an Evangelical Statement of Principles." You put this out in 2019, and interestingly, the Southern Baptists were the first out of the gate to have an official response to some of the advances in artificial intelligence in our culture. You were followed fairly closely by the Roman Catholic Church, which put out its "Rome Call for AI Ethics;" but yours is unique because it was full of affirmations and denials, and very heavily supported by Scripture on each one.
If you could, I think it'd be cool to address what the thought was for the need for that. Give us the backstory to this initiative, kind of a verbal version of the meme, how it started/how it's going.
Jason:
Well, it all started really with a lot of my work at the ERLC. Originally when I came on staff, I was our creative director. I had always been interested in technology, always had some interesting thoughts on things. The more I started reading and the more I started engaging a lot of these issues writ large that we do at the ERLC, I started realizing that there wasn't a distinctively Christian voice—-or there were very few distinctively Christian voices is the better way to say it—speaking to these issues. And so the more I was reading, I was encouraged to write some; and the more I wrote, the more I read; and it just kind of snowballed, all the way until about a year and a half or so before we published the document.
It was right on the heels of Project Maven, which is Google's Department of Defense contract that went south pretty quickly once it was revealed that Google was working on this. It was a set of AI systems to evaluate drone video data that had been captured; it could scour through so much video data and identify potential targets or potential enemies and things like that, and flag those things for human reviewers. Well, part of the story is that Google employees revolted; they didn't want to be part of developing weapons of war, which was one of the big phrases that came out of that. And right on the heels of Google deciding not to renew its contract with the DOD and working on Project Maven, they released a set of Google AI principles.
This was fairly common. We started to see this right around 2017, all the way up to 2019: companies and even nation states promoting their own set of AI principles. I think that spoke to some of the larger questions surrounding artificial intelligence: what do we do with it? What is it? How do we navigate a lot of these really pressing challenges?
I was already starting to follow some of these things, starting writing on these areas. I went to our president at the time and said, what if we put together an evangelical statement? This wasn't outside of the ordinary for us; we had done things like this on immigration reform, on pro-life issues, a lot of different issues over the years. And I said, what if we did something like that? And he was incredibly enthusiastic and said, let's go forward.
We pulled together top researchers, ethicists, pastors, public policy leaders, technologists, doctors, even a lot of politicians, to come together to say as evangelicals: what do we think about artificial intelligence? How should we navigate these things? What are some areas that we can kind of hang our hat on, some categories to help the church better understand these issues? So there's an equipping element, but also to speak to the issues, to say this is a distinctively evangelical and we hope Biblical voice speaking to these very pressing issues, whether it's ranging from issues of work, to war, data and privacy, and even some issues that at first sounded a little odd—talking about sexuality issues with artificial intelligence, or talking about the future of artificial intelligence and where we're heading.
So that's a little bit of the backstory about how we developed this. It was something that we saw as a way to push the conversation forward. And little did we know at the time that it would be really one of the only, if still the only, explicitly faith-based statements engaging these pressing issues of the digital public square.
Gretchen:
In fact, you skipped a part, because I happen to know that when your president, Dr. Russell Moore said,"Let's do it," he said, "Tag, you're it—you do it." So you became sort of the lead drafter of the document, but also sort of a head of the project.
So on the how's it going: I know that the document got a lot of attention. How has it gone so far? Are you revising it? Have other people suggested, "Hey, we'd like to come alongside"? Are there other organizations that are saying, we're going to put our version of a Christian response to it? Where are you guys with it now?
Jason:
Right out of the gate, as you said, it was pretty unprecedented. As a leader of the project, I was not expecting the reception that it had. I expected it to get a little traction; but we had major news stories run across the board, from Politico to Slate, to say, look at these evangelicals and Southern Baptists and what they're doing and what they're saying.
And the funny part about it too was by and large, it was incredibly positive. Even some of our detractors—which I understand, this is a very explicitly evangelical statement, and we intentionally labeled it as an evangelical statement—by and large, most people are saying, I agree with you on these five articles or six articles. I don't really like this one, or I would strengthen this here and there. But by and large, it was pretty constructive. much so, even non-Christians—which was the most surprising response to me—were by and large, pretty enthusiastic about it. They said, look, we don't, we don't believe in God; we don't believe in the Bible, and the Scriptures, and the things you talk about and the way you frame it. But we really like some of the ways you're addressing it, through this lens of human dignity—of the rights and dignity of all people.
Now as a Christian, I ground that in a different place than some of my secular counterparts. But there was widespread consensus on some of those issues, especially around data privacy. And so that was really interesting to me. And then from there we've seen a lot of reception. There were some who said, we want to maybe pursue our own, or we're wanting to revise this.
And there's been a group of us who've thought, what would a 2.0 version statement look like? Maybe a little more broad tent, to come together and say, what would it look like to put forth a more principle document? Our document, while it's a statement of principles, is in many ways a statement of beliefs and principles: this is what we believe about the image of God, and this is how it applies in these very specific contemporary examples. And so having some other folks come alongside, and even broadening to an international appeal; because we know this isn't just a domestic issue, we have brothers and sisters across the pond who are very much involved in these conversations. What we're thinking is in the next year or two we'll hopefully see some expanded versions building off of what we did in that initial statement.
Gretchen:
We may come back to that in a bit, but I want to talk a little bit about your PhD right now. Your area of research interest is Christian ethics and public theology. How did you land on those topics? I have to assume there are other flavors of ethics and different explorations of theology; but what are the big questions you're asking as you move forward in this PhD?
Jason:
As you said, my focus is specifically in Christian ethics and public theology. How I landed on it really aligns with what I do for my nine-to-five. So I share the area of research and technology ethics at the ERLC. We're a public policy, or you can even better call us a public theology, commission. So we're focused on the ways that theology and ethics are lived out in the public square. So it was kind of a natural fit in that sense; that's a mini emphasis of the degree. Really it's Christian ethics, the Christian moral tradition. Coming from a specifically evangelical position on that is understanding the origins of ethics— meta-ethics or ethical theory—and then seeing how this is applied. How do we formulate our system of ethics, looking at Christian and non-Christian ethics, and how do these systems fit together? And then what does that look like when you start to apply it in society?
That was one of the things that we did with the statement of principles: that document was intentionally designed to have a really long shelf life. What I mean by that is that we weren't focused on the specific technology or advancements of the day, nor what we thought might come down the line in two or three years. It's really getting to the core. That's that principled element of the document: what are our beliefs that drive this conversation, no matter the technological advances? What [are] the core beliefs and elements that are going to drive all of these advancements and how we think about them? And so in that sense, we wanted it to be timeless.
Naturally there'll be things that get out of date or need to be updated. But the core elements—the ethical theory, the basis of it—is something that has withstood the test of time, because as a Christian, it's how we've been created, how God has created this world to work. Which is kind of the nature of what I want to do when I'm studying ethics: not what is popular, what's PC or anything like that; more so saying, what are the bedrock principles that I want to stand upon as I apply these principles in some of the most cutting edge or modern or controversial topics of the day?
There's a lot of overlap with a field called social ethics, which is how these structures or fundamental principles that are lived out in all of society. Very similarly, public theology is taking a lot of the theological concepts and a lot of the ethical concepts and saying, what does this look like in the public square? So often public theology focuses on the relationship between the church and the state; that's a big area of focus within public theology.
But also what about a public theology lived out in the rest of society? Because not everything is fixated around government and how the church and the state relate. Especially as we have the rise of these massive technology companies that operate transnationally, what does it look like for Christians to engage the technology industry? So building out a public theology, as I call it, for the digital age.
And so that's really the idea behind public theology: you're taking Christian ethics and you're applying it in very specific ways, whether it's church-state relations, engaging with these really powerful technology companies, or even how we interact with one another in our communities, our families, and our neighborhoods.
Gretchen:
And online.
Jason:
Yeah, exactly.
Gretchen:
Can't forget that!
This podcast is part of a larger Beatrice Institute project called Being Human in the Age of AI, where we ask what makes humans special and what does it mean to flourish on the frontier of a technological future. You wrote a book called The Age of AI: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity. You've given a lot of thought to this. What do you think we need to pay particular attention to in order to maintain our human dignity, even as we outsource or abdicate more and more of our God-given role to machines?
Jason:
I think that's one of the most important questions we can ask today. Often we get fixated on some of the more practical, specific questions; and while we need to have those debates, we have to step back. We need to step back as Christians, and instead of having such a narrow focus on this particular issue, ask what's driving that issue? What's behind the scenes?
This is that idea of meta-ethics: meta meaning outside of/before. Before you get to those kinds of questions, is what's going on behind the scenes. In the book and a lot of my other writings, I say, look: technology isn't really causing us to ask new questions of humanity per se, but ask age-old questions in light of new opportunities. And what I mean by that is that a lot of the core questions behind the questions that we're asking right now are the same questions that humanity has asked from the very beginning of time.
Is there a God? Some believe there is, some believe there's not. I do obviously hold that there is a God, that he's knowable, that he's revealed himself to us. So how do we interact with him? What does it mean to be human? Well as a Christian, I believe that all people, regardless of their belief, are created in God's image. They're designed. There's a specific purpose and goal and end in mind to what it means to be created in God's image. And so in that sense, when we approach a lot of the bigger questions—whether it's transhumanism, or a lot of the kind of moral abdication that we see today, or some of these bigger questions—nothing can change the fact that we're created in God's image; that we have dignity, value, and worth because of that, and no advancement’s ever going to change it.
When we look at technology, these are three big questions: is there a God? And if so, what is he like? What does it mean to be human, which we are talking about in terms of human dignity and created in God's image?
And then I think one of the big questions that we have to ask is what is technology? We just assume technology. This is the world we live in; these are the devices we use. And so we assume a very particular set of beliefs about what technology is. What that ends up doing is it drives how we respond to them. And so I think by stepping back and asking some of these bigger questions—sometimes this is talked about in terms of worldview questions, or meta-questions or the meta-narrative—these bigger existential questions need to be asked, because they drive what we do in the present.
When we talk about how to retain human dignity in the technological age, our way of being is not going to change; but the way we see ourselves, how we see our neighbors as created in God's image? That can shift because it's a perception thing. That's where I think, as Christians, when we engage in these very important questions, [we have to] step back, ask some of these bigger kind of meta-questions, because they drive a lot of the ways that we approach not only thinking through the questions, but also how we approach providing answers and navigating a way forward. fix
Gretchen:
As you're talking, a couple of things come to my mind … Some of our assumptions around technology, as we see innovations happening, we equate or conflate that with innovations in humanity. We've tied machine intelligence to human intelligence, kind of at the hip. And this seems to me, maybe what we ought to look at.
How does that resonate with you?
Jason:
I think it really drives back to that second question: what does it mean to be human? If you take a more materialistic or naturalistic understanding of what it means to be human, a lot of times you hear this talked about in popular literature as, we have “flesh suits.” It sounds really disgusting to say it that way; but we're just a body, and when we die, that's it. That's over, we're done for. The way you approach what it means to be human—which is often known as anthropology, or from a theological perspective as theological anthropology— what does it mean to be mankind, to be humanity? That's one of the most important questions, because if we misunderstand ourselves, it actually reveals a misunderstanding of who God is because we're created in his image; but also it misrepresents what technology is, and how we're to live in society in terms of our ethics and morality.
And honestly, this isn't just related to technology issues. This really drives all of the social issues of the day. I think this is going to be the big question of 2022: what does it mean to be human?
And I think the Church has the answer. It's rooted in the Scripture, rooted in how God's created us. And this is one of the greatest gifts, outside of the Gospel message itself, to humanity, to society: your value, dignity and worth is not based on what you do. It's not based on what you contribute. It's not based on how powerful or how strong you are or your abilities. It's based solely on how God has made you. And that revolutionizes the way we approach ethics, the way we approach morality, and the way we approach a lot of the pressing issues of the day.
Gretchen:
It takes us away from a utilitarian or instrumentalist perspective on humanity, and roots it in what resonates with all of us, regardless of where we fall on the belief scale.
Let's move on to another piece of writing that you've got going right now. It's your second book; it's coming out later this year, and you call it Following Jesus in a Digital Age, which I love. The title speaks to the idea of Christian discipleship writ large, but goes on to address issues particular to our time, the digital age, so to speak. So what does it look like to follow Jesus in the digital age as you're unpacking and writing this book? And how is being a Christian disciple in the 21st century both the same and different from being a disciple in say the first century?
Jason:
First and foremost, I don't believe that technology presents us with new questions, per se. What it does is it presents us with new opportunities: things that we can do, or questions that we can ask in light of these new opportunities. And so in many ways, it's very similar in terms of discipleship issues from the first century to the 21st century. What does it mean to be human? How do we live in society? How do we interact and engage with those around us?
Now, obviously those are in different contexts, and we have different opportunities and technologies and innovations before us. And so one of the things that I wanted to do in this book specifically is to peel back the blinders, or to open up our eyes a little bit. In Ecclesiastes we read about how a foolish man walks in darkness, and how God opens up our eyes so that we can see what's really going on around us.
This book is specifically designed for everyday readers. You don't have to be a specialist. You don't have to have special training. You don't have to be a pastor or ministry leader, or even highly educated. I wanted to write this book for the everyday believer to say, look, I see all of this stuff going around. I see the questions about the metaverse or content moderation, or I see questions about conspiracy theories and social media. I see how Instagram is shaping and forming young girls and their image of themselves. What do I do about it? I'm panicked. I'm overwhelmed. I'm tied to my phone and I don't know why; I can't put it down. My children seem to be fixated on their devices. I don't know what to do.
Rather than write a book that says, here are tips and tricks, 10 ways you can get off your phone type of thing—which can be important, and we should have those conversations—it goes back to some of these fundamental questions. What I do in the first chapter is to say, well, what is technology? This is what's known as the philosophy of technology. For some folks, the word philosophy is overwhelming or incredibly boring—it depends oh how you were taught philosophy, or if you were ever taught it. But the idea is, what is technology? What does it mean? How do we view it? What is it in the grand scheme of things? And so that's what I tried to do in the book, to kind of pull out some of these bigger principles that I think help frame up some of the most pressing discipleship issues of the day, which I think are going to be facing a society that increasingly doesn't believe in truth.
In a post-truth society, we see this a lot of times with misinformation, conspiracy theories, et cetera. We also see that we live in an incredibly divided time, an incredibly polarized time, where it's us versus them, the left versus the right. That's creating a host of new issues with social media. And then also the messages that we're seeing: how they shape our perception of ourselves, how they shape our perception of other people. So focusing on the ways that technology's forming and shaping us, and hopefully helping to say, "This is how we can follow Jesus into this digital age."
And one thing to note about the title: we intentionally chose A Digital Age. I think [we] often assume it's the digital age, that this is the digital age. This is the pinnacle, this is everything. The reality is in two or 300 years, if the Lord doesn't come back, they're going to have their own digital age. They're going to have their own technological age with its own challenges. So I intentionally said every generation has their technological age; it’s justthe technologies were different. But the questions in many ways, weren't.
I just wanted to point that out, because it was really important to me that we say a digital age, because there will be more. Who are we to say that we're the ones who say, this is exactly what it means to follow Jesus in all ages moving forward? They're going to have different opportunities. They're going to have different challenges. But the Word of God is unchanging. The message of God, the message of how he created us in his image, who he is, how he's created us and how we're to live in this world: those principles don't change.
Gretchen:
No, and I think you're right in terms of a digital age. I remember some years ago somebody was talking about the generation gap; then they started saying, your five-year-old's experience with technology is going to be different between your eight-year-old’s experience with technology, and there will be intergenerational gaps. So I think that's a really key point.
Another thing you said that I liked is that this is for everyday believers—who I would argue are the “original gangsters” of the disciples, anyway. They were fishermen; they weren't highly educated people, but they got it.
Jason:
I think we often think that theology or ethics is just for the learned among us: those who have degrees, or those in certain leadership positions. But ethics is everyday life. All of us are making moral and ethical decisions every moment of every day, some consciously and some unconsciously.
And so what does it mean to follow Jesus, for all of us, no matter our education level? What does it mean to follow after Christ in this really pressing age, with a lot of these very pressing challenges around us?
Gretchen:
Following up on that discipleship thread, a recent blog you posted has this sentence in it. "The church needs to understand that technology is becoming one of the primary disciplers of our people, [meaning the Church] forming us in ways that we may never fully understand." I found that a really provocative sentence, but it's embedded in an article [called] “4 Ethical Issues in Technology to Watch for in 2022.” And you articulate them as: content moderation, fake news, digital surveillance and digital authoritarianism.
None of those four jump out at me and say, Gretchen, this is what discipleship is all about. So I want you to tell me how you got there. Why do you think those issues should be top of mind for Christians to begin with, and then how do they relate to discipleship?
Jason:
I'll start at the latter part and then move back. When we talk about discipleship, it's about forming and shaping us, in terms of being a Christ disciple or one who's following after Christ: to learn his ways, to understand the ways that we've been created, the purposes and the ends to which we've been created for, which is ultimately to glorify God. So when we talk about being a disciple, it means that we're being formed and shaped.
It's easy to think, well, discipleship is on Sunday mornings. We're gathering with the local body, or we have a Sunday night service, or we have a small group, or we have discipleship practices of reading the Bible together, or journaling, or doing family worship; talking about these things along the way, as Deuteronomy tells us; to live a life in light of who God is and how he's created us. Ultimately, as Jesus talks about in Matthew 22, it’s to love the Lord your God, with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love your neighbors yourself. Which really is the core of Christian ethics by the way, to love God and love others.
When we talk about discipleship in that sense, I think most people are nodding along saying, oh yeah, that's Christian discipleship: to become more like Christ. But we fail to understand, especially in this digital age, that our smartphones are with us all the time. So it's not in the sense that we gather with the church and we hear the scriptures being preached on, or we sing worship songs together, hymns and spiritual songs to edify and admonish one another. We're doing that maybe a couple hours on Sunday; maybe we have a small group once or twice a week. Maybe we read our Bible; for those who are doing daily Bible reading, they're reading their scripture every day, they're praying.
But these are pockets in our day.
I hate on Sunday mornings, I get a notification on my phone. I have an Apple smartphone, and the screen time notification comes up.
Gretchen:
Yeah, mine too, on Sunday! What's up with that?
Jason:
Sunday morning, at about nine o'clock, right before I'm starting to gather with the local church, I get this notification that says: look how you spent your week. What did you do this week? And I'm utterly shocked almost every single time. It's like, you spent this many hours on Twitter, this many hours on social media, this many hours on our email, this many text messages. And I'm like, oh man. And you don't think about it, because it's just become the culture we live in. It's just the world around us.
What I'm arguing for in that piece, and really what I argue for in my book, is look: you're being formed, and you're being shaped, you're being discipled by this technology that never leaves your side.
I'll be honest here and be humble to say, I'm not perfect. When it comes to technology habits, I have some really bad habits. One of which I've noticed is that when my phone is not near me for an extended period of time, I grow a little uneasy. Am I missing something? What's going on? I wonder if this person texted me or I got this email or whatever.
So we've almost been training—keyword discipled—for immediacy. We're always wondering what's next, what's happening right now, did I miss something? We live in this age of information overload. And so that's kind of what I'm getting at with that discipleship statement is to say you're being formed into a certain type of person. These technologies encourage you to use them in a very specific way. This gets back to some of the conversations around philosophy of technology, et cetera; but then you asked a really important question, which is what in the world do these four issues have to do with discipleship?
The connection is that we're being formed and shaped into particular people. These are four of the issues that we need to be thinking about that maybe aren't as evident. If you follow along with any of the technology debates, content moderation and free speech is almost one of the biggest issues. I think most, regardless of the political affiliation or what side of the aisle you're on, agree content moderation is a big deal. Should we be suppressing more, should be removing more content online, or should we be removing less? Because we realize social media especially is shaping us. The information that we see is forming us; it's causing us to be a certain type of people. That's one of those big debates that we have that I think is really key when you think about it through a discipleship lens.
Gretchen:
So are you saying this is something we ought to stop and think deeply about because it is shaping us, and we do need to rustle as believers (and as just people) with where we land on what we think? Where it really lands, typically, is free speech for me, but not for thee; I want them to content moderate your stuff, but let me say whatever I want, because that's control.
I mean, content moderation and free speech and fake news and misinformation sort of go hand in glove to me, because what's one man's fake news is another man's truth. What about surveillance and authoritarianism?
Jason:
In terms of surveillance, we live in a digital society, meaning almost everything we do is connected to some form of technology at all times, whether it's our smart appliances or smart phones, smart devices. Not only do I have a phone within about six inches of me right now, but I also have a wearable on my wrist; I'm on my computer; we're on a podcast; all at the same time. So this is the world we inhabit.
Well, behind the scenes, there’s countless, countless droves of data that are being collected on us all the time. And we can see—and this is how you tie in some of the digital authoritarianism—that this data is incredibly powerful. Now sometimes there's debates on how much data is actually needed. But the idea of personal privacy is a big question, not only here domestically in the United States, but also overseas. What is privacy? What is private? Who has access to this data? Who makes the rules? Who decides who decides?
I'm kind of channeling Shoshana Zuboff in her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. We live in a surveillance society in many ways; every single day, the things we see online, the posts that we like, the things we buy, the places we go, are being tracked. Not always for malicious purposes; but sometimes it is. And we can increasingly see the way that data can inform the design of these systems, that [then] inform and shape us as people. Not only the ads that we see online, the content that we see online; they talk a lot about bubbles or rabbit holes that you can go down on these social media apps, and some of the places you end up in really dark areas, sad areas, and places that are dangerous, especially for young people.
I'm trying to push the conversation forward. The culture around us, our society around us, we're having conversations about digital privacy. Should these companies be gathering this much data? What type of data protections are there? What kind of recourse do I have in these debates on what's collected about me and what's shared? We've seen this conversation pushed forward, especially with the California Consumer Privacy Act a couple of years ago. It almost set a de facto standard in some sense. And then you have a lot of states kind of debating on state level privacy; even at the federal government, you have some conversations surrounding that. And then the GDPR in Europe really pushed the conversation forward, as most of Europe fell under the GDPR and this data regulation. So that's what I'm trying to say in terms of some of these ethical issues: how do we think about privacy? Because it's increasingly important.
One of the terrible ways that we see data being abused is what we see in authoritarian regimes around the world. A prime example, especially as of late, [is] news surrounding the Chinese Communist Party or the CCP, and the genocide that's being committed right now among the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. That is something that's top of mind. Even in the last month or so, we saw the Uyghur Forced Labor [Prevention] be passed by the United States Congress almost with everyone voting for it, and then president Biden recently signed into law. This is going to have massive impacts on our society: the ways that we purchase, the things that we interact with. But it's highlighting a current genocide happening overseas.
Well, how did that happen? It happened on the back of technology. The Chinese Communist Party, or these other authoritarian regimes, are utilizing tools like facial recognition, data privacy, firewalls, and content moderation to control and to suppress the ways that people think, the ways that they interact. And also where they go, how they work, where they worship this has been collected on them constantly, and so they live under this heavy hand of repression.
And this isn't just happening in China. This is happening around the world, whether it's being able to shut off the internet for an entire country to quell protests—that we saw in Belarus that we saw in Cuba—or increasingly the ways that data is being used or tracking people, in order to control and manipulate them.
Gretchen:
So if we understand that—and I think you've done a great job of articulating [it]--what comes to my mind is the fact that God has all of the powers that AI gets imputed; but also he's fully loving. He can see all that and he'll never use it against us. And I think we're developing tools that give us godlike powers in a fallen human context.
Another thing that struck me, Jason, is that you talked about how technology is forming us. Another guest I had, Micah Redding, talked about the liturgy and ritual of technology. You see that embedded in Christian formation for centuries: the understanding that the things we do physically, that's why the monasteries had these rhythms and times for things. I think the first thing I do in the morning is look at my smartphone. I literally have a series of apps that I check, then I get up and do my quiet time. I've been told I should switch that; haven't done it yet. fix
Let's talk about Jacques Ellul and Albert Mohler, who've addressed this issue of technology being a theological issue. I can quote Jacques Ellul. I think you have yourself: “No social, human or spiritual fact is so important as the fact of technique [which is his word for technology in the modern world]. And yet no subject is so little understood.” And then Albert Mohler argues that Christians need to think more seriously about technology and understand that it is a theological issue.
Can you unpack that briefly—how the link between technology and theology is really important for us to grasp?
Jason:
On that latter point, it's essentially what we've been doing this whole podcast: applying these Christian truths in light of these new opportunities. In many ways, the ways that we interact with these technologies or the technologies we create is a theological issue because it's revealing to us how we see God, how we understand him as God, how we see ourselves as created in God's image, and how we see the world around us. And so it's getting back to these existential, or worldview, questions: these questions before the questions that we need to be asking.
That's where I really appreciate the work of Dr. Mohler's, to say the Church needs to be taking these issues seriously. Often we think of technology issues as always at arms length; it’s always kind of “out there.” Yeah, it's something we should talk about, but maybe not that important; it'll happen in five or ten years. It's always five or 10 years down the road when we need to take it seriously. The reality is we need to take it seriously now. And I think that was something we learned in 2021 especially, and I think we'll learn in 2022 even more so: these technologies have massive implications and ramifications on how we live our lives, how we see God, how we see ourselves, and how we see the world around us.
Jacques Ellul is an interesting figure. He's a French sociologist. He died in 1994, I believe. He's pretty controversial, not just within Christian circles, but also in the wider secular culture as well. But the way he saw technology, I think, is a helpful corrective.
And I have to be really careful when I talk about Ellul; I don't fully agree with Ellul on everything. That's the beauty of the intellectual life: you can engage with people and you don't have to fully agree with them; nevertheless, you can benefit from them. So Ellul has shaped the way that I see technology in countless ways, even though I think he goes a little too far at times.
Earlier in the podcast you mentioned the word instrumentalism. There's another corresponding term called determinism. We don't have time to unpack that, but if listeners want to dig into that concept, Ellul is a little bit more deterministic, where he says technology is not just a tool. And I'm like, yeah, I agree with you on that. But [he] becomes a little bit too deterministic, to say you don't really have an agency. You don't really have a choice. And as a Christian, I just can't get there; the Scriptures are very clear.
And that's where the split is. You have this instrumentalist version that says, yes, it's agency; it's all about the way you use it. These tools don't have values. They're not forming or shaping you. It's just a tool. It's just how you use it. And there's some truth to that.
But on the other side with Ellul, there's some truth too. And so for me, Ellul is a helpful corrective, because I think we've gone too far on one side, and Ellul comes back and says, whoa, whoa, whoa, you need to pull that back. I won't follow him all the way to his landing positions on some various issues. But nevertheless, I think he's a really helpful and instructive figure to say technology is more than you think it is. That doesn't mean that you don't have responsibility for the ways you use these tools; but it does mean that they're shaping and forming us, so we should take these things seriously.
And I think that's exactly what Dr. Mohler is saying too, in many ways. These aren't "out there" issues. They're right now issues that are affecting not only you as a person, your family, but also your local church and your community, and the church needs to take these things seriously because they are pressing ethical issues.
Gretchen:
This is a good word for the social media age.
Speaking of social media, Jason, you posted a stack of books on your Instagram feed that represents part of your spring reading list. You explore across more than a dozen volumes the field of theological anthropology—which we've talked a little bit about in the concept of imago dei—the nature of human identity, human rights, human dignity. I would argue, and you might too, that all of these ideas are being challenged, at least theoretically, by advances in artificial intelligence.
So what do you think, are we in trouble? Why is it important that we have a solid theological anthropology to help us face and withstand those challenges?
Jason:
You hit it right to say these are challenges, and they're not inevitable. In many ways, I think that the image of God or human dignity is one of the most pressing issues of the day. And that's why I wanted to spend my spring kind of focused on this issue.
Especially a lot of the conversations on the question of human rights—we often talk about rights. I have a right to this, or right to that. What is that right? Where are those rights grounded? Why do we even say we have rights? That's some of the issues that I'm going to be addressing this spring. What does it mean to be created in God's image? What does this mean for a lot of the human rights conversations that we have today?
Specifically to artificial intelligence, there are a lot of doomsday scenarios. There's a lot of hype about what's happening, how long it's going to be until we have sentience, or we achieve some type of super intelligence. It's always about the red-eyed robots that are gonna come steal our jobs or kill us, one of the two. Those are the big issues that everyone wants to talk about. And I say, yes, let's have those conversations; but as Christians, we're not a fearful people. And I hope that listeners picked up on that in this conversation: we're a hopeful people, because the end of the story's already written.
A lot of times when we talk about technology, [when] we talk about pressing social and cultural issues, it's almost this doomsday, inevitable, everything's going to hell in a hand basket, I don't know what to do, I'm overwhelmed. Well as Christians, that's what the book of Revelation is written for. It's not a book of prophesy charts or felt boards to tell us the end times and when it's happening. It was written to give us hope in the midst of a church that was being persecuted, in the midst of an overwhelming society, in the midst of heartache and horror and death and disease. Revelation 21 and 22—the end of the story is written. Jesus is sitting on his throne. Nothing is going to change that. And every tear will be wiped away; every disease will be overcome; death itself will be defeated finally and foremost. All of the people of God are going to be gathered around the throne singing “Holy holy, holy is the Lord God almighty.”
So in light of the end of the story, Christians are hopeful people in the midst of it, because we're facing these challenges with hope. That's one of the things when we talk about technology and how it's forming and shaping us, and we get into some of these questions, is to say, look, we're accountable for our actions. We're accountable for the ways that we're being formed. We should be thinking wisely about these issues, but we also don't have to give way to the panic and the fear of the age. We don't have to fear anything; humanity isn't in need of an upgrade in order to face the world around us. We're created in God's image; we're fully capable and equipped and accountable to do the work that God has set before us, and we do so from a place of hope.
Gretchen:
I think you've heard on some of the other podcasts that I've done just recently, some of those themes of the balance between making the world a better place—which we are called to do, and we're called to leave the world a better place after we've left our footprint on it—but the upgrade is Jesus, not V2 of a software or the internet 3.0. I think that's super important to anchor us in this theological technological age that we're living in.
Do you have a favorite book in the stack?
Jason:
Well, most of them I haven't read yet. So I can't say that I have a favorite one yet, because these are to-be-read.
Gretchen:
Back up and say: of the books you've read recently that you didn't write, what's one of your favorite books that you would recommend people read?
Jason:
It's kind of a challenging question, because there are a good number of really helpful books. I'll mention two.
It's always good to read primary sources. I think a lot of people want to talk about folks like Ellul, and they write about Ellul—I mean, I literally write about Ellul. But I hope listeners and readers would go back and read Ellul himself, because maybe I didn't get it right. Maybe I missed it. Maybe I didn't give you the full context to understand something. That's something you mentioned earlier, about his word technique: it carries a very specific meaning in his work that's actually different than just our word “technology” in English. It's French; he's a French sociologist. And so technique, la technique, is a very specific type of way he's understanding the forces of the age, the societal forces.
So I'd encourage the listeners to go back and read The Technological Society. It's a pretty large book, to be really honest, kind of overwhelming at times. There is an audio book version if folks want to go listen to it. Or go read some of his shorter works, just to get a flavor and a sense of who he is, how he's talking about technology.
I've recently been digging into a lot more Christian ethics. I mean, I'm an ethicist by training, so naturally I'm reading a lot of ethics. But there's a lot of really helpful older works on ethics. One of them that I highly recommend for folks, if you're interested in Christian ethics but haven't done a lot of reading: in the 1950s a guy named John Murray wrote a book called Principles of Conduct: Aspects of Biblical Ethics. It's just a really helpful introduction to Christian ethics. I think we often think it’s just applied theology; ethics is a little bit more than that. There's a lot more that goes into it, and John Murray really helps to excavate that for us and help us to understand the nature of Christian ethics.
So I would say The Technological Society by Ellul, and then Principles of Conduct by John Murray.
Gretchen:
Should they read Ellul in the original French, Jason?
Jason:
If you can! I have just finished a French course myself, and so my challenge is to try to start reading him regularly in the French. But there's some really good English translations that I'd recommend.
Gretchen:
I think your point about reading the original source is super important, and I would equate that to the big discussion about evolution. I would wager quite a lot that most of the people that talk about it have never, ever read Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. I would say the same thing about the Bible: don't squawk about what you don't like about the Bible if you've never read the book.
Jason:
And reading the whole book in its context. That's important for the Scriptures obviously, but also other works as well. It's easy to pull out the sound bites, and miss the forest for the trees.
Gretchen:
At the end of every podcast, I like to give my guests a chance to share something of their personal vision and vocation. So Jason, how do you see your mission or call in life? What stamp or legacy would you like to leave, both on your field and in the world?
Jason:
It's kind of a big question. I think for me, I want to be found faithful. I don't care about the success as much. I don't care about having a number of books. I don't care about being a great professor in that sense and being remembered. What I want to be seen as is faithful: as someone who loved my wife, who loved my two boys, who loved our local church, and who hopefully sought to equip the next generation. Which is one of the reasons I love teaching and one of the reasons I write: is to equip the next generation to be more faithful, to seek wisdom above all. Because at the end of the day, my value and my dignity and my worth, as we've talked about this whole podcast, is not tied to the things I do. It's not tied to the legacy I leave. It's tied to the image of God, and it's tied ultimately to Jesus Christ, my savior.
I don't always live up to that. I'm a fallible, broken human being who doesn't do everything perfectly. But that's my hope. That's my goal, is that I leave this life not making some big splash impact as much as training up the next generation.
I have the dedication of my next book, and it's to Hollis. I'm going to write a book to each of my sons, and this book is written for Hollis. And it says, I hope one day you read these words and you treasure the risen Christ. I don't want you to look back at your dad and say, oh, my dad was everything. No; my dad was tied to Christ. He believed in Christ, and he sought to follow him and train us to follow him as well.
Gretchen:
Well, prayers up and sails up for that, Jason. Thanks for joining us on the podcast today. It's been a delight.
Jason:
Thank you so much for having me. It's been fun.