Tech Broligarchs Want Jesus Out of the Way (Russell Moore, 2/03/25, Christianity Today))
“God” is no problem in this view of reality. After all, the word God can be made abstract and even algebraic. Albert Einstein suggesting that “God does not play dice with the universe” implicated an impersonal structure, a logic, not the living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Spinoza’s “God” will never summon a person before a judgment seat. The words God or religion can be used as stand-ins for the very sort of self-deification the tech-bro ideology and all its successors demand.
Jesus, on the other hand, is not easily dismissed. Once he is heard—not as a theoretical avatar giving authority to some ideology, but for the actual words he spoke, the actual gospel he delivered—the ambitions of every would-be “master of the universe” stand exposed.
Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov said he wanted Jesus silenced because the Jesus of the Bible didn’t “understand” human nature: that what people really want is the filling of appetites and the spectacles of distraction. Against the Inquisitor’s diatribe, though, Jesus, as with Pilate, simply stands there, with a look that pierces through all the manipulations of a mechanistic view of the universe.
The digital view of humanity cannot fit with the vision of James Madison and the framers of the American constitutional order. Utopian revolutionaries have always offered some version of “One must break a few eggs to make some omelets,” regardless of the price of actual eggs at the moment. But behind that utopianism is always a theology—and the theology can co-opt almost everything. Christianity can be co-opted by a digital utopianism, but only by silencing Jesus.
Yet Jesus is not easily silenced. The universe is no simulation. It is created and held together not by an algorithm but by a Word. And this Word is no abstraction to be decoded but a person, one who “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).
A million different Babels lie in the ruins of history, and behind them a million different Nimrods, all of whom would storm the limits of mortality and of accountability to create simulations of themselves and of their rule. They are all gone, and they cannot be rebooted.