A follow-up to The Beast System Runs on AI: A Watchman’s Warning (May 21, 2026)
Have you noticed how often your phone now offers to do things for you? Find the cheapest flight. Reorder the groceries. Soon, pay for them. Most of us take the help and keep scrolling. But what should a Christian response to AI look like?
Back in May, we shared Patrick Wood’s warning about where this could lead. Wood, author of The New Economics of Technocracy, points to the system Scripture describes, one where “no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark” (Revelation 13:17). He argues that such a system would not arrive all at once. It would be built piece by piece, infrastructure first, with artificial intelligence as the engine.
Five months later, we went back to see what has moved. Here is what we found. Every piece is linked, so you can check it for yourself, the way the Bereans checked even the apostle Paul (Acts 17:11).
Help us get it right. We check each fact against its source and link it so you can check it too. If we missed something, or you see it differently, tell us in the comments. Every comment is reviewed before it appears, and if you ask a question, we will answer it there.
The Checkout Counter Is Moving Inside the Machine
On June 10, Visa announced a partnership with OpenAI to bring Visa payments into OpenAI’s tools, including ChatGPT. The partnership is designed to let AI agents, software that carries out tasks on your behalf, make purchases within limits the user sets, such as spending caps and required approvals. Visa’s product chief put it this way: “AI will transform commerce more profoundly than the internet or mobile technology ever did.”
Let’s be fair. This is a convenience people choose, and it is not the mark. But most of us have never thought twice about who stands at the checkout. Now we are being asked to hand more of the purchase itself to a machine.
One Door for Your Money, One Door for Your Name
In Europe, lawmakers are now negotiating the final legislation for a digital euro, a central bank digital currency (CBDC): digital money issued by the central bank itself, not by your bank. The European Central Bank aims to be ready to issue it in 2029 if that law passes this year. The ECB says it would complement cash, not replace it. Here at home, a housing law Congress passed this summer bars the Federal Reserve from issuing a CBDC through 2030. The House has also passed a permanent ban, but the Senate has not approved it.
Then on August 31, the White House budget office ordered federal agencies to make Login.gov “the universal sign-on for accessing public services online” (Memorandum M-26-18). Agencies have two years to bring covered public websites onto it. Other sign-ins may remain, and the stated goals are convenience and fraud prevention. But notice the shape of it: one front door to your government. A shared sign-in is not a national ID card, but it is the kind of foundation one could be built on.
The ID Card Ended. The Infrastructure Did Not.
In July, Britain’s new prime minister scrapped the national digital ID plan. Yet digital ID is still on the government’s agenda through its existing sign-in service, GOV.UK One Login. That is Wood’s warning in miniature: the headline project ends, and the infrastructure keeps growing.
These systems do not run on policy alone. They run on buildings full of computers, and those buildings are coming close to home.
Count the Cost
Here is where a warning can easily turn into a slogan, so let’s slow down. A data center is simply where those computers live. The same machines that could track a nation also help doctors. The FDA keeps a list of AI-enabled medical devices it has authorized, many of them tools for reading medical images.
The tool is not the danger. The May post said it well: the question is the heart of the one holding it. And every hand on this tool belongs to fallen people like us. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). That is true of the engineer, the regulator, and the reader alike. For a look at the worldview driving some of tech’s elites, see Alex Newman’s interview with Carl Teichrib on Big Tech and the re-paganization of the West.
Walking away is not the answer either. If America abandons this ground, it will not sit empty. Nations like Communist China would gladly take the lead, and they do not share our view of human freedom. We would rather see these machines built in a free country, under law, with citizens watching.
Better still, with Christians helping to build them. Daniel shows us how. Carried off to Babylon, the city whose ruins archaeologists have since uncovered, he refused the king’s food (Daniel 1:8), yet he and his friends mastered Babylon’s learning: “And in every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters that were in all his kingdom” (Daniel 1:20). Daniel served at the top of a pagan empire (Daniel 2:48) without bowing to its gods. Our labs and boardrooms need Daniels.
We need not begin with opposition. We can begin by counting the cost. Teaching on the cost of following Him, Jesus asked, “For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?” (Luke 14:28). The principle holds for any builder.
Here in Central Virginia, the towers are going up. Google plans three campuses in Chesterfield County, and the county says Google will become its largest single commercial taxpayer once its first site is fully operational. That is a real benefit.
The other column is real too. State regulators have cited Google’s first site for sediment washing into streams and wetlands. Google says heavy rain overwhelmed its controls and that most of the cited items have been addressed. And the county estimates that approved and proposed projects could add 8.6 million gallons of water demand a day. Both columns belong in the room. For land-use and water questions, the place to start is the county board.
What We Do Now
None of this tells us the day or the hour. Jesus said only the Father knows that (Matthew 24:36), so we will not guess.
But He did give one command for the waiting: “And what I say to you I say to all: Stay awake.” (Mark 13:37). He spoke it to four disciples, then widened it to every believer, including us. Staying awake is not panic. It is a servant alert at his post.
- Keep a human hand on your wallet. Before any AI spends for you, read the limits you are agreeing to.
- Show up locally. When data centers come before your board of supervisors, be there. Ask what your county gains, what it gives up, and who will be watching.
- Raise up Daniels. Encourage the young people in your church to excel in school and in their work, not for worldly gain but “as for the Lord and not for men” (Colossians 3:23). The world is already writing for them; see this look inside Yuval Noah Harari’s book for kids.
- Pray for the decision-makers in county board rooms, state agencies, and Congress.
And take heart. The God who declares “the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:10) is not waiting to see how the technology turns out. No article can open a sleeping eye. Only the Spirit who raised Christ can. But that same God still wakes His church, and He can begin with us.
Pull Up a Chair
What do you think? Are you already using AI tools, or keeping your distance? Is a data center coming to your county? Maybe we missed something. Leave us a comment below.
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV).
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