There is nothing quite as irritating as going to church only to hear the presiding priest preach leftist ideology about climate change and artificial intelligence (AI).

The Catholics are the worst, but the Anglicans are not far behind.

The Catholic Church has increasingly treated both AI and climate change as evils sure to bring down humanity. Pope Leo XIV has warned that AI can subordinate people to efficiency, threaten employment and human relationships, concentrate power, and impose substantial energy and water costs. On climate change, the church has gone considerably further, presenting radical environmental action, and reduced dependence on fossil fuels, as moral obligations tied to care for creation, and the poor.

On the Anglican side of the aisle, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, has warned that technology could override human dignity, relationships, and moral responsibility, and has explicitly called for government regulation to protect people from AI. On climate change, her Church of England has committed itself to net zero by 2030, with a host of Anglican leaders describing climate change as a moral and justice issue, given that the church expects poorer countries to suffer its purported consequences disproportionately.

Even coming from the offices of those two leaders, the arguments fall apart under the most basic cross-examination. By turning off the most efficient power sources the world has known in favour of greenery it is the poor that suffer the most – as the most recent case study of a court blocking oil and gas investment in South Africa, something both churches support, has shown. AI, on the other hand, is set to vastly increase the efficiency of economies, and thereby the generation of wealth, which is a necessary condition for rising prosperity – let alone the more specific gains that AI will secure in fields such as healthcare.

But it gets worse when a priest in his parish seeks to articulate the arguments they have been fed from the pope and the archbishop to their congregations at a mass. They invariably fluff it and end up sounding stupid which detracts from everything else they are saying. Sticking to the bible is a safer strategy.