From Babel to the Algorithm: What an Ancient Tower Tells Us About the Internet and AI.

Earlier this year, Pope Leo XIV became the first pope to take his name partly in response to a technological moment, signalling that the Church is waking up to the profound moral questions posed by artificial intelligence. He is right to do so. But the conversation the Church needs about AI and the digital age will not be found by looking only to the future. It requires us to look much further back — to a windy plain in ancient Mesopotamia, and a half-built tower.

The Bishop of Oxford, the Rt Revd Dr Steven Croft, has been one of the most consistent and thoughtful Anglican voices on this question, engaging with artificial intelligence in Parliament and in public for nearly a decade. As long ago as 2017, serving on the House of Lords Select Committee on AI, he was warning that ‘AI needs to be held within a vision for global economics and politics which is deeper and better than free market capitalism,’ and that there was ‘immense potential for good but also immense potential for harm.’ More recently, giving evidence to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on AI in December 2024, he argued that ‘when faced with a choice, the Church needs always to turn towards human interaction, personal encounter and face to face community,’ and that technology, however powerful, ‘can be an excellent servant but a poor master.’

As an Anglican priest, I find myself drawn to Genesis 11 as the lens through which to read these concerns. It is a short story — just nine verses — but one of the most arresting in the entire Bible. The whole world, we are told, shared one language, one ‘lip’. They gathered on a plain and resolved to build a city with a tower ‘with its top in the heavens,’ so that they might ‘make a name’ for themselves. God came down, saw what they were doing, and scattered them.

It would be easy to dismiss this as a quaint folk explanation for why human beings speak different languages. But read carefully — and read it against our present moment — and the story becomes uncomfortably contemporary.

One lip, many languages

The Hebrew phrase translated ‘one language’ is more precisely ‘one lip’ — a unity not just of words but of shared intention and ambition. The internet, with its English-dominated coding and its aspiration to connect every human being on earth, is nothing if not a ‘one lip’ project. And yet, like Babel, its unity is proving more fragile than its architects promised, and its purposes more troubling than its early enthusiasts imagined.

The brick of Genesis 11:3 was, in its day, a remarkable new technology. Before it, builders used irregular natural stones; the fired brick offered uniformity, precision, scalability. Walter Brueggemann, in his landmark commentary on Genesis, notes that the Babel narrative is in part a ‘polemic against the growth of urban culture as an expression of pride.’ It is not condemning technology or city life in themselves. What it is interrogating is the purpose to which they are put, and the spirit in which they are undertaken.

The builders of Babel did not make bricks in order to house the homeless or build communities of flourishing. They made them to ‘make a name for themselves’ — to reach God, or perhaps to replace him. The same question presses upon us today. The internet was born with genuinely noble ambitions: to democratise knowledge, to connect the isolated, to give voice to the voiceless. And it has, in part, done all of those things. But it has also become the infrastructure of surveillance capitalism, algorithmic manipulation, and platforms that profit from outrage and division. Google, Meta, and X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) now constitute a kind of digital Babylonian empire: immense, largely unaccountable, and wielding influence over public discourse that no single nation state could match.

The God who comes down

One of the most theologically exquisite moments in the passage is the divine response. The tower is built to reach heaven; and yet God has to ‘come down’ to see it. The commentator Gordon Wenham observes that even humanity’s greatest achievement is so small that God struggles to see it from above — a ‘remarkable satire on man’s doing,’ as Gerhard von Rad puts it.

There is something here that speaks directly to the grandiosity of our present moment. The promises made on behalf of artificial intelligence border on the theological: that it will cure cancer, end poverty, solve climate change, and unlock the deepest secrets of the universe. The language of transcendence is everywhere. And yet, as in Genesis 11, God might be expected to ‘come down’ and find the tower rather less impressive than its builders supposed.

Bishop Croft has consistently pressed this point in the public square. In September 2025 he challenged the government in the Lords over AI’s impact on young people’s employment prospects, noting that in his conversations with young people in the diocese, their number one anxiety was the effect of AI and technology on their futures. And in 2024 he chaired a Westminster public policy forum on disinformation and deepfakes, describing the rapid rise of synthetic harmful content as one of the defining challenges of our moment. His conclusion — that the Church must be a ‘convenor and contributor’ in the wider societal conversation about AI — resonates deeply with the prophetic function described in the ordinal.

This is not to say that AI is evil, any more than the brick was evil. The bricks of Babel were morally neutral. It is the project — the hubris, the ethical vacancy, the refusal to ask ‘for whose benefit and at whose cost?’ — that the narrative judges. Writing recently, the scholar Atef Marzouk observed that ‘tech-oligarchs own public spaces… but are neither equipped with a clear mandate nor subject to clear accountability mechanisms.’ The Tower of Babel, in the end, was a failure not of engineering but of governance and ethics.

Fragmentation, loneliness, and the echo chamber

The scattering at Babel — the confusion of languages, the dissolution of common understanding — finds an eerie echo in the fragmentation of contemporary public discourse. Social media platforms promised connection, but their business model depends on engagement, and nothing drives engagement quite like outrage. Algorithms ensure that our existing views are amplified and our opponents caricatured. The result is a digital Babel: billions of voices, incomprehensible to one another, talking past each other at increasing volume.

The rise of generative AI has deepened this crisis. Deepfakes make it impossible to trust our eyes. AI-generated text floods the internet with plausible-sounding misinformation. Bishop Croft has been among those sounding the alarm: he has described how ‘over the course of 2025 we will become increasingly aware of AI Agents… able to respond to simple instructions and carry out complex tasks,’ and has urged churches to form ‘communities of resistance’ to uncritical engagement with these technologies.

The internet’s darker corners host some of the worst of human behaviour: pornography, child abuse material, self-harm communities, and hate speech on an industrial scale. Brueggemann’s insight remains sharp: the confusion of tongues at Babel is both judgment and, in a strange way, mercy — a limit placed upon humanity’s capacity to do evil at scale.

The Pentecost reversal — and its implications

The Bible does not leave us at Babel. The prophetic tradition looks forward to a restoration of right speech: Zephaniah promises that God will ‘restore to the peoples a pure language’ (3:9), that all nations might call upon him together. And in Acts 2, the narrative of Pentecost offers the most profound counter-image to Babel in all of Scripture.

The Spirit at Pentecost does not undo the diversity of languages — it does not restore the ‘one lip’ of Babel. Instead, it enables the disciples to speak in other tongues, so that each person hears the good news in their own language. Pentecost does not flatten human difference in the name of unity; it honours it. The early community that emerged shared their possessions, cared for the poor, and held all things in common — a direct contrast to the self-aggrandising project of the Babel builders.

This Pentecost vision has everything to say to the Church’s engagement with the digital world. We are not called to reject technology, any more than the apostles rejected the Greek and Aramaic of their day. We are called to bring it under an ethical and theological framework: one that asks whose voices are amplified and whose are silenced; one that insists on accountability from those who own the public square; and one that refuses to accept that profit is a sufficient justification for harm.

What the Church must say

Pope Leo XIV’s willingness to speak prophetically about AI is a model for what Christian leadership might look like in the digital age. Bishop Croft has been modelling exactly this in the Church of England for years — arguing in Parliament, in his diocese, and in the wider Anglican Communion that faith communities are an indispensable ‘third voice’ in the conversation between government and the tech industry. As he put it to the All-Party Group in December 2024: ‘The Church brings an honest appraisal of human weakness, error and tendency to wickedness to inform the work of regulators and developers, which contrasts with the naïve libertarianism of some technology companies.’

Our tradition of political theology — from William Temple to the present day — equips us to ask the hard questions the market will not ask: Who benefits? Who is harmed? Who is accountable? Who is left behind? It is worth noting that the COVID-19 pandemic revealed, starkly, that millions of people in this country do not have reliable internet access. The digital revolution — like the brick revolution of ancient Mesopotamia — has not distributed its benefits equally. This is not a technical problem; it is a moral one, and the Church has a voice in naming it.

The Babel narrative ends without hope — there is no rainbow here, as there was after the flood. But the wider canon of Scripture does not leave us in confusion. Revelation’s vision of a redeemed humanity from ‘every nation, tribe, people and language’ worshipping together (7:9) points towards a divine project of genuine, differentiated unity: not the enforced sameness of Babel, but the glorious diversity of the new creation.

Until that day, the Church stands as a community called to model a different kind of digital citizenship: one that uses the tools of the age with wisdom, humility, and accountability; that amplifies the voices of the marginalised rather than the powerful; and that refuses to believe that a tower — however tall, however sophisticated — can bring us closer to God than the cross of Jesus already has.