25 Sep 2026 AI and the social gospel: Reclaiming a moral voice for advocacy
What can churches learn from the Christian response to the Industrial Revolution as artificial intelligence reshapes our societies?
That question drove the latest WACC Europe Discussion, “AI and the Social Gospel: Reclaiming a Moral Voice for Advocacy,” led by Christian social ethicist Professor Kate Ott.
Ott teaches at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, and lectures in practical theology at Yale Divinity School. Her work examines how moral communities respond to major change, with particular expertise in technology and digital ethics.
Opening the session, WACC Europe President Peter Reimann drew a parallel between two moments of profound technological and social upheaval: the Industrial Revolution at the turn of the 20th century and the rise of AI today.
He asked what role faith communities can play. It is a question close to WACC’s commitment to digital justice: who shapes the technologies that shape our lives, and whose voices are heard when decisions are made?
Learning from history
Ott made clear that her focus was not the technical workings of AI. The challenge for churches, she suggested, is to grasp the wider systemic changes that accompany it, not only how a particular application works. To explore how, she turned to the Social Gospel movement in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Industrialization transformed labor and production. New jobs were often precarious, poorly paid and dangerous, growth outpaced regulation, natural resources were extracted on an enormous scale, and economic power became ever more concentrated.
Ott saw clear echoes today. Digital technology may seem immaterial, yet AI depends on data centers, energy, minerals, devices and fiber-optic networks. Economic and technological power rests with a small number of corporations and individuals, raising questions familiar from earlier struggles over monopolies and public resources.
The two periods are not identical, she stressed. But the Social Gospel offers a way to ask how religious communities responded when rapid technological change met its social consequences.
From individual to social responsibility
For Ott, a key development was theological. Christian communities that had emphasized individual salvation and individual sin came to speak of “social salvation” and “social sin” and to recognize a call to address the structures that shape people’s lives.
Ministry began to concern the whole person and the conditions communities live in. Churches asked not only how to meet immediate needs but why those needs existed. A church that fed hungry families could also confront the low wages and working conditions that left them hungry. Local experience became the doorway to understanding structural injustice.
The result was a more public role for Christians: not to make democracy Christian, Ott stressed, but to take part in democratic life through collective action and advocacy. The movement took up the eight-hour working day, workplace safety, child labor, and public ownership of utilities.
Ott cautioned against romanticizing these developments. She noted that dominant voices often reproduced white patriarchal assumptions, and some rationalized American imperialism and Manifest Destiny. Members disagreed about war and economic systems, from reformist capitalism to socialism.
Yet, criticism from within, from Black leaders, women, and others on the margins, exposed the movement’s failings and widened its understanding of justice. Critique, in other words, need not mean abandoning a movement – it can help refine it.
Going where AI affects people’s lives
The first lesson, for Ott, is to begin where technological change is already touching everyday life.
Because digital technologies are everywhere, their effects can be hard to locate. Yet they are visible in workplaces with AI-supported surveillance, in industries where automation is changing working conditions, and among farmers and other workers who depend on technologically integrated equipment and systems.
Churches need not wait until every consequence is known. They can go to these places, listen to the people affected, and open space for dialogue. Social Gospel leaders sometimes brought business owners and workers into the same conversation, and churches today can help people at different points in technological and economic systems hear one another. That may mean leaving church buildings for public libraries and other community spaces where people of any faith, or none, can take part.
The role of churches, Ott argued, is not to tell people what to think but to offer space for moral discernment, listening, and reflection. Religious communities are practiced at slowing down, gathering, ritual, and making time for questions of meaning and responsibility. This is a valuable counterpoint to the speed of technological change.
Listening of this kind is also a practice of communication justice – it makes room for those whose experience is rarely heard.
Rebuilding a collective moral voice
Ott also called for renewed attention to the churches’ collective moral voice. That includes engaging technology companies. Even industry leaders acknowledge the need for regulation and voice concern about the pace of development. Churches and ecumenical or denominational bodies can join these conversations as moral interlocutors and as advocates for those affected.
Engagement need not begin at the global level. Local, national, and regional initiatives that bring together churches, governments, companies, workers, and civil society may offer more realistic routes to influencing practice and regulation, just as the Social Gospel itself grew from particular problems in particular communities.
Technology companies may be willing to engage religious perspectives, and churches can help convene broader conversations among governments, companies and civil society. Larger ecumenical bodies can help open doors and amplify concerns emerging from local communities.
Coalition-building was another hallmark of the movement. Despite deep theological, racial, gender, and economic differences, groups worked together around shared concerns.
Similar coalitions are needed now, Ott suggested, across Christian traditions and with other religious and non-religious actors. A participant pointed to multifaith and social justice movements as models. Different political contexts will call for different approaches, and there need not be a single form of organizing around AI.
Do not wait until the consequences of AI become clear. Create spaces for moral discernment, coalition-building, and advocacy now.
For Christians, Ott argued, social justice should be reaffirmed as part of Christian responsibility. The point is not to claim a privileged position in public debate or to expand Christianity but to ask what one’s own theological commitments require. Christians can join broad coalitions without dominating them and without turning advocacy into a vehicle for religious expansion.
Acting amid uncertainty
In the discussion, one participant raised the uncertainty surrounding AI: significant change is coming, but its consequences are hard to predict. Ott said this strengthens the historical parallel. Social Gospel leaders did not know how industrialization would transform society either. They saw concrete harms affecting people around them.
Churches can likewise identify where problems are already occurring, listen to those affected, and begin with small interventions. A local initiative on AI-enabled workplace surveillance, for example, might build experience for broader advocacy.
Another participant noted that an AI system does not decide by itself to surveil workers: people own companies, manage workplaces, and choose how technologies are deployed.
Ott agreed that attention to social sin must not replace individual responsibility. Drawing on liberation theology, she suggested that the two are connected. Structures are sustained by individual decisions and everyday participation, but individuals hold very different levels of power within them. An employee, a company executive, and a technology CEO may all take part in the same system with very different capacities to change it.
The conversation returned to a tension: technology executives warn that AI is moving too fast while the companies they lead keep accelerating. For Ott, this points to economic structures. Executives operate within systems of competition and incentives that make voluntary restraint difficult, which is why external regulation, collective action, and independent moral voices matter.
From Imago Dei to neighbor love?
On the theological front, Ott urged caution about using Imago Dei, the belief that human beings are created in the image of God, mainly to reinforce human exceptionalism. Such claims, she argued, have not included all humans equally and have fed harmful relationships with marginalized people and the natural world. She proposed placing greater emphasis on responsibility and neighbor love.
Moral discernment, now
The lesson of the Social Gospel, Ott concluded, is not to reproduce a historical movement. It is to rediscover a willingness to enter the places where technological and economic change is affecting people’s lives, to listen, to organize across differences, and to connect Christian convictions with responsibility for social structures.
Her challenge to faith communities was clear: do not wait until the consequences of AI become clear. Create spaces for moral discernment, coalition-building, and advocacy now.
For WACC, whose work on digital justice rests on the conviction that communication is a human right, it is also an invitation to make sure the people most affected by AI are heard in the rooms where its future is decided.
Top image: The AI Race by Gloria Mendoza / Better Images of AI / CC by 4.0
WACC Europe’s monthly discussions aim to bring a justice angle to communication and technology’s challenges, and build networks of informed engagement. The next one will be held at 3:00 pm CEST (Paris/Berlin/Warsaw) on 20 October, focusing on Christian national. To learn more, contact WACC Europe.