Two years after the release of Megan Basham’s Shepherd’s For Sale, the pattern of religious NGOs selling out to dark money to promote political agendas still holds. This month, The Gospel Coalition’s Luddite behavior was exposed as being part of a propaganda campaign to fearmonger about AI, so that industry leaders can ultimately profit from regulation.
Effort News combines the power of AI with investigative journalism and published AI Safety Donors Paid Religious NGOs $3.3M for Statements on AI earlier this month.
In 2024, Trump defeated Harris to succeed Biden as president. AI Safety’s largest donors — Dustin Moskovitz and the now-convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried — were among Biden’s largest donors. Suddenly, they were on the outside looking in. Trump rejected the movement’s AI doomsday prophecies and repealed Biden’s Executive Order on AI.
With enough funding, they found a surprising solution — religious NGOs. Since 2025, AI Safety donors put $3.3 million into churches, seminaries, faith networks and religious-affinity groups. It paid for pronouncements: declarations, red lines, and a “Magna Carta of AI.”
The AI Safety movement descends from rationalist and new atheist roots. Its core belief — that AI will literally end all human life — often draws comparisons to doomsday cults like Heaven’s Gate. Yet with enough funding, some churches are willing to square that belief with the Book of Revelation.
They point out how ultra-liberal atheist donors are behind much of the dollars raising panic about AI and have turned to religious NGOs to accomplish their purposes. While they frame this as a surprise, the history of using religious NGOs for fraudulent doomsday scenarios is rich with the example of climate change, whereby the world will end in 6 years. AI hysteria is the new climate change.
Future of Life Institute (FLI) is the main player discussed as their activity in 2025 and 2026 has increased dramatically with religious NGOs.
Grant descriptions leave no doubt about what FLI paid for: public statements about AI.
The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America took $105,000 from FLI. They credit their “red lines on AI” to “a grant from the Future of Life Institute.”2 The Gospel Coalition received $200,000 for a podcast called “Silicon Spiritualities,” without disclosing their sponsor. They later barred their writers from using AI to research, write, or edit. The World Council of Churches took $100,000 to write its “red lines.” The Mormon nonprofit Faith Matters took $299,000 for a “Magna Carta of AI.”
The Gospel Coalition published the Silicon Spiritualities podcast hosted by Chris Watkin, a Keller Center fellow. The podcast gets hardly any views. But FLI is not concerned about whether their propaganda succeeds or not, just that it’s there.
The Gospel Coalition’s $200,000 haul is the highest of any Protestant organization in 2026, second overall to the Impact Academy, the only Hindu organization to receive a grant. In distant 3rd are the Muslims, in 4th, the Mormons, and in 5th, the Eastern Orthodox. The article expands on FLI’s foothold with the Catholics and their ability to have influenced Pope Leo XIV.
Brett McCracken’s Our Line in the Sand on AI: TGC’s Missional Opportunity is the deliverable statement from The Gospel Coalition. Effort News points out that The Gospel Coalition did not disclose that the article was paid for by FLI. In its red line, The Gospel Coalition opposes AI writing, editing, and even research. The quality of their work reflects this.
FLI is using its newfound connections to support the business disputes of Anthropic, an AI-safety-linked company. In March, Boyd co-signed a Catholic theologians’ brief backing Anthropic in its dispute with the Department of War. Anthropic brought him to the company’s two-day summit with fifteen Christian thinkers.7 Then, on 25 May, Pope Leo XIV presented Magnifica Humanitas, the first encyclical devoted to artificial intelligence, and the lay speaker beside two cardinals in the Synod Hall was Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic.
The Keller Center
Gavin Ortlund would likewise sound the AI doomerism alarm with a call for regulation. Having read Revelation, it’s quite obvious that the world will not end by an LLM-powered Terminator. LLMs are fancy chatbots that can execute programs. They are hardly agentic and are not even close to sentience.
Gavin Ortlund peddled the climate change narrative, so this is a natural step for his liberalism. He is also a part of The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics as an inaugural member, which put on a seminar with a curriculum on AI.
Meanwhile, the biggest benefactors of this manufactured moralfagging is Anthropic, an industry leader clinging to its precarious reputation as a frontrunner ahead of its IPO. It stands to benefit greatly from regulation that creates barriers to entry in an emergent industry. In this grand scheme $200000 is a cheap trick.
