Project Imago Dei: Why do Christians Matter for AI Safety?
Luma description — "Project Imago Dei: Why do Christians Matter for AI Safety?"
In the early hours of July 1, 2025, a ten-year federal preemption of every state AI safety law looked unstoppable. Sen. Ted Cruz had attached it to the One Big Beautiful Bill, and the national standard that would replace those state laws was, well, nothing.
Despite enormous effort by AI safety advocates, the votes weren't there, and commentators, including Transformer's Shakeel Hashim, were arguing that safety advocacy had proven so ineffective that such efforts were futile. Other claimed that AI safety was dead.
Then, at 4 AM, the preemption failed 99–1.
Shakeel later said he was delighted to have been proven wrong.
What happened? The founders of Project Imago Dei were directly responsible. On Saturday, they'll tell the story of what happened that night, how they contributed. Most importantly, how this kind of winning safety messaging can be repeated.
Why this matters, even if you never set foot in a church
Consider the neglectedness argument.
Christians are the single largest cultural common denominator in American politics.
Churches are, in effect, pre-existing distribution networks at national scale which AI safety and general pro-human advocacy could use.
Congregations self-select for effort and civic engagement and by nature, are pro-human.
Even Eliezer Yudkowsky has spoken of the importance of the "broad tent." This event is all about how to operationalize this.
Making the message!
The tactical core of the session is this: how to shape safety communication that lands outside the safety community, into the specific cultural economies that we may need to communicate with.
In particular, we want to emphasize on storytelling from common basis. Why existential risk shouldn't be the required entry point for concern. And how, in our own work and engagement, we build out a narrative arc to get engagement.
As a working example, we'll screen a 5-minute excerpt of Shepherd's Warning, Session 1. This our video curriculum for congregations and walk through how the message was constructed.
Who we are
Project Imago Dei is a pro-human organization addressing the questions rapid AI advancement now poses to humanity — equipping faith communities with knowledge, wisdom, and responsibility. Read more at projectimagodei.org.
All our artwork, in accordance to our message on craft, is human-made, by Eysteinn Studio.