Complexified

Latest Episodes:

The “Pastors In Name Only”: The New (Old) Fight Over Who Counts As Christian Aug 03, 2026

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Why Democratic pastors are being attacked for their faith, not merely their politics.

Pastors, seminarians and other faith leaders are running for office as Democrats across the country. Their campaigns are making progressive Christianity newly visible—and prompting opponents to challenge not only their politics, but their legitimacy as Christians.

RNS national reporter Jack Jenkins joins Amanda to examine James Talarico’s rise, attacks involving a “Satanist wedding” and biblical inerrancy, and the theological dispute between Raphael Warnock and Mike Johnson over Matthew 25. Do these candidates represent a durable religious political force, or are they a temporary reaction to Trump?

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Data Centers, Dark Money: The Interfaith Group That Won't Disclose Anything Jul 28, 2026

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Who's behind a mysterious mass-text that invoked faith and economic justice to promote data centers?

A few weeks ago, residents of Prince George’s County, Maryland, received a text message telling them about the benefits of data centers: jobs, investment, economic opportunity.

The message wasn’t signed. It didn’t say who had paid to send it. But it linked to a website belonging to something called the Interfaith Action Movement.

Sounds like a coalition of religious leaders. But the leaders, followers, and houses of worship were not disclosed by the IAM contact.

And the timing was interesting. Less than a week earlier, Prince George’s County had imposed a two-year moratorium on hyperscale data centers. Residents were already fighting over the environmental costs, the economic promises and who would ultimately benefit.

So who was behind this “interfaith” campaign?

RNS reporter Aleja Hertzler-McCain followed the anonymous text to a Seventh-day Adventist faith leader and political consultant with connections in Maryland, New Jersey—and a campaign-finance scandal in Bermuda.

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$438 Million Later, What Does This Faith-Tech Company Actually Do? Jul 20, 2026

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RNS reporter Bob Smietana on Gloo, the faith-tech company chasing a one-stop IT/AI solution for churches.

Nearly half a billion dollars, gone, over thirteen years.

That's how much a company called Gloo has lost trying to build an all-in-one digital & administrative powerhouse for what it's calling the "Faith & Flourishing Ecosystem" of American churches.

A tech company that can handle email & texting, data analytics, web hosting, podcast hosting, IT infrastructure, sermon-to-social video clips, all the way to AI-generated devotionals and study guides. That's just a taste.

Our guest is RNS reporter Bob Smietana, and we're asking:

What happens if it works? What happens when one for-profit company, one whose SEC filings admit it might not survive the year, becomes the back office for a huge slice of American Christianity?

Who holds that data? Who shapes that message? What happens if all of that data falls into the wrong hands?

Check out more here:

Faith-based AI company Gloo faces moment of truth after $438M in losses — Bob Smietana, July 9, 2026

Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger hopes Gloo can make AI a force for good — and for God — Bob Smietana, March 24, 2025

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The Catholics Who Broke With Rome. Again. Jul 14, 2026

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When Tradition Becomes Trouble

On the side of a mountain in Switzerland, in the shadow of the Alps, a fanciful event attracting a small but ardent group of Catholic traditionalists gathered to celebrate the consecration of 4 new bishops…

Who were then promptly excommunicated from the Catholic Church along with the bishop who appointed them.

The group is called the Society of St. Pius the Tenth, or SSPX. It has spent decades claiming to defend the true Catholic tradition against a church it sees as too modern, too open, too willing to change. But this time, by moving ahead without Rome’s approval, SSPX triggered excommunications and pushed its whole society into schism.

And it's not the first time this group has run up against the disapproval of the Holy See.

Today, Vatican reporter Claire Giangravè joins us to talk about SSPX, Pope Leo, the Latin Mass, and what happens when longing for an older church becomes a rupture with the church itself.

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Spiritual Technology for the 21st Century Jun 15, 2026

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Philip Reed-Butler, Black AI, and the future of healing

For the last few weeks, we’ve been talking about artificial intelligence. We’ve talked Vatican positioning, Silicon Valley philosophers, Catholic ethics, corporate power, doomsday language, all circling the question of who gets to shape the future these machines are confining us in.

But most of those conversations begin from the same assumption: AI is a tool built somewhere else, by someone else, to give us answers.

Productivity. Efficiency. Surveillance. Profit.

Today’s conversation starts somewhere else.

Philip Reed-Butler is a scholar, theologian and technologist at Iliff School of Theology, where he directs the AI Institute and teaches Theology and Black Posthuman Artificial Intelligence Systems. He is also the founder of the Seekr Project, a distinctly Black conversational AI project designed around introspection, healing and mental-health capacities.

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The Business of Being Good Jun 09, 2026

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Anthropic, the Vatican, and the Moral Branding of AI

Imagine you're an engineer at one of the most powerful AI companies in the world. You've built a system that can write poetry, pass the bar exam, and hold a conversation that feels startlingly human. And then someone asks you: but does it know how to say it's sorry?

That question — about fault, correction, forgiveness — is not a technical question. It's a theological one. And the fact that engineers at Anthropic were asking it, and that they were asking it of Catholic ethicists and Vatican officials, is the story we're unpacking today.

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Building God, Fearing Doom: The Theology of Superintelligence Jun 03, 2026

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A theology of sorts has been building in Silicon Valley, where questions about digital, biological and spiritual life are beginning to converge.

For most of us, AI means chatbots, recipe tips, work tools and strange little images. But in other circles, the conversation is darker and far more existential. Some believe AI could give humanity powers that once belonged to science fiction: curing disease, extending life, even overcoming death. Others look at the same advances and see catastrophe — even the possible end of civilization.

So which is it? Are we watching the future of medicine take shape, or the beginning of something closer to the end times?

Through it all, religious language is never far away. Religion News Service reporter Hayden Royster joins Complexified to explain the belief systems shaping the AI race — from accelerationists and doomers to transhumanism, superintelligence and the strange theological language running through it all.

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Pope Leo XIV and the Case for Imperfection May 27, 2026

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In 1891, Pope Leo 13th looked at the Industrial Revolution — factories, machines, workers being displaced and exploited — and decided the Church had a role to play.

The result was an encyclical: Rerum Novarum, translated as “On New Things,” it became one of the foundational documents of modern Catholic social teaching.

135 years later, another Pope Leo sees another technological revolution enveloping humanity: his first encyclical is about artificial intelligence.

The Ethics of AI is not a question for solely for engineers, investors, governments, or Silicon Valley. It is a question for all of us about the human person.

So today we begin there: with the document, the history behind it, and the tension the Vatican is highlighting as we are barreling into the age of artificial intelligence.

technology is building machines that aspire to transcendence, while religion maintains that the divine is already present in fragile, embodied human life

Religion News Service Vatican correspondent Claire Giangravé has spent most of her waking hours with this encyclical and has been reporting on what it says, why it matters, and what kind of future Pope Leo is warning us not to sleepwalk into.

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America, According to Hillsdale May 20, 2026

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Who gets to tell America's story?

Hillsdale College is small by most reckoning, but punching above its weight in influence, with its ethos and teaching saturating all levels of education far beyond its campus in Michigan.

It is showing up in charter schools. In civics curriculum. In state-level fights over history education. In Trump-aligned patriotic education projects. And recently, in Rededicate 250, a faith-filled gathering on the National Mall where conservative Christian leaders, political figures, and Trump allies are preparing to rededicate America as “one nation under God.”

This week on Complexified, Amanda Henderson talks with RNS reporter Kathryn Post about how one small, academically serious, deeply conservative liberal arts college became a key intellectual partner in MAGA’s Christian America story.

Listen to the new episode of Complexified wherever you get podcasts.

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Separation of Church and State Was a Baptist Idea. What Happened? May 04, 2026

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The Baptist preacher (and Texas Lieutenant Governor) who stood before the White House Religious Liberty Commission had a message: there is no separation of church and state in the Constitution. That's a shift...

For two centuries, Baptists didn't just support the wall of separation between church and state — they built it. They famously asked Thomas Jefferson for it. And then as recently as 1960, Southern Baptist leaders argued that a Catholic president would surely subordinate the Constitution to the Pope. This devotion to a secular state was deep. But that was then, this is now...

Baylor University historian Elesha Coffman suggests Southern Baptists have become the very force they feared Catholics would be — a dominant religion using political power to shape society along theological ideals. According to Coffman, the receipts are right there in the historical record.

In this episode, Amanda Henderson talks with Coffman about her recent article, Southern Baptists have become what they once feared Catholics would be, about the winding path from Jefferson's reply to the Danbury Baptists, through the founding of a prominent anti church-state separation organization, through Ronald Reagan telling a room full of evangelical leaders, "I know you can't endorse me, but I endorse you," all the way to Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick declaring the wall never existed.

The question underneath it all: is this hypocrisy, strategy, or evolution?

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