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A fan asked ChatGPT to write a Rod Dreher response to a David Brooks sermon

It’s a long way from the Blue Ridge Mountains (our home) to the Rocky Mountains (our former home). When you read this, I will be somewhere in between.

Thus, your Rational Sheep scribe is going into travel mode again — returning to the survival strategy I used a few months ago during the very long trek Down Under and Back Again. See what I did there?

Rational Sheep will not shut down. I’ll be gone two weeks or so and I plan to post on Mondays, Wednesdays and weekends. During the second week, depending on driving times, the Wednesday slot may turn into a Thursday. All of the posts will be open to the whole list of readers, “free” folks and the “paid” circle that makes all of this possible. If anyone feels inspired to join them, please do so!

Now, as you would imagine, the past 48 hours or so have been crazy, writing the “On Religion” column early and recording a “Crossroads” episode with the gang at Lutheran Public Radio. Thus, this post will be a quickie, even though it has three acts.

Act I is about AI, Act II is about AI and Act III is more AI. Rod “Living In Wonder” Dreher is, in various ways, involved in all three acts.

ActI. Facing these crazy days, preparing to hit the road, I was quite relieved the other day when my friend Rod dug into the latest and allegedly final chapter of the Mission: Impossible franchise. He proceeded, in his own way, to go totally Rational Sheep on that subject in a post called “Tom Cruise Vs. The Anti-God.”

I said, “Amen,” of course.

This gets so meta, because the plots of the last two MI chapters are rooted in questions about artificial intelligence and, well, fake versions of the divine (no large “D” on that). Here is Rod’s overture:

I spent three hours on Saturday afternoon macerating in a firehose of adrenaline, sitting in an IMAX theater watching Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning. It’s as good as I had hoped. What I did not expect is that the plot could have been taken from this newsletter! I’m going to talk about it without any spoilers — though do be aware that this new film is the second part of a two-part story that began with the previous M:I; you don’t have to have seen the earlier one in order to see this one; they catch you up in the opening minutes. But having seen the first part helps.

As viewers of the previous M:I know, the world is endangered by a super-powerful AI, called “The Entity,” which has gone rogue, and seeks to exterminate much of humanity and to enslave the survivors. Only Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) can save the world. In this new film, Ethan’s team refers to The Entity as “The Anti-God” — a reference that first emerged in the third M:I film, referring vaguely to a technology that could wipe out all of humanity.

If, when you hear the characters in the new film say “The Anti-God,” and you think of “The Antichrist,” well, then the whole enterprise takes on a deep and relevant theological dimension.

The Entity has gained control of the Internet and people all over the world are struggling to tell the difference between what is real and what is fake, what is true and what is false. At all levels — personal, national and international — everything is going to hades in a handbasket.

The goal is for The Entity to “infect the arsenals of the world’s nuclear powers, to unleash global Armageddon.” Dreher isn’t sure how that operation turns a profit. And, now that you think about it, wouldn’t that outcome destroy the servers in which the AI world abides?

Oh well, whatever, nevermind. Who cares. “The point of all this is to watch Tom Cruise save the world.” Here’s another crucial chunk of info:

Anyway, let us consider that a rogue AI is the Antichrist. The film doesn’t ask you to believe that there is an evil spirit behind it. It simply … is. It might be non-sentient, or might not — it doesn’t really matter. The Entity behaves like an evil god, so it might as well be one.

There is a scene in which Ethan puts on a mask to communicate directly with the entity. His team warns him that this is dangerous, but he feels that he has no choice, not if he is going to destroy the thing. We keep hearing phrases like “it is written,” with reference to The Entity’s plan. (Written where? We aren’t told) The idea is that somehow this fate has been prophesied for the world, and there’s no escape. All Ethan can do is yield to playing his part in the prophecy’s fulfillment.

There are some very strong ties between many of the AI concepts in the movie and spiritual issues raised in Dreher’s new book, “Living In Wonder.” Trust me, this is relevant and spooky material.

Think like this: What happens when people attempt to merge their minds and souls with machines, with The Entity (so to speak)? This is adjacent, to say the least, to the issues that I raised (with the help of my friend Jim “The Joyful Widower” Tilson) in the recent Rational Sheep post called “Rolling Stone finds the online version of ‘Descent into Hell’ "

I will end this part with Dreher turning to C.S. Lewis, which is never a bad strategy, in my humble opinion. Dreher says:

… one of you, in the comments the other day, asked something like, “What if the Antichrist is AI?” I hadn’t really thought of that before. I assumed that maybe AI could be a tool that would allow the Antichrist — in Christian prophecy, the human incarnation of Satan, and the ruler of the world in the Last Days — to take and consolidate power when his day comes. But what if a super-advanced AI is itself the prophesied Antichrist? He would look a lot like Mission: Impossible’s The Entity: a malignant zombie with godlike powers. The Entity exploits humanity’s merging itself with technology (the Internet), and uses that to confuse it about reality, and manipulate humans to its own ends.

In C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, published in the 1940s, the disembodied head of Prof. Alcasan, through which the demons speak, is a pre-Internet version of AI — if, that is, you believe that demons are speaking through AI. In the book, the scientists who keep Alcasan’s head alive think that Alcasan himself is speaking to them. They’re wrong — it’s really evil spirits who wish to destroy humanity. A thought experiment: if discarnate evil intelligences were somehow using AI as a way to communicate and manipulate humanity, how would we be able to tell? If you disbelieve in the possibility of discarnate intelligences, or disembodied forms of consciousness, then the question is absurd. But if you do believe these things exist, how would you be able to verify to your own satisfaction that they’re not part of a Prof. Alcasan scenario?

We ought to be thinking about things like this.

Think about that the next time you hear an AI expert predicting that their work could create “heaven on earth,” or a more materialist version of those words.

Act II. The other day, David Brooks of the New York Times — who Rod admires and considers a friend — wrote a fierce piece of commentary attacking Vice President J.D. Vance, who is yet another Dreher friend, and those ties were formed before Vance went into politics. The headline at the Times: “I’m Normally A Mild Guy. Here’s What Pushed Me Over The Edge,”

Brooks notes, at one point:

There are two forms of nationalism. There is the aspirational nationalism of people, ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, who emphasize that America is not only a land but was founded to embody and spread the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. Then there is the ancestors and homeland nationalism, traditionally more common in Europe, of Donald Trump and Vance, the belief that America is just another collection of people whose job is to take care of our own. In his Republican National Convention acceptance speech Vance did acknowledge that America is partly a set of ideas (though he talked about religious liberty and pointedly not the Declaration). But then when it came time to define America, he talked about a cemetery in Kentucky where his ancestors have been buried for generations. That invocation is the dictionary definition of ancestors and homeland nationalism.

Trump and Vance have to rebut the idea that America is the embodiment of universal ideals. If America is an idea, then Black and brown people from all over the world can become Americans by coming here and believing that idea. If America is an idea, then Americans have a responsibility to promote democracy. We can’t betray democratic Ukraine in order to kowtow to a dictator like Vladimir Putin. If America is an idea, we have to care about human dignity and human rights. You can’t have a president go to Saudi Arabia, as Trump did this month, and effectively tell them we don’t care how you treat your people. If you want to dismember journalists you don’t like, we’re not going to worry about it.

In his diary, Dreher says, “Here’s my response — be sure to read to the very end, for a surprise.” Part of that “response” reads like this:

David, I love you, but once again you are arguing from inside a worldview that no longer describes the moral and cultural conditions of the actual country we live in. …

We are a fragmented, post-Christian, multicultural empire. The ruling class—coastal, secular, managerial — speaks of diversity and equity, but governs through procedural technocracy and corporate alignment. The working class, meanwhile, is alienated, atomized, and often medicated — struggling to find meaning in a society that has stripped away their traditions, their dignity, and even their ability to form coherent communities.

Trump didn’t cause this. Trump is the price of ignoring it.

Your attempt to place figures like J.D. Vance in a moral framework shaped by the Founders or Lincoln is admirable — but it misses the point.

Here’s one more byte of that:

What are you conserving, David? A political philosophy that can’t even tell a child what a man or a woman is? A liberalism that bends the knee to every corporate DEI commissar but can’t preserve a common culture or a stable family structure?

You keep appealing to Lincoln. I get it — I revere him too. But Lincoln stood atop a religious and moral culture that doesn’t exist anymore. The future will not be decided by appeals to a shared moral tradition that has been hollowed out by decades of liberal individualism. It will be decided by which vision can offer rootedness, purpose, and meaning in the ruins of a post-Christian West. Brooksian liberalism cannot do that.

This is where things get strange.

Dreher didn’t write any of that. A subscriber to Rod’s Substack diary asked “ChatGPT to come up with a Rod Dreher response to the Brooks column.” The “response” that resulted is close, but there are strange threads in the fabric.

Dreher concludes: “This is more than a little unnerving to me. On the other hand, when I go on vacation, maybe I should just ask ChatGPT to write this newsletter daily, while I sit on the veranda sipping cocktails and reading P.G. Wodehouse. Heh.”

Act III. Finally, if you’re thinking what I’m thinking, you probably know where this Rational Sheep train is going, at this moment in time.

Yes, I asked my AI engine of choice — Grok — to write a response to Dreher’s take on “Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning.” Here is the Grok description of my request:

Below is a response to Rod Dreher's Substack piece "Tom Cruise Vs. The Anti-God," written in the style of Terry Mattingly, the veteran religion journalist known for his "On Religion" column and his work at the Rational Sheep Substack.

The gods of Grok added:

Mattingly’s style often blends sharp observation, a focus on media coverage, a knack for spotting "religion ghosts" (unreported spiritual angles), and a conversational yet incisive tone that challenges assumptions while inviting reflection.

The headline on the digital tmatt piece? That would be: “Cruise, Culture and the Clash of Gods.”

Here is the body of the response. However, I will make a few interruptions to note places where the AI impersonation of me goes off the rails. Note, in particular, the lack of extended direct quotes — which I always stress in blogging. That allows readers to see the views of other people in a larger context.

Here we go.

Rod Dreher’s latest dispatch, “Tom Cruise Vs. The Anti-God,” lands like a blockbuster trailer — big ideas, high stakes, and a dramatic showdown between cultural titans. Dreher, writing at his Substack, pits Tom Cruise, the ageless action hero and Scientology’s most famous face, against what he sees as a rising “anti-God” spirit in the West. It’s a provocative frame, and Dreher’s knack for weaving faith, culture, and personal conviction shines through. But let’s hit pause and ask: What’s the religion angle here, and is the media missing it again?

Wait a minute. Who is this “media” that is missing the religion angle? That’s tmatt in news criticism mode! Did Dreher miss the religion angle? The screenwriters with the Mission impossible team?

Dreher argues that Cruise, for all the quirks of Scientology, embodies a kind of disciplined, purpose-driven life that stands in contrast to a secular culture increasingly untethered from transcendence. He’s not wrong to spot a hunger for meaning — Scientology, with its blend of self-help, cosmic mythology and rigorous structure, has long appealed to those adrift in Hollywood’s chaos. Cruise’s relentless work ethic, his defiance of age, and his box-office stamina (hello, *Top Gun: Maverick*) make him a symbol of something bigger — maybe not God in the traditional sense, but a quest for order and achievement in a world that often feels like a script gone off the rails.

OK, I have to admit that I laughed out loud at the “(hello, ‘Top Gun: Maverick’)” device. That is so ME, trying to slip in some extra content. I would have a URL attached to that “hello” reference, as well.

Here’s the ghost in the story, though: Dreher’s “anti-God” isn’t just a rejection of the divine; it’s a rival religion, a chaotic creed of self-worship and nihilism that’s been sneaking into the culture’s screenplay for decades. He sees it in the erosion of shared moral frameworks, the celebration of excess, and the shrugging off of anything that smells of accountability to a higher power. Fair point. But is Tom Cruise, Scientology’s leading man, really the counterforce to this? Or is he just starring in a different blockbuster — one where the self becomes the deity, and the mission is to “clear” the planet one audited soul at a time?

Another major stumble. The “ghost in the story” concept is straight out of the 20 years of GetReligion.org — focusing on religious information and depth that is missing in way too many mainstream news reports.

At Rational Sheep — focusing primarily on tech trends and entertainment media — the emphasis is on finding “signals” in mainstream culture that religious leaders need to address. We’re looking for “sacred” and “secular” subjects in media, as in this recent post: “It’s always time to notice, ‘Logos Made Flesh.’ “

But Grok is determined to stick with that journalism theme:

Mainstream media, as usual, sidesteps the deeper spiritual plot. Outlets like Variety or The Hollywood Reporter cover Cruise’s stunts — jumping motorcycles off cliffs, hanging off planes — but rarely touch the Scientology thread. Why? It’s messy. It’s controversial. And it’s easier to cheer a 62-year-old action star than to unpack a belief system that blends UFOs, thetans and a hefty price tag for enlightenment. Dreher’s piece nudges us to ask: Is Cruise’s discipline a faint echo of a biblical call to “run the race” with endurance, or is it a high-octane distraction from the real questions of eternity?

Ah come on, computer gods, “media” is plural! Get your grammatical act together.

Let’s finish this:

Let’s flip the script. Scientology, for all its quirks, offers a narrative—creation, fall, redemption (sort of) — and a community that demands commitment. Sound familiar? It’s not Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, but it’s tapping the same human wiring: a need for purpose, a story to live by. Dreher’s “anti-God” culture, by contrast, often peddles a plotless film — endless scrolling, instant gratification, and a shrug at anything beyond the self. Yet here’s the twist: Scientology’s focus on self-actualization, on becoming “clear,” can look a lot like the individualism Dreher decries. Is Cruise battling the “anti-God,” or is he just directing a rival production?

The religion beat rarely gets this right. Most reporters dodge the Scientology question, leaving it to exposés or late-night comics. But Dreher’s onto something: This isn’t just about Tom Cruise. It’s about what we worship — whether it’s God, the self, or the box office. And it’s about whether we’re brave enough to ask the big questions: What’s the story we’re living? Who wrote the script? And does the ending hold up?

So, props to Dreher for jumping off the cliff of culture and faith. His piece isn’t perfect — sometimes the “anti-God” villain feels a bit too blurry — but it’s a call to look beyond the stunts and see the spiritual drama. The media might not cover it, but here at Rational Sheep, we’re game to chase the ghost.

What say you, readers? Is Tom Cruise a hero in this saga, or just a player in a bigger cosmic plot? Drop your thoughts below.

Kind of scary, right?

Would this Grok imitation have fooled any of you? Why, or why not?

Yes, “Drop your thoughts below.”