AI and the Planet: What Two Pastors Say About the Water Rumor

Key takeaways

• Check before you repeat: A polished claim about AI and water can spread fast online, so both pastors urge readers to look at the sources first.
• Keep your convictions consistent: Mesa argues that anyone who objects to AI on environmental grounds should look honestly at the rest of their own screen use.
• Guard your thinking: Whittle's biggest worry is that people will let AI do their reading, writing and reasoning for them.
• Care for creation without panic: Mesa describes people as caretakers of the earth who still know how the story ends.
• Be the church: Whittle sees AI as a chance for the church to do what only people made in God's image can do.

Two pastors who use AI every day

On this episode of the Beyond the Letter podcast, Pastor Adam Mesa sits down with his friend Michael Whittle, founder of Pulpit AI and now VP of AI at Subsplash. Pulpit AI began as a tool for churches, and Mesa says his own team uses it several times a week, including for pulling material from past sermon transcripts.

Both men use AI daily and say so plainly. Mesa also says nearly everyone does, whether they know it or not, because search engines, social feeds and even a restaurant's phone line now rely on it. When he and Whittle taught a breakout session at Mesa's church, he says about 90 percent of the room raised a hand when asked who had used AI, including people in their sixties and seventies.

What pastors are hearing

Whittle spends much of his time with pastors, and he says their questions have changed. At first they asked how to use AI to work more efficiently. Now they want to know what it is doing to their people, to jobs and to the environment. He recalls that early on some people called what he was building demonic, and he thinks that reaction has faded while the deeper worries have grown.

The two also talk about how tangled the conversation has become. Whittle points to the trillions of dollars going into AI infrastructure, to company leaders who warn of danger while preparing to go public, and to a debate that has turned political. In his words, it is hard to know up from down once something gets politicized. Mesa adds that he does not expect individual CEOs to supply the moral limits on their own. He thinks voters need to support ethical and criminal regulation, especially against scams, stolen voices and pornography.

The worry about losing our minds

When Mesa asks Whittle for his own concerns, the answer is about people. Whittle describes studies suggesting that younger generations are getting their dopamine from screens, and he fears we will hand off the work of thinking. As he put it, "my fear is that we stop, like, reading and writing and talking to each other."

He shares one response from a pastor he knows in New Zealand, Joel Milgate, whose teaching team decided that preachers under 35 cannot use AI in sermon prep at all. The reasoning is that they have not yet developed their voice or their way around the text. Whittle adds that a chatbot tends to affirm whatever we bring to it.

Mesa describes the rules he keeps. He compares AI to a calculator that figures a 20 percent tip, which raises no ethical question, and to an engineer who cannot explain the math behind a skyscraper, which does. He moves serious conversations with critics onto a call or a voice memo instead of a back-and-forth by email. At home he makes his young sons order their own food at restaurants, and if they refuse, they wait until they are home to eat. His reasoning: "those that have a leading edge will be people that can still communicate, people that can still reason."

Whittle notes that the same shift may be good news for people who work with their hands. He mentions his brother-in-law, a union welder in Reno who has work lined up for years, and says people who can think, create and build may be in demand.

Is AI draining the water supply?

The conversation grew out of a rumor Mesa's team kept meeting over about 90 days, mostly from Gen Z commenters who copied and pasted the same polished statement under anything AI-generated. The claim was that AI is using up water supplies, with one image said to take a liter of water to cool. Mesa says his own research found that figure untrue, and he offers a challenge: if you truly believe this, show him a flip phone, since Google, Instagram and TikTok all run on AI too.

Whittle says he kept a note on his phone with stats and articles, and he offered to send the sources. He read several figures aloud. Americans, he said, lose more treated drinking water to leaky pipes in three days than every data center in the country uses in a year. A golf course uses more in a week than a data center uses in a year. U.S. data centers directly consumed 17 billion gallons in 2023, which he put at 0.3 percent of the public water supply. He also said many data centers sign contracts to pay for their own power, so some cities see a financial benefit.

Neither man says AI costs the planet nothing. Whittle says plainly that it does use water, and Mesa grants that it likely has some environmental impact. They also raise the possibility of influence campaigns. Whittle cited a research firm he described as having documented ties to China and credited with helping block or delay about 24 billion dollars in U.S. data center investment. The two say they cannot assume everything online is what it claims to be, so readers who want to weigh these claims should check the sources themselves.

Mesa adds a point about consistency. Innovation has always affected the planet, he says, and people have usually responded with regulation or better methods. If you want to help people without clean water, he says, you can give to feed and serve them today. He also says: "don't presume your conviction on other people until you believe it to be true."

How a Christian can hold this

Near the end, Mesa asks what changes when the question is put in a Christian frame. He says he is not afraid of AI ending humanity, because he is a Bible-believing Christian and knows the story ends with Christ reigning. He points to Genesis, where people are given creation to take care of, so he does not think we should ruin it carelessly. He also points to Revelation, where God remakes the earth, and he believes sin is behind the decay in both humanity and creation.

He does not draw a lazy conclusion from that. Knowing the earth will be remade, he says, is no reason to toss a wrapper out the car window, and it is no reason to give up electricity either. He thinks Christians need to talk openly about where the line sits with AI, and how it could become something we worship.

Whittle agrees, adding that he does not believe a machine can bear the image of God. He says: "A machine can't pray for people." It also cannot lay hands on the sick or give the sacraments, and he sees people bringing paper Bibles back to church as a small sign of what is happening. He calls this "the greatest time in the world to be a Christian," and says that if AI gives the church a greater chance to be what it is meant to be, he thinks the church is in a good spot.

He closes with a story from a pastor he met, in which a senior executive at a major AI company, a Christian for about four years, has given 75 million dollars to his church over three years. Whittle does not name the person or the church, and he draws a modest lesson: fear can make us miss opportunity.

What this means for you

You do not have to pick between panic and cheerful acceptance. Before you share a claim about AI, click through to the source and ask who benefits when you believe it.

It also helps to decide your own limits. Ask which parts of reading, writing, praying and talking with people you will keep doing yourself. Pastors Mesa and Whittle both suggest the way to answer the machine is to show up for real people, in real rooms, in the way only a person made in God's image can.