These days, in the land of the free and the home of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, the story of the Golden Calf as described in Exodus 32 and Deuteronomy 9 keeps coming to mind.
Exodus says:
The Lord said to Moses, “Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; they have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them; they have cast for themselves an image of a calf and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’” …
Bill Leonard
Then Moses turned and went down from the mountain, carrying the two tablets of the covenant in his hands, tablets that were written on both sides, written on the front and on the back. The tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved upon the tablets. …
As soon as he came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, Moses’ anger burned hot, and he threw the tablets from his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain. He took the calf that they had made, burned it with fire, ground it to powder, scattered it on the water, and made the Israelites drink it.
In this text, Moses tarries 40 days in God’s presence, receiving the Commandments engraved on tablets of stone. God tells him to return to the camp because “the people” have created a new deity, a golden calf. Moses goes, sees what’s happening and in anger breaks the tablets to pieces.
Aaron, who oversaw the calf’s creation, sounds strangely contemporary when he denies culpability, blaming Moses for being absent so long. Aaron insists: “They said to me, ‘Make us gods, who shall go before us; as for this Moses … we do not know what has become of him.’ So I said to them, ‘Whoever has gold, take it off;’; so they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!’”
In the Exodus version, God tells Moses to instruct the Levites to kill the celebrators as punishment for their disobedience, and several thousand die. Moses then intercedes with God on behalf of the rest of the people, who are spared.
In the Deuteronomy account, Moses begs God for mercy; no one is executed; grace prevails. Deuteronomy reports that Moses poured the fragments of the destroyed calf “on the water,” but does not add that the people drank it down.
In Exodus, Moses compels “the people” to drink down the pulverized golden calf they have previously worshipped, expelling the false deity from their systems, literally.
“Today, almost 3,500 years later, millions of Americans are worshiping two dangerous Golden Calves.”
Today, almost 3,500 years later, millions of Americans are worshiping two dangerous Golden Calves.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Golden Calf story
Millennia later, on May 28, 1933, as Adolf Hitler tightened his autocratic grip on Germany, already initiating governmental sanctions against Jews, Lutheran minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer revisited the Golden Calf story in a sermon at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
In Exodus through the Centuries, Scott M. Langston writes: “For example, Jews, as well as non-Jews with Jewish spouses, were disqualified from holding governmental positions. Basing his sermon on Exodus 32:1-7, 15, 19, 30-4, Bonhoeffer challenges the church and its officials to act as the church of Moses opposing the church of Aaron, prophet against priest, ‘the church of faith’ against the ‘worldly church.’”
Bonhoeffer warns: “The church of the world, the church of the priests, wants something it can see. It doesn’t want to wait any longer. It wants to go ahead and do something itself, take action itself, since God and the prophet aren’t doing so.”
Turning to the church of his day, a church beginning to associate itself with the burgeoning National Socialist bureaucracy, Bonhoeffer declared:
Church of the priests against church of the Word, church of Aaron against church of Moses — this historical clash at the foot of Sinai, the end of the worldly church and the appearance of the Word of God, repeats itself in our church, day by day, Sunday by Sunday. Time and again we come together for worship as a worldly church, as a church which will not wait, which will not live from the invisible; as a church which makes its own gods; as a church which wants to have the sort of god which pleases it and will not ask how it pleases God; as a church which wants to do by itself what God will not do; as a church which is ready for any sacrifice in the cause of idolatry, in the cause of divinization of human thoughts and values; as a church which appropriates to itself divine power in the priesthood. And we should go away again as a church whose idol lies shattered and destroyed on the ground, as a church which must hear afresh, ‘I am the Lord your God’ … , as a church which is humbled as it is faced with the Word, as the church of Moses, the church of the Word.
In America, 2026, might we ask, “Are we there yet?”
Throughout its history, the church in this world all too often has linked itself with monarchs, popes, politicians, governments and dictators — ecclesial/political alliances that often used the language of theology to buttress what became yet another Golden Calf approach to religio-political principalities and powers. How often in Christian history have those coalitions utilized biblical vernacular to cover their golden calves of superfluous gospel beliefs and practices?
Medieval grand inquisitors demanded conformity to the Ten Commandments while failing to require them of the leaders of the crown or the Holy See. Those who challenged the “orthodoxy” of such alliances were imprisoned, exiled or burned at the stake by governments both Catholic and Protestant. Dissenting Christian martyrs include the likes of Perpetua and Felicitas, Jan Hus, Thomas More, Balthasar Hubmaier, Felix Mantz, Michael Servatus, Mary Dyer and Dietrich Bonhoeffer himself.
Does such history illustrate that what is now called Christian nationalism has frequently become a kind of golden calf, promising a Christianized society but resulting in a gospel gone awry?
Is AI the ultimate Golden Calf?
In 2026, we surely cannot explore the Golden Calf motif without referencing the presence of Artificial Intelligence even briefly. These days, even some of its designer/controllers, touting the promise of its benefits to humankind, are now warning of its potential dangers, including the possibility of its planetary destruction.
In a Sept. 22 New York Times opinion piece, “It’s Time to Cry Wolf over AI,” Thomas Friedman warns that the U.S. and China, AI’s most powerful developers, “are not being candid with us about how little even they understand the power and reach of the models they have developed, like sorcerers, in their labs.”
Is it the humane benefactor or the ultimate golden calf of global idolatry?
He cites political theorist Francis Fukuyama, who recently observed that “AI is a tool that can be used for good or bad purposes — and at the moment we have few mechanisms for regulating the bad uses other than the good intentions of the people creating the technology.”
Friedman adds that computer scientist Craig Mundie labels AI “a new species. And like a new species, it is already exhibiting evolutionary properties.”
Oxford economist Eric Beinhocker calls it unleashing “Darwin in silicon,” already demonstrating a capacity for “self-improvement, self-replication and self-preservation. When you put those three things together, and their evolution happens at silicon speed, not human speed, you’ve got something extremely powerful, potentially dangerous and impossible to control.”
Suppose there should come a day when a 21st-century Aaron figure says something like this: “I threw a program into the computer and out came this AI.” Will another Moses (or Bonhoeffer) be there for us?
Dear God, we can only hope.
Bill Leonard is founding dean and the James and Marilyn Dunn professor of Baptist studies and church history emeritus at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C. He is the author or editor of 25 books. A native Texan, he lives in Winston-Salem with his wife, Candyce.