The Tool Is Neutral. The Toolmaker Is Not.

New technology is like fire. It can cook you a warm meal, or it can burn your house down. The fire does not care. What matters is whose hands it is in.

I still believe that. I have spent most of my career putting technology to work for the church, and I have watched the same tools that distract people also carry the gospel into places a building never could.

But lately I have been wrestling with a pushback that deserves a real answer. Some argue that form carries intention. A sword is inanimate, but nobody forges a sword to stir soup. Its shape tells you what it is for. So the question is fair: are the platforms we depend on shaped for something? And who is doing the shaping?

What Trailblazer shows us

That question was on my mind as I went through Trailblazer by Marc Benioff, the cofounder and CEO of Salesforce. It is a business book, and a good one in many ways. It is also one of the most honest windows I have found into how a big tech company decides what is right and wrong.

Early in the book, Benioff tells the story of Indiana in 2015. The state passed a Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Many Christians saw it as protecting their faith convictions. Benioff saw it as a license to discriminate against LGBTQ people. Salesforce had thousands of employees in Indianapolis, so he used that weight. He canceled company travel to the state and threatened to pull back investment. Other CEOs joined him. Within days, the law was amended.

Whatever you think of that law, sit with what happened. A software company influenced state legislation heavily in about a week.

From there, the book moves through a list of causes: equal pay for women, racial equality, and homelessness in San Francisco. He also speaks warmly about protecting faith in a chapter, which was interesting to hear. These causes are worth exploring when something is unjust. For example, closing the pay gap between men and women doing the same work is worth addressing.

But as I read, I kept asking one question. What is the anchor? What holds this list together, and what would keep it from being a different list ten years from now?

A compass that follows the crowd

To be fair to Benioff, he would say he has an anchor. Equality is a stated core value at Salesforce, and in Indiana he took a real risk to defend that value. I don’t know what it cost him, but it cost something. He was not hiding behind a poll or his board. That is who Benioff is. Check out “Marc Benioff’s Race to One Billion AI Agents | The Circuit,” and you’ll get why he is larger than life and compelling as a leader.

But if you really listen to where his values come from, it is alarming as a follower of Jesus. They come from stakeholders: employees, customers, communities, and the company’s culture. The secular business is supposed to listen to those voices and act on them. That is the model, and he is proud of it. By the way, the faith community in his company is small; therefore, it really isn’t heard amongst the larger angry crowd.

Here is my concern. A compass set by the people around you works more like a mirror. It will point wherever the strongest voices point, and those voices change. The positions that feel like courage today were unthinkable in most boardrooms twenty years ago, and nobody can tell you what the boardroom will treat as obvious twenty years from now. That is not because these leaders are villains. It is because nothing fixed is holding them in place.

Paul warned Timothy about a time when people would gather teachers to say what their itching ears wanted to hear (2 Timothy 4:3). He wrote to the Ephesians about being tossed back and forth by every wind of teaching (Ephesians 4:14). That is not only a church problem. It describes any institution whose truth the crowd sets.

Followers of Jesus are in a different position. We believe we receive truth, not vote on it. We believe Scripture defines what marriage is, what a person is worth, and what real equality looks like, and that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8). That will sometimes line us up with the culture and sometimes set us against it. Either way, we did not get our position from the culture.

So should we be afraid?

No, I think for now. But we should be awake and aware of this problem. The early church knew this tension better than we do. The Roman Empire was everywhere. You could not buy bread, travel, or mail a letter without touching it. And Rome was anything but neutral. It demanded worship of the emperor; it crucified Jesus, and it would eventually execute Paul. Rome had its own compass too, and it pointed wherever Caesar did.

Yet Paul did not run from Rome. He walked its roads. He sailed its shipping lanes. He wrote in the common language. He moved freely under Roman control, and when it served the mission, he claimed Roman citizenship and appealed to Caesar himself. The gospel reached the known world in a single generation largely because it traveled on the empire’s own network.

Paul never confused the road with the kingdom. He used nearly everything Rome built and bowed to nothing Rome worshiped. When the empire said Caesar is Lord, the church said Jesus is Lord, and they kept shouting it on Roman roads, in Roman cities; sometimes it led to Roman chains on their wrists.

The first Christians were not separatists. They did not retreat to the desert, at least not the key leaders, and wait for the empire to fall. But they were pure. They knew exactly where the line was between using Rome and belonging to Rome. Jesus prayed for this very thing in John 17: not that his followers would be taken out of the world, but that they would be kept from the evil one while they were sent into it (John 17:15–18).

Big tech is our Rome

Big tech’s ideology is woven into everything; it has its own values, and it won't go away until Jesus returns. We don’t necessarily need to flee these platforms. I run a church on these tools, and I will keep doing it. The fire still cooks the meal. But the tool is neutral, and the toolmaker is not. The companies behind the platforms we use have convictions; they are willing to use their power to advance them, and those convictions are tied to a moving target in culture. I need to be aware and awake to what could happen. I can’t be blind to the possibilities. Today that target may leave room for us. Tomorrow it may not.

So build on big tech just like Paul traveled on the big tech of his day. Use the roads strategically and never mistake them for home. Don’t put all your ministry on ground someone else owns. Read what the people who make your tools write, because they are telling you plainly how they think. Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves (Matthew 10:16) as you navigate the culture of our day on these platforms and tools.

Leverage everything. Bow to nothing. And keep one eye on where their ears might bend next.