Omniscience Does Not Belong to the State

On Jan. 24, 2025, U.S. Border Patrol stopped Samuel Tunick at the Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta and demanded to search his phone. Tunick was part of the “Defend the Atlanta Forest” movement in Atlanta, opposed to the development of a police training center dubbed “Cop City.” He has been charged with a felony for giving a customs officer a duress passcode that deleted the contents of his phone when the officer entered it. Not only is the case chilling because of the aggressive nature of the prosecution, but also because the federal government wants to assume characteristics that are typically reserved for God.

The point of government surveillance is not merely to know everything, but to fundamentally change what we do.

I will confess that the three omnis always gave me some pause—especially as a kid. Omnipotence—the idea that God is all-powerful—was fine, even if I had my doubts. Omnipresence—God’s capacity to be everywhere all at once—was hard to imagine, but I could live with it. But it was omniscience—God’s ability to know everything, even my own thoughts—that gave me anxiety. Most of my fear centered on committing “thought crimes,” essentially. If thinking about committing adultery is the same as doing it, as scripture suggests, then I basically had to keep a pure mind at all times. As anyone reading this will readily acknowledge, this is an impossible task.

What seems clear to me is that there is only one being I would trust, however ambivalently, with omniscience: God. Otherwise, I wouldn’t trust anyone or any institution to be able to know everything, to read my mind. The United States government wants that power and is willing to use whatever means necessary to achieve it.

It may sound like hyperbole to say that the U.S. government is trying to read our thoughts, but our phones are an extension of our minds at this point. In 1998, Andy Clark and David Chalmers first made the argument, dubbed the “extended mind thesis,” that the thinking process extends beyond the human brain and body into the physical environment. Consider the way that you use your phone. If you’re like me, you use it to Google random questions you have throughout the day, plan your trips, and research your anxieties and fears, hoping a Reddit post might have the solution. Our phones have become an integral part of our thinking process.

READ MORE: ‘Brand New Day’ Makes Peace with the Powers of Surveillance

Part of thinking is collaborating with others, which helps us make connections and figure out ways to advocate for a more just society. Authoritarian governments don’t want us to collaborate with others, and they seek to surveil us to discourage us from doing these things. Whether it’s a 30-year sentence for a man who hid zines, or the federal targeting of Minnesotans who protested the Bishop Henry Whipple Detention Center, the Trump administration is trying to criminalize dissent. This administration is increasingly using prosecution as a weapon not simply to punish speech, but to make the average American think twice before engaging in activism.

There has been a steady stream of well-publicized attempts by the government to gain access to Signal’s secure messaging logs, as activists turn to encrypted modes of communication to fight authoritarianism.

As Christians, we ought to be explicit about how our theology offers a different take on omniscience that drastically diverges from how authoritarians understand it. Many Christians have critiqued tyranny as idolatrous because it assumes absolute power and submission, which should only be reserved for God. Calvin put it this way in his Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Daniel: “We ought rather utterly to defy than to obey [rulers] whenever they are so restive and wish to spoil God of his rights, and, as it were, to seize upon his throne and draw him down from heaven.” If Calvin were alive today, I imagine that he would argue that the government’s obsession with knowing our thoughts is an idolatrous attempt to claim attributes reserved for God alone.

God’s all-knowing nature is central to the divine’s singular nature—God is the only being who can be all-knowing. However, authoritarians seek to make this a characteristic feature of their regimes instead of God’s rule. This too is idolatry, and it threatens not only our democracy, but our faith as well. Not only does it attempt to cheapen God, but it makes following God’s commands harder. It is also a perversion of the way that God uses that omniscience. While the government seeks to punish what it finds, God is instead characterized by forgiveness and grace, even while knowing our innermost thoughts.

God’s all-knowing nature is central to the divine’s singular nature—God is the only being who can be all-knowing. However, authoritarians seek to make this a characteristic feature of their regimes instead of God’s rule.

In attempting to become omniscient, the Trump administration is not just trying to punish its critics, but also trying to make it harder to follow our convictions and do what God is calling us to do.

The government may seek to know what we are doing in real time. It may even want us to believe that it knows what we are thinking. But omniscience does not belong to the state, and neither does our conscience. The fundamental truth that we must proclaim is simple: both belong to God.