Freedom of conscience is a central tenet of the American founding. As the nation celebrates its 250th anniversary, a technology now reaching the market forces a question the founders never had to face: What becomes of that freedom when a machine can reach the mind itself?

Indeed, as the founders understood it, the government can bind the body, but the inner life of a person, the place where belief and conviction live, answers to God alone. The question before us today, then, is whether the newest brain-computer interface technologies will still honor it.

This isn’t theoretical. In March, China became the first country to approve a brain-computer interface for commercial use, beating Elon Musk’s Neuralink to market—which he has been developing with initial FDA approval over the last few years.

A brain-computer interface, whether Musk’s or China’s, is simply a device that lets a person control a machine using their thoughts alone. The Chinese version, called NEO, was developed by the Shanghai startup Neuracle Technology alongside researchers at Tsinghua University.

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NEO differs from Musk’s Neuralink in one crucial way. As MIT’s Technology Review describes it, NEO is a coin-sized implant whose sensors rest on the membrane covering the brain, whereas Neuralink penetrates the cortex itself. NEO’s approach is considered much safer and less risky than Neuralink, which is in part why it commercialized first.

Developers designed NEO to help paralyzed patients recover the use of their hands by using their mind to “control a soft robotic glove … restoring basic hand movements such as grasping objects or writing.” In one case, a man paralyzed in a car accident was able to grasp a ball and write his own name for the first time in years.

As a restorative technology, this may be a blessing to countless people who have suffered debilitating injuries. But a good beginning does not guarantee a good end, and discernment requires that we look down the road, too. What begins as an intervention to restore paralysis can, and will likely, move toward far more radical treatments for conditions ranging from blindness to emotional disorders and for cognitive enhancements.

The danger here is precisely what journalist Rod Dreher calls “soft totalitarianism.” Rather than the next threat to our essential freedoms coming from overtly authoritarian and heavy-handed regimes, it seems more likely it will come veiled as luxury, comfort, or greater ease—such as the promises of the smartphone, which have left countless Americans “scrolling to death.”

Consider, for example, how Elon Musk describes the trajectory of Neuralink. Speaking by video to a summit in Israel this spring, Musk pointed to Neuralink’s goal of helping paralyzed patients move again and restoring sight to the blind, calling these “Jesus-level technologies.” Musk also speaks openly of telepathy and of someday granting superhuman vision, and his company’s president has said they intend to implant chips in healthy people by 2030. Thus, the goal isn’t merely to heal what is broken. Neuralink’s aims may be to enhance what is already whole and eventually merge the human mind with the machine.

Musk has often warned of the existential threat of the “woke mind virus” in AI—an issue that brain-computer technology may exacerbate, or equally concerningly, try to solve, given the invasive nature of the technology to potentially access, influence, or rewrite memories and alter psychological conditions. The risks and ethical harms are manifold. As the technology enables people to move and speak using only their brain, it could be used in reverse to capture a person’s most intimate thoughts and even be subject to external hackers.

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This is where wisdom must slow us down. A tool we hold in our hands is one thing. A device woven so deeply into our thoughts that we can no longer tell where the self ends and the system begins is something else entirely. Pair such an implant with an AI assistant, and the line between a thought that is ours and a suggestion fed to us grows dangerously thin.

As Griffith University cybersecurity expert Dr. David Tuffley told the New York Post, “[the technology will] theoretically allow hackers to access sensitive neural data, such as patients’ thoughts and memories.”

Freedom of conscience, when one’s mind is directly mediated by a machine, becomes an increasingly difficult right to preserve, and one that may ultimately undermine our humanity. While the Bible does not speak of brain-computer interfaces, it has a lot to say about the transformation of our hearts and minds (Romans 12:2) through the sanctification of the Holy Spirit. It is the work of grace upon a free creature.

Likewise, when Jesus confronted the lust of the heart, He did not propose a device to suppress the urge. He went to the heart, and His most severe words about plucking out one’s eye were a call to radical repentance, not a blueprint for deleting human agency. A chip that simply overrides the will achieves behavior modification, not a heart change or greater maturity.

As we mark the 250th year of our nation, Christians should be the first to advocate technologies that restore and reinforce our God-given humanity, and be a voice against those that threaten to replace it with a chip.