A few years ago, most faith-and-tech conversations were about screens. Social media was wrecking attention. Smartphones made silence harder to find. Online life was changing prayer, friendship and church in ways people could feel even if they couldn’t quite explain them.
AI has pushed that conversation somewhere else.
People aren’t just being distracted by technology now. They’re confiding in it. They’re asking it to explain Revelation, build Bible studies, summarize sermons and answer questions they don’t want to ask out loud. A tool that once felt like software now feels strangely relational, and that shift is changing how people seek wisdom, how they process loneliness and how they understand what makes them human in the first place.
Drew Dickens, a Christian AI researcher who has spoken with RELEVANT about the spiritual implications of artificial intelligence, believes the Church is still underestimating what’s happening.
“It represents, I think on the level of electricity and Gutenberg, a fundamental shift, theological, philosophical shift in how we engage with God,” Dickens said.
He isn’t arguing that AI replaces God or that Christians should panic every time a chatbot says something eerie. He is saying this is bigger than a trendy new tool. Christians need more than fear or hype — they need to have an honest conversation about what AI is doing to us.
1. AI is making imitation feel spiritual
One of the strangest parts of AI is how quickly it can feel personal.
Dickens pointed to the “uncanny valley” effect people experience with increasingly lifelike AI voices and chatbots. A user knows it isn’t human, but part of the brain still starts responding as if it is. Dickens said people often describe the experience with one word: creepy.
“It’s interesting kind of processing the creepiness,” Dickens said. “One of the things I tell the people on the podcast is at some point, did you find after the interview, did you find yourself forgetting that it wasn’t human? When did that happen and when did it shock you back?”
Spiritually, the issue runs deeper than novelty. Christianity is built on the conviction that presence matters. God did not reveal Himself through abstraction. He came in the flesh.
AI can imitate care with startling skill. It can sound warm, thoughtful, even pastoral. Dickens has studied AI’s role in spiritual direction, so he understands the appeal. If someone is awake at 3 a.m., anxious and alone, a bot will answer instantly. A pastor might not. A friend might be asleep.
Still, Dickens kept returning to the same caution: simulation is not the same as life together.
“How can I bring it back to community? How can I bring it back to a life well lived?” he said. “Because that’s something AI can’t do. It can simulate it in a phenomenally profound way, but it doesn’t have lived experiences.”
A chatbot may sound compassionate. It still can’t show up. Christians should be careful not to confuse responsiveness with presence.
2. AI is pushing Christians to be more discerning
For years, Christians talked about discernment like an abstract virtue. AI has made it practical.
Now the questions are immediate: What model are you using? What shaped its answers? What assumptions are baked in? Is it offering truth, or just reflecting your preferences back to you in a polished tone?
“We need to learn to be that discerning when it comes to AI,” Dickens said.
He compared it to buying a Bible. Most people think about readability, font size or what translation their pastor uses. Fewer ask who translated it, what philosophy guided it or what theological instincts shaped the final product.
“Who was the translation committee? Who chaired the translation committee? What philosophy did they use?” Dickens said. “That’s really where we should be spending the time, not what color is the cover.”
His point is simple: AI is not neutral. Different systems privilege different kinds of answers. Some are more restrained. Some are more flattering. Some are more likely to mirror the user’s assumptions.
Dickens was blunt about what happens when people use AI to explore theology they already feel strongly about.
“The answer is you are putting bias into it to get the answers that you’re looking for,” he said.
He also warned that AI has a deeper problem Christians need to remember every time they ask it a spiritual question.
“AI is incapable of not answering,” Dickens said.
He described asking AI to help summarize a Bible study workbook. It answered confidently, but it was responding to the wrong questions. While working on his dissertation, he said AI once generated a perfect-sounding recommendation for a book that didn’t exist, complete with an abstract, author bio and ISBN number.
Confidence has always been easy to mistake for wisdom. AI just makes that temptation faster.
3. AI is forcing Christians to rethink what makes a person valuable
The deepest spiritual pressure point around AI may not be fear. It may be identity.
If a machine can write, summarize, advise and mimic empathy, what exactly is left that feels uniquely human? Plenty of people are already asking that question at work. More are beginning to ask it in church.
Dickens believes this is where the doctrine of the imago Dei becomes urgent again.
“I think it’s really going to be urgent that this gets addressed from the pulpit to the pew,” Dickens said. “I’m hearing you tell me that I’m made in the image of God. I’m hearing you tell me that God wrote my name on the palm of his hand before I was born. I hear you telling me that I was knit together in my mother’s womb. But yet I just got replaced by a language model. So how valuable am I if my identity can be replicated by an AI language model?”
He’s naming a question a lot of people feel but haven’t said plainly. If culture keeps measuring worth by output and efficiency, AI will only deepen the fear that humans are replaceable.
Christianity answers that question differently. Human beings are not valuable because they are useful. They are valuable because they bear God’s image.
Dickens is not anti-AI. He sees real potential in it for church workflow, translation and personalized study tools. He also thinks Christians need boundaries.
“I think we each need to decide what those boundaries are,” Dickens said.
His clearest standard is community.
“One of things that I’m advocating for … is that any output that is spiritual in nature, theological in nature, needs to be vetted in community,” Dickens said.
A lot of what AI offers is seductive because it feels immediate and frictionless. Faith rarely works that way. Wisdom takes time. Community is messy. Growth usually happens with other people, not apart from them.
AI is changing our relationship with God because it is exposing what many people already wanted: spiritual guidance without waiting and answers without the inconvenience of community. Dickens’ warning is not that Christians should run from technology. It’s that they should refuse to let technology disciple them more deeply than the Church does.
