Axios, Meet Chatbot Jesus: Churches Tap AI to Save Souls — and Time:

A new digital awakening is unfolding in churches, where pastors and prayer apps are turning to artificial intelligence to reach worshippers, personalize sermons, and power chatbots that resemble God.

Why it matters: AI is helping some churches stay relevant in the face of shrinking staff, empty pews and growing online audiences. But the practice raises new questions about who, or what, is guiding the flock.

• New AI-powered apps allow you to “text with Jesus” or “talk to the Bible,” giving the impression you are communicating with a deity or angel.
• Other apps can create personalized prayers, let you confess your sins or offer religious advice on life’s decisions.
• “What could go wrong?” Robert P. Jones, CEO of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, sarcastically asks.

New York Times: Jesus Bot Is Always on Demand (for a Small Monthly Fee), by Jessica Grove:

I spent the last week talking to three different religious chatbots about my struggles and questions — Bible Chat, Christian AI and Text With Jesus. There has been ample news coverage of the concerns about religious artificial intelligence chatbots like these. Some Christian leaders think that they trivialize Jesus and other biblical characters, or may even be blasphemous. …

I didn’t go into this experiment to test the quality of chatbots’ scriptural analysis because, as a Jew with minimal knowledge of Christian doctrine, I can’t make that assessment. … The majority of Americans are Christians or have Christian backgrounds, so I chatted with these bots to get a sense of the quality of their guidance and whether they could genuinely help people in need. You can ask similar questions of ChatGPT or other conversational search engines — I talked to Anthropic’s Claude a little bit about Jesus last week, too.

What makes chatbots so powerful is that they can purportedly learn about us and how to talk to us. Text With Jesus, for example, invited me to “delve deep into the lives of biblical figures and seek answers to life’s most profound questions in real time.” But what I found was far from profundity. …

While I can’t personally gauge the accuracy of the answers coming from the chatbots I used and I haven’t seen data that specifically evaluated these three apps, seven Christian scholars organized by the Gospel Coalition evaluated the top seven mainstream, secular A.I. platforms on how theologically reliable they were. The highest grades went to DeepSeek R1 and Perplexity, but they still only achieved a 64 out of 100 on the group’s theological reliability scale, which compares responses from the free versions of the A.I. platforms with established, historical creeds and confessions.

Still, the perils of using A.I. technology as a tool for faith go beyond banal or incorrect information and even profiting off users’ pain. After a week of sitting with these tools, I think the biggest problem is that, like all chatbots, religious A.I. becomes tailored to you and your own needs and desires — it is transactional. You get exactly what you pay for. When everything becomes about you and your own comfort, there is a risk of being isolated deeper inside yourself rather than pushed into your community, where you might be challenged and driven to grow and connect with others.

While there are benefits to autonomy, I still think this is a net negative. Studies suggest that the main reason religiously observant people have better health outcomes is because of the embodied part of their practice: being with other people, and also part of a larger body of the faithful. As Tyler VanderWeele, a professor of epidemiology who runs the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, has written, “it is religious service attendance, rather than self-assessed spirituality or religiosity, or private practices, that most powerfully predicts health and well-being.”

The other positive aspect of religious practice that is notably absent from these apps is a sense of transcendence or the divine.

Christianity Today: Chatbot Companionship Will Make Our Loneliness Crisis Worse, by Russell Moore:

In the latest issue of The Atlantic, journalist Damon Beres warns about the deceptiveness of AI companionship with the admonition “Get a Real Friend.” His analysis recognizes that real friendship is harder than it seems. But as the major tech companies develop sophisticated artificial intelligence for erotic purposes as well as for friendship, Christians are sleepwalking into a future the Bible describes as hell. The Prophets saw the chatbots coming. They told us where that path leads, and it’s not to freedom from loneliness.

What Beres describes is the exact right combination of societal dangers hitting all at the same time. People are disconnected, with institutions failing and friendships—much less intimate relationships—harder to make and sustain. It is now very possible to rapidly develop lifelike AI companions. That development is led by a small cohort of tech bros who have a motive for profit and almost no personal concept of a what a person is. And as Beres notes, “We are at the very beginning of the chatbot era.” …

The prophet Isaiah knew exactly what draws us to these kinds of promises. He depicted idols—technology constructed by human hands but meant to satisfy spiritual longings—as a form of self-deception. The prophet described an ironsmith or a carpenter using technical tools—hammers, axes, pencils, compasses—to create something that appears to be human (Isa. 44:9–16). The technician takes some raw materials to burn in a fire to get warm. “And the rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, and falls down to it and worships it,” Isaiah wrote. “He prays to it and says, ‘Deliver me, for you are my god!’” (v. 17, ESV throughout).

The problem, Isaiah thundered, is not just that this is an offense against God but also that it fails on its own terms. The thing made with ears, eyes, and a mouth cannot hear, see, or speak. The personal nature of it comes only from the willed self-deception of the idol maker: “He feeds on ashes; a deluded heart has led him astray, and he cannot deliver himself or say, ‘Is there not a lie in my right hand?’” (v. 20).

The church cannot answer this as long as we deny it is taking place. But if we see what’s happening, we can offer something that will seem increasingly strange in an artificial world. We can offer a community gathered around bread and wine and an ancient gospel. We can offer a group of people who differ on the things the machines and their creators tell us are most important—politics, wealth, claims of racial or cultural superiority—precisely because we are convinced that technological progress cannot fix our deepest problems.

And we can offer an old kind of friendship, not just with each other but with God, friendship that a chatbot cannot replicate. One of the most startling things about the Jesus of the Gospels is that he fully knows those he encounters (John 1:48–49) while completely confounding their expectations of him (6:60–69). In a world of sycophantic chatbots, Christ disturbs what we want enough that we can find in him what we need: one who tells us the truth—one who is, in fact, the truth.

The church is not ready for the chatbot-companion revolution. It will make loneliness and disconnection worse. We should be ready for that world, ready with a radical counter-vision. We can say, “What a friend we have in Jesus” and really know what that means.

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