AI and Faith

Following up on my previous posts:

Tyler Cowen (George Mason), Can AI Help Us Find God? (Feb. 1, 2026)
Mitchell Bahnsen (Westmont College), A Theological Approach to Artificial Intelligence (Jan. 4, 2026)
Jessica Grove (New York Times), Chatbot Jesus, The Church, and Human Flourishing (Nov. 30, 2025)

Russell Moore (Christianity Today), Your Understanding of Calling Is About to Change Radically:

You don’t have to seek God’s will for your career anymore.

I’m mostly joking, but not entirely. We must always seek God’s will. But what we meant by this for most of our lives is about to change dramatically. It’s not God or his will that’s changing but the world as we’ve known it—and with it, the outmoded way we’ve thought about “career.” …

Last week, the essay “Something Big Is Happening” hit 60 million views on X within a matter of days and just as quickly became a focus of controversy. The essay, by artificial intelligence industry researcher Matt Shumer, argues that we are in the equivalent of February 2020, paying little attention to the virus that news reports told us was spreading across China. The world, Shumer wrote, is about to change dramatically—with a sea change of job losses and mass unemployment, especially in entry-level positions and among white-collar “knowledge workers.” …

I have stated and restated my alarm that the church (and Christian ministries and media) seem unwilling or unable to prepare. But here’s one piece of all the ways AI is changing the world that will definitely be the case, regardless of whether the AI doomers, the AI boosters, or those of us in the middle are right: The old pattern of choosing a career and spending a life pursuing it is about to be over. …

We have thought of vocation as a definite thing. That mindset may even be behind a lot of the angst we have about discerning God’s will for a career. We think once it’s decided, then the map is set, and now we just set out on it. Of course, that was never really true. Vocations never go the way we plan. That’s true whether a person stays in the same role for a lifetime or moves from job to job to job. …

As Frederick Buechner famously said, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” That’s still true. But the ways and means of joining your gladness to that hunger will change—probably over and over. The unpredictability was always there. Now it’s just recognizable and undisguised.

Maybe you’re worried about figuring out what God is calling you to do. Maybe you’re concerned about how long you can keep working in the calling you chose years ago. In either case, here’s the good news: You can do nothing about the changes around you, but you can do something about you. …

AI models can write faster than I can, and I’m sure they can turn out a more attention-grabbing article or sermon than mine would be. Maybe the whole point of my calling wasn’t the writing or the teaching but the preparation for some month in the distant future when my roommate in the nursing home tells me he was hurt by some religion and is scared to die. Maybe my whole calling—all these years of grappling with what to say in sermons or wrestling every week with whether some atrocity in the news cycle was worth writing about here—maybe that was all just a lifetime of preparation for me to be able to know what I need to say to him: “Jesus loves you. This I know, for the Bible tells me so.” Who’s to say? If that is the case, could I live with that? Would it all be worth it? Yes. The same is true for you, whatever you do.

But that contentment requires a certain mindset. In describing Abraham’s faith in response to God’s calling, the Bible says, “And he went out, not knowing where he was going” (Heb. 11:8, ESV throughout). That required Abraham and Sarah and all the other heirs of that promise to “[acknowledge] that they were strangers and exiles on the earth” (v. 13). You don’t know what you will be doing in ten years. You never did.

You can’t predict with certainty what jobs the world will need in ten years—and you certainly can’t find one and freeze it in place. But the world will still need wisdom and integrity and creativity and care. As you learn and practice a craft, you can pay attention to what disciplines that you have enable you to do it. Those who thrive will be those who adapt—who can learn, recalibrate, and see their vocations as lives of serving others with their gifts, not just as job descriptions. Maybe then we can free ourselves of identifying with our callings and see that they were always meant to free us to give and serve.

And in that freedom, we might recover something we’ve lost. Jesus said to his disciples, “Follow me.” And then he said it again. And again. And again. In every case, he repurposed old skills for some new task for which his disciples never even knew they were being prepared. Jesus’ calling to vocation was never about a blueprint. It was always about a way. It was never about your calling. It is about who is calling you.

Washington Post Op-Ed: Why The Pope Is Right to Weigh in on AI, by Nuno Castel-Branco (All Souls College, Oxford; Author The Traveling Anatomist (University of Chicago Press 2025)):

Popes throughout history have been the promoters of science but also provided necessary moral guardrails.

Earlier this month, Pope Leo XIV addressed the Holy See Diplomatic Corps, as is customary at the beginning of every year, where he warned of the danger of pairing artificial intelligence with nuclear weapons. It is a warning that speaks to the broader and ongoing debate regarding AI and its potential.

As the pope put it, artificial intelligence “is a tool that requires appropriate and ethical management.” Yet, tech titans Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s increasing permissiveness toward immoral sexualized uses of AI and President Donald Trump’s executive order to curtail the ability of states to regulate this technology run directly against this calling.

Most of the AI debate is about whether it will achieve some of its early promises. But as these cases show, and the pope suggests, the debate should also focus on what it shouldn’t achieve.

Leo’s intervention is a reminder that the papacy has often been a dual force that promotes innovation and tempers it with moral principles when necessary. …

Leo seems to be quite aware of this historical legacy. In his first official address to the College of Cardinals following his election in May, he linked the new “industrial revolution” of AI with his name choice. His predecessor Leo XIII famously created the social doctrine of the church to respond to the industrial revolution. This was done with a positive outlook toward scientific innovation, tempered by the charitable principles of the church. Leo XIII also codified into church teaching the arguments of Galileo about faith and science, namely that the Bible serves “to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.”

Today, popes continue this legacy of promotion and ethical temperament as new forms of science and technology emerge. In the same speech to the diplomats, Leo condemned the modern practices of abortion and surrogacy. But unlike with such cases, he is aware of the positive outcomes of AI and does not outright condemn it. Instead, he has spoken of AI’s “immense potential” and of applying the Church’s “academic strength” to engage with it. If history is any guide, the church will issue many more remarks to guide us through the uncertain future of AI.