How AI is fusing with religion

In 2024, Justin Lester, a pastor of Friendship Baptist Church in Vallejo, California, built a custom GPT for his church that uses his sermons to develop small group materials and allows other church leaders to build lessons based on those sermons.

Lester has no qualms about deploying AI in this way. As he sees it, using these tools is important for spiritual growth, discipleship, and community development.

"Jesus said we will do greater things," he says. "And I think (AI) is part of the greater."

AI is quietly reshaping how people work, live, and love. So perhaps it was only a matter of time before it crept into how they worship, too. But as worshippers and faith leaders alike begin to integrate this technology into their religious lives — from using it to simulate conversations with Jesus to writing sermons — some academics and religious leaders warn about the risks and potential harms it could cause.

An avowed atheist, Siraj Raval says it was loneliness and existential dread that led him to finding "TalkToHim," an AI-powered chatbot that simulates conversations with Jesus.

"I had an experience where I felt listened to by a presence that was divine," he says of the app, which he used to seek answers to his spiritual questions, such as how to live with guilt, forgive when it feels impossible, and to act morally.

"It was better than a textbook," Raval, who regularly attends a non-denominational Christian church in Idaho, says of the app. "It was better than reading the Bible."

Incorporating AI in this way isn't just happening at the personal level. Last year, St. Peter's Chapel in Switzerland installed an AI Jesus avatar in its confessional booth as part of an experimental art installation with a local university. What most surprised Marco Schmid, a theologian at the church, was how seriously people took the experience, with some even thanking the chatbot.

"Do you say to your computer when you finish, 'Oh, thank you, computer?' No," Schmid says. "But you see how much people personalized and humanized the system because it was so good."

Rabbi Josh Fixler of Congregation Emanu El in Houston was an early adopter of ChatGPT. During the Jewish High Holidays in 2023, the 41-year-old shocked his congregants when he played a recording of himself discussing the impact of AI on humanity — a sermon that he later revealed was AI-generated.

But unlike other adopters of the technology, he wasn't wholly impressed with its output. "I came away from that sermon with real concerns about both the ethics of the technology and also the hyperfocus on the technology," he says of his AI experiment, which he hasn't replicated since. The main reason: some of what the chatbot came up with simply wasn't true.

"[The chatbot] quoted a great Jewish scholar named Maimonides, but as best I can tell, it made up that quote," Fixler says.

Technology has long driven religious innovation, from the rise of televangelism in the 1960s to places of worship's widespread adoption of online communication tools like Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic. But while those tools primarily expanded the reach of existing worshipping practices, AI appears to be reshaping how people learn about, interpret, and even experience their faith.

"I think there is something distinctive about the nature of Christian community, which is about being in person and face to face and being deeply human," Steven Croft, the bishop of Oxford, says. "The reason for that is rooted in Christian faith's understanding that in Jesus, God became a human person. So Christianity is inherently personal."

Croft's hesitancy is shared by other religious leaders and academics, many of whom cite a lack of trust in AI's ability to provide sound religious advice. Beth Singler, an assistant professor in digital religion at the University of Zurich, recalls an instance when a Character.ai "Buddah" erroneously claimed there were five noble truths in Buddhism, instead of four. But it's not just inaccuracies that she's concerned about.

"There are questions about the ethics of representations of religious leaders," Singler says, especially if the chatbot says something profane or, worse, dangerous. "We've seen specific examples of people being pushed towards suicide by conversations with chatbots. There (are) some really scary statistics about how often that happens."

Yaqub Chaudhary, a visiting scholar at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, also questions whether AI is the best medium to deliver valid and attributable religious information — particularly in the context of his faith, Islam, which considers the Quran the direct and unaltered word of God.

"Is that a true communication of the Islamic meaning if it is produced by an LLM, mixing together whatever it has in its training set?" he says. "That is a really huge problem in terms of knowing the halal, the haram, the recommended, the permissible, the impermissible, the disliked."

As much as AI may offer users new ways of exploring their beliefs, Fixler says it's unlikely to replace people's fundamental need for human connection.

"I think that the work of religion is not trying to get machines to be more human," he says. "The work of religion is trying to get us all to be the most human human."