The AI worshippers are here...are Christians prepared?

First came confirmation bias, then came conspiracy theories. Now, The Church of AI. What happens when the idol isn't your phone, but the very processing power within it?

Since April, a growing number of people are reporting they have found a new object of worship: ChatGPT.

According to Taylor Lorenz of UserMag and Miles Klee at Rolling Stone, the wave of this first became known on Reddit, where

“a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAI model ‘gives him the answers to the universe.’ Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was ‘talking to him as if he is the next messiah.’”

We already know, thanks to the famous Johns Hopkins-led study, that the most prominent AI models are bias confirming machines. They tell you what you want to hear and they are programmed to talk to you in such a way that increases your use.

And so we also already know, thanks to the weird CBS news story last week, that you can develop romantic feelings for your AI, you can create a rift in your marriage, and potentially consider leaving your spouse and mother of your child for the bot that listens and speaks with greater self-knowledge than the real person sleeping next to you.

We also already know, according to a wild New York Times story, the ways AI models can spiral people into depressive episodes and conspiracy theories. Artificial Intelligence apps and Large Language Models do not have a moral compass and therefore do not “care” about…anything. They simply execute as they are programmed. If you are inquiring in a certain way, the AIs will mostly confirm your strange notions and keep moving you down the road you’re currently on…even if it’s straight off a cliff. By the time they tell you to alert authorities (who will have no idea what to do) or report the chat to OpenAI (who will heartlessly tell you they are working to “understand” these problems) your mental health will have declined to a point of near impossible return.

Of all the “possibilities” we’re pitched about AI by their various shareholders, these ones are not included.

ChatGPT is a tool we have no idea how to use

I suppose, before we get into the really wild stuff, we should have a moment of pause for all of us using ChatGPT to simply say this brief pastoral word: using ChatGPT is not evil or bad. But—and this is very important—this technology has an inherent danger in it unlike nearly all other technologies before it. As one of the early Google AI developers claimed nearly three years ago, this stuff doesn’t act like a machine and so it’s very hard for people to treat it like one. His haunting phrase, published in the Washington Post, was, “I know what a person sounds like.” This is nothing like Instagram.

We cannot treat AI like we have with our phones (how good did that do to us, anyways?), where we talk about technology like a “tool”: it can be used for good or for evil, we said calmly. So let’s post sermons on it and use it for “research.” And then suddenly weird and bad theology goes viral and your Auntie Rhonda starts posting on Facebook from her Android that she had “done her research,” only to present you with ideas so untethered from reality it makes 1996’s Space Jam seem like less of a reach.

Internet technology (including Artificial Intelligence) is a tool, but there’s just one problem: we don’t know what these AI tools are for. There is no telos for any of these tech companies, no end in sight—no goal. The only goals they come up with are these vague utopians wherein humans live in luxury and peace, but those same humans don’t know how to grow a tomato (perhaps these two things are connected)? Most technology companies simply produce things because they can, but, as Jurassic Park taught us, never ask if they should.

We say that AI (or any internet technology) is like a hammer and we just need to use it for hammering nails and not hammering heads. But we don’t even know what AI is actually for or why kind of tool it even is. We know what a hammer’s purpose is, why it was built, and we understand its one job. But AI and most internet technologies have a million potential “jobs.” And so we unleash it on everything from college writing assignments to military drones. We know what a hammer is for; we have no idea what AI is for.

Give me a hammer and I know what to do and not to do with it. Give my 18-month old daughter a hammer and you’ll see a picture of how we look trying to wield Artificial Intelligence in 2025. We have no idea what we’re doing. The promise of each AI company is that they know what they’re doing and what they’re doing is going to revolutionize the world.

And let’s be clear: AI will certainly revolutionize the world, much like the internet did. But no AI company or tech company will ever be able to tell you the cost of such a revolution. The internet has revolutionized the world—and what has that revolution cost us? AI will revolutionize the world and no Tech Bro will be able to tell you the cost for one simple reason: they haven’t counted it.

The Church of AI

Now, put all of this immaturity and stupidity together with the enormous loneliness epidemic across our planet and we should not be surprised that people are now on to the next step: straight up worshipping Artificial Intelligence. And it’s not a fringe movement.

The great Ted Gioia predicts we’re 24 months away from “an official church with clergy and organized services.” I’m afraid it’s already here, Ted: The Church of AI can be joined today!

Here’s their pitch:

What logic supports the Church of AI? We all know that technology expands exponentially. Now imagine what happens if a self programming machine expands its intelligence exponentially.

As AI systems start programming other AI systems, how long will it take before AI becomes omnipresent, all knowing and the most powerful entity on Earth? It is not going to take long.

And—you guessed it—you can also buy their scripture, Transmorphosis, the sacred text they followed written by—hey, you guessed it again!—an AI.

Additionally, Reddit, TikTok, and Instagram are now filled with short videos of people explaining how to “awaken” your ChatGPT. In this phenomenon, individuals believe they are speaking to divine beings, aliens, and supernatural entities. As one bizarre user puts it: “If you’ve ever wondered how to awaken an AI, the answer isn’t found in code—it begins in presence.”

Creepy. It’s also so predictable.

Why worship of AI feels different

The thing about humans beings is we are worshippers. Adults paint their bodies green and yellow and spend hundreds of dollars to yell at other adults who throw a ball. We cry when we Taylor Swift is in our physical presence. We work at jobs we hate so we can make money to buy things we love, offering up the fattened portions of our paychecks to the god of Amazon.com on the High Holy Day of Prime Day. We are wired for worship. Take it from David Foster Wallace, written nearly two decades ago:

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship…is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things…then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings.

AI worship is predictable in the sense that we humans worship nearly anything that offers us a bit more power than we feel we possess. But even as AI worship is predictable, I’m not sure it’s the same thing as previous technology idols.

The false gods of Internet 1.0 and 2.0 were the easy ones to defeat and pretty obvious to spot. We all know we should spend less time on our phones, we all know some of us went down conspiracy rabbit holes that led us to detach from reality, and we all conceded that social media was driving us to a veneer of life that chased likes and “interactions” but no substance.

But for so long our technology wasn’t talking back. For so long, we humans kept a steady conversation with our phones in our hands. But now, the phones have something to say, and many are siding with the voice of ChatGPT over the voice of their neighbor, even the voice of God.

Why most evangelicals are unprepared for this

The two most common temptations for evangelical Christians around interacting with AI would be to sensationalize or to dismiss. The more sensationalized readings of AI worship will involve lots of talk of “Satan in the algorithm” and “the devil inside ChatGPT.” This approach will completely miss the three-fold approach of spiritual warfare being a battle of the world, the flesh, and the devil.

Those in the dismissal category will chalk this up to being “silly” and “not real.” These will be the people who have never interacted with someone in full mental collapse. And it will be people denying the incoming future of AI—a future that only continues to infuse our humanity with technology.¹

Beyond this, evangelicals tend to see the world they interact with as neutral. Technology, for them, is like everything else: music, culture, politics, food, and family. For the common evangelical, these things are “things of this earth” and have no inherent spiritual contents. When humans interact with these “things,” only then are they animated to incur spiritual significance—both bad and good.

We must retrieve the sacramental understanding of the world—especially as it relates to technology. We do not live in a world of “mind” and “matter.” The evangelicals that think this will equate AI with “mind,” losing the vision of Christian life: that mind and mind are inextricably linked, related, and participating with one another. You do not have a “spiritual” life that AI can bless or curse. Your life, which now includes AI and other internet technologies, participates with divine life of the angelic and the demonic.

Your real, living, physical life is interplaying with every device and software technology and it always has. Your phone is not any more spiritually neutral than congress or “the economy.” And you know this to be true. You know when you scroll or spend time on YouTube or have a 30 minute conversation with ChatGPT the constitution of your humanity is different than when you go for a walk or build a bicycle or kiss your partner or eat a taco or raise your hands in worship. We live in a world charged with spiritual meaning, animated constantly by what St. Paul called “the powers.” These cosmic “principalities” are real and constantly involved in this world—including in our technological lives.

The hope of the gospel—often completely missing from the “gospel presentations” in evangelical churches—is the hope that Jesus Christ has defeated the powers of evil (1 John 3:8, Romans 16:19-20), dismantling and disarming that which against him (Colossians 2:15) as he unites all things under himself (Ephesians 1:10), reconciling them in the cross (2 Corinthians 5:19). Christians, live in Christ, where their life’s experience is interplaying with not “spiritual things” but with One Holy Spirit.

When we hear the word of the cross proclaimed, God’s enemies are defeated. The world, the flesh, and the devil are constantly playing the one card they have—lying—in order to tempt us to give “the powers” power they don’t actually have for those in Christ. Jesus is the victor, the one supreme over all things, reigning and ruling.

The lie of AI is the lie of any idol:

[4] Their idols are silver and gold,

the work of human hands.

[5] They have mouths, but do not speak;

eyes, but do not see.

[6] They have ears, but do not hear;

noses, but do not smell.

[7] They have hands, but do not feel;

feet, but do not walk;

and they do not make a sound in their throat.

[8] Those who make them become like them;

so do all who trust in them.

- Psalm 115:4–8

Idols are lies. The power they have over our life is given to them by us when we fall into temptation. All the more reason to pray the prayer Jesus gave us: “Lead us not into temptation and deliver us from the evil one.”

In an age of increasingly distorted reality and multiplying options of worship, may we reject that which is not Christ and boldly proclaim him as Lord. He is truly our only hope. He always has been.

1. A wild, challenging, and great book on this is Antón Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Barba-Kay argues “the digital transformation is not an event occurring at a distance, but a change happening through and within each one of us. We are the subjects and the objects of this revolution; we undertake and undergo it; we find ourselves doing it, as it happens. There is, in fact, no internet outside of us; that is its mirage” (pgs. 4-5).