AI is coming to church faster than you think

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A take I haven’t written elsewhere

AI is coming to church faster than you think

(via)

A colleague shared a YouTube video with me this week. It’s got 175,000 views, and it’s titled, “Barron Trump Singing "Holy Spirit in Me" |AI cover|.” It’s four minutes of—well, you know what, you too can spend 240 second of your God-given life watching this tripe:

The video isn’t the worst part, though. It’s the comments on what is explicitly labeled a product of artificial intelligence. One after another blesses the president’s 19-year-old son—who absolutely does not spend his time recording vaguely sexual, visibly fake worship videos—for his faith and, as one says, “Wonderful Songs about GOD.”

I know, it’s just YouTube comments. Who knows who these people are—or if they’re even people! Maybe it’s AI all the way down. Maybe a bunch of those views come from people just as incredulous as me. There are ways to ameliorate this story. But there’s no denying that a lot of professing Christians are perfectly happy to get a spiritual experience from AI.

And it’s not just YouTube randos who are chill with this stuff. AI is coming to church in America, and it’s coming faster and with even less circumspection than I would have predicted.

Working at Christianity Today, my sense has been that many American evangelicals are quite skeptical of AI as we now know it. That’s certainly the sentiment we tend to hear from our readers. And more broadly, polling suggests many Americans worry about the speed with which AI is being developed and about the effects of AI-created content, particularly where trustworthiness is concerned. Put together, this would suggest a marked skepticism about AI use for anything involving theology, discipleship, and the like.

Alas, revealed preferences say otherwise. More than half of adults in America use AI programs like ChatGPT already, and I’ve not found anything to suggest Christians or church uses are major outliers. On the contrary, some Christians have begun to discuss how they use or advise using AI in church—and not just for administrative stuff.

For example, here’s a recent post from Josh Howerton, senior pastor of a six-campus megachurch in the Dallas area that draws 20,000 people a week:

The AI isn’t directly writing his sermons, and let’s assume for the sake of argument that his double-checks are wholly accurate. Is it innocent, then? Just faster googling?

I am unconvinced. Sermons are not strings of interesting tidbits, and it is relatively rare that a tidbit can transform our understanding of a scriptural passage, let alone our lives. (Often, we “can’t understand” a piece of the Bible because we do not want to do what it says, not because we need a little archeology fact.)