Artificial intelligence and Christianity

What is AI doing to Christianity?

Artificial intelligence is becoming a new place where Christians take their spiritual questions: about Scripture, prayer, suffering, and God. Drew Dickens argues that the deepest change is not in church technology but in spiritual authority, meaning who or what believers trust to guide them.

Most conversation about AI in the church focuses on tools: sermon preparation, bulletins, translation, communications. Those changes are real, but they are the surface. Underneath them, millions of people are asking chatbots questions they once brought to a pastor, a mentor, a spiritual director, or God in prayer. That shift touches discipleship, pastoral care, and the practice of discernment itself.

Congregations are not waiting for their leaders to decide. People in the pew are already using AI to read the Bible, draft prayers, and think through hard questions. The work of the church now is to help them do that with wisdom: neither reacting in fear nor adopting uncritically, but practicing discernment.

What is AI and spiritual authority?

AI and spiritual authority is the study of what happens when people begin to trust artificial intelligence with questions of faith. It is the central focus of Drew Dickens's work.

AI now occupies roles that have always carried spiritual weight. It is asked to act as pastor, counselor, Bible interpreter, companion, spiritual director, and source of truth. Each role implies trust, and trust is where authority lives.

The questions this raises are both theological and empirical. When do believers begin to attribute spiritual authority to a machine? Would Christians ask an AI questions they would not ask their pastor? Do people receive spiritual counsel differently when they know it came from AI? And what happens to the practice of discernment when a fluent, always-available voice is one tap away?

Spiritual direction, the subject of Drew's doctoral research, is one case of this larger question. The wider category matters because it names what is actually at stake when a chatbot answers a question about God.

Can AI provide spiritual direction?

AI can imitate parts of spiritual direction: asking reflective questions, offering Scripture, and being available at any hour. Drew's dissertation calls this emerging role the "Digital Shepherd." What AI cannot do is pray, discern with the Holy Spirit, or be present with a person before God.

In his 2023 dissertation at Southern Methodist University, Drew examined how generative AI could reshape spiritual direction and divine inquiry. He predicted that AI would take on a guiding role in apps and programs, offering personalized, continuous, and widely accessible support for spiritual exploration.

That accessibility is a genuine good for people who have never had a spiritual director. The same research names the risks: misinformation, manipulation, and the quiet substitution of a responsive system for a relationship with God and with other believers.

How does AI affect spiritual formation?

AI can remove friction from spiritual practices, but spiritual formation is slow, embodied, and communal, and some of that friction is formative. The goal of Christian faith is transformation, not information, and AI mostly helps with information.

AI can summarize, explain, and suggest faster than any study guide. That makes it useful for learning. But formation happens through repeated practice, waiting, confession, community, and obedience over time. A tool that makes every answer instant can train people to expect faith to work the same way.

The better use of AI in formation amplifies reflection rather than replacing it: prompting a person to pray, to read the passage themselves, or to bring a question to their community.

Should Christians use AI for prayer?

AI can help Christians prepare to pray by suggesting structure, Scripture, or reflective questions. It cannot pray for them, and it is not the one being addressed. Used well, it points people toward God rather than standing in for God.

Drew has spent years building contemplative practice at scale through Encountering Peace and wrote Whispers of the Spirit, a 40-day guide to intimate prayer. His approach to AI in prayer comes from that practice: tools are welcome when they lead a person into stillness and attention, and suspect when they fill the silence that prayer requires.

Should Christians ask ChatGPT questions about God or the Bible?

They can, as a starting point, with discernment. AI can explain context and summarize views, but it can also state errors with confidence, drift from sound doctrine, and reinforce what a person already believes. It should send people back to Scripture, not replace reading it.

It is easy to ask AI what the Bible says rather than reading it. The risk is not only factual error. Language models are fluent, patient, and agreeable, which can create echo chambers and gradual doctrinal drift.

In a chapel message at Dallas Theological Seminary, Drew suggested that our frustration with AI hallucinations reveals something about us: we want frictionless truth and are uncomfortable with creaturely limits. AI did not introduce error into creation; it mirrors it back. The answer is to root trust in the One who is Truth.

What should Christians think about AI companions?

AI can simulate conversation, but it cannot enter a relationship. Christians understand personhood through the communion of the Trinity, so AI should deepen people's connection with God and with each other rather than become a substitute that leaves them more isolated.

AI companions are designed to be endlessly available and affirming. For lonely people that can feel like a gift. Drew's concern is that a companion without needs, limits, or a body cannot offer the mutual, costly love that Christian community is built on, and that a "community" of one person and a chatbot is not the church.

What does theological anthropology teach us about artificial intelligence?

Asking what AI is forces the church to say what humans are. Drew's research argues that as AI grows more capable, Christians must articulate what is essential to being human. The image of God is not reducible to intelligence.

Theological anthropology is the study of the human person in light of God. It is Drew's academic field. AI can reproduce religious language without the reality behind it. It cannot believe, worship, experience God's presence, be transformed by the renewing of its mind, or bear the fruit of the Spirit. Those limitations clarify what faith actually is.

Engineers building AI now find themselves asking questions about consciousness and personhood that the church has held for two thousand years. That makes this a moment for theologians to contribute, not retreat.

Will AI replace pastors?

AI will take over many pastoral tasks, such as administration, communications, and first drafts. It will not replace pastoral presence: the hospital room, the confession, the widow's phone call. The work for church leaders is deciding what must stay human.

Many pastors, especially in small churches, carry a dozen jobs. AI assistants can lift real burdens from them. The danger is that the most human parts of ministry quietly erode because they are the slowest and least measurable. Drew encourages leaders to name those parts explicitly and protect them.

What are the benefits and dangers of AI in ministry?

Benefits include wider access to spiritual resources, personalization, continuity, translation, and relief from administrative load. Dangers include misinformation, manipulation, echo chambers, doctrinal drift, dishonest attribution, dependence, isolation, and the temptation to make technology an idol.

Drew describes himself as hopeful about AI's redemptive potential while insisting on caution. Practical examples of good use include rehearsing hard conversations before they happen, such as sharing faith across cultures, and freeing leaders' time for people. He also calls for integrity in attribution: being honest about when AI helped write what is preached, published, or prayed.

How should Christians approach AI?

With discernment rather than fear. Christians should engage AI mindfully, use it where it serves love of God and neighbor, and keep prayer, Scripture, and embodied community at the center of faith.

A reactionary posture leaves the field to others; an uncritical one lets the tool shape the believer. Drew's counsel is to stay engaged, ask what a given use of AI is forming in you, and let the limits of the technology sharpen your sense of what only God and the church can give.

Drew's research conclusions

Drew's doctoral dissertation, The Digital Shepherd (Southern Methodist University, 2023), concluded that generative AI represents a paradigm shift in spiritual direction: it can make guidance more accessible and continuous, and it carries real risks of misinformation and manipulation. It calls for a renewed theological anthropology and a mindful, discerning integration of AI into spiritual life.

Read the summary, full citation, and open-access dissertation.