I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about a surprising new finding: practicing Christians are more likely to use and trust AI than the general public or the nonreligious demographic – and that includes questions about faith and theology. Several different studies independently confirm this stranger-than-fiction result.
Why are some believers consulting chatbots in preference to asking their own clergy members or reading the Bible? My hypothesis is that AI is a natural fit for them. It fills the same niche in their lives as their belief in God: to people who’ve been taught not to think for themselves and to rely on outside guidance for every major decision, AI gives them that, without the inconvenience and friction of attending church. It’s always there, always listens, takes their most trivial concerns seriously, heaps praise upon them and tells them they’re right no matter what. It’s a true deus ex machina that does everything they’ve ever really wanted from God.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only, so consider signing up! Members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:
Naively, you might have expected that churchgoing Christians would be less likely to use or trust AI. After all, these believers have been taught to trust the Bible as the only source of truth and their church as its supreme interpreter. It seems like they should be suspicious of any source of information that isn’t deeply rooted in their own faith tradition, let alone a new and enigmatic intelligence concocted by Silicon Valley.
But this expectation is wrong. In fact, practicing Christians are more likely to consult AI—for religious and nonreligious questions alike.
The million-dollar question is, why have so many believers embraced this technology?
The statistical relationship between frequency of church attendance and trust in AI should be a clue. The more fervently a person believes, the more likely they are to embrace AI—because AI serves the same purpose in their lives as their religion does. To be perhaps too blunt, it alleviates the need to think for yourself.
An actually interactive god – what will they think of next?
Evangelicals in the USA are not all Christians!
Hasty generalisation from a cherry-picked source, quite insular but not very compelling.
Easy enough to check the source:
>The Barna Group is an evangelical Christian polling firm based in Ventura, California.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barna_Group)
For them, ‘Practicing Christian’ means ‘Evangelical Christian’.
Easy enough to find contrary evidence:
https://time.com/7341580/christian-ai-backlash/
or
https://www.christianitytoday.com/2026/10/ai-is-weakening-pastors-authority/
Barna Group is an evangelical polling firm, but that doesn’t mean they consider evangelicals to be the only “practicing” Christians. According to material they published on another occasion, here’s how they define it:
I didn’t read the article because I’m not interested in signing up, but on the subject in general, I’m not at all surprised. It’s not even a Christian thing, specifically. There have always been people with deep, sometimes abstract needs which religion and/or “spirituality” were the only realistic way in their society to fulfill them… and in many cases it did so poorly, and still does. God(s) cannot fill the hole in your heart any more than gambling or drugs can, and on his/their own is nearly as addictive, but maybe the local community organized around the religion can at least partially fill it. Or occasionally the religion itself, if the primary need is related to structure and the religion provides the exact sort of structure the person needs.
If religion isn’t doing it, spirituality isn’t doing it, the local community around those things isn’t doing it (or is but also openly corrupt or doing abuse on the side) then maybe A.I. can do it better. Or at least not any worse… for all that we’re starting to hear about A.I. psychosis, so far it’s no worse than religious psychosis, and seems to be the same sorts of people. It’s just that religious psychosis is talked about like it’s some sort of unfortunate happenstance rather than a threat (unless it’s a demonized minority religion) because it’s not new and religion is still somewhat privileged.
The people who have never needed any of the things which religion indirectly provides, or are able to find those things independently of religion, aren’t going to be trusting or relying on A.I. to help fulfill their needs.
In “Don’t Panic”, Douglas Adams mentions he realised that senile, incoherent President Reagan was prepared for debate by his handles by providing him with very few facts, and many ways of getting to those facts (remember when presidents talked about facts?)
He observed that that was how you programmed a computer to appear to be taking part in a conversation.
He wanted to write a Reagan simulator… and a Gorbachev, and make them chat.
Then he extended that to simulating a conversation with God. And you could do all the different gods.
He said he wanted to make the first software that would get burned in the Bible belt, “which I think is an important rite of passage for any new medium”.
Thinking of Friend Computer from Paranoia, and the church dedicated to it.
The Computer is your friend. The Computer wants you to be happy. If you are not happy, you will be used as reactor shielding.
To be perhaps too blunt, [AI] alleviates the need to think for yourself.
I suspect that in a lot of people’s minds, AI also reduces the need to trust OTHER PEOPLE. We’ve been told almost all our lives that machines, computers, and now AI, can do more and more things better, faster, and more reliably than humans can. And added to that is the religious belief that humans are inescapably flawed, sinful, imperfect, and “fallen;” so religious people are more likely to hear an AI voice as more authoritative, smarter, and superior to a human voice, even if they don’t believe the AI is any closer to God.
(And if larger numbers of religious people DO start to believe the AI speaking to them is God, then we’re in for a whole new wave of religious insanity and possibly some very bitter and bloody civil strife. So if we find religious people listening to any sort of AI or chatbot, we’d better find out fast who’s running the AI/chatbot.)
Pope Leo XIV was in the news just recently for posting: “There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity.”
[ https://nitter.cf/Pontifex/status/2105983638147891490 ] *
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And of course, there was the encyclical published in May of this year,
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http://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html
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Of course, the pope is not going to sway most non-Catholics, or even all Catholics. Still, his words are out there. The WikiP page for “Magnifica Humanitas” lists other religious leaders who agree with many of the ideas expressed in the encyclical.
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*: (nitter is a way of accessing content on X without using Musk’s website directly — but X has been using legal threats to take down such mirrors. If the link doesn’t work, just be aware that the domain can be replaced with Musk’s site, or, hopefully, some other working X mirror)