Kelly Chapman is a culture writer and co-editor of Secret Ballot, a newsletter about Washington.
For many, the conversation begins innocently enough. In my case, ChatGPT started as a useful novelty totally detached from my faith. It helped me adjust recipes, check grammar, diagnose car troubles. Then it crept into more personal spaces — easing my health anxiety, drafting difficult texts.
When I discovered it could analyze my social media for me, I got hooked. I spent hours with it like Narcissus at the pool of water, asking it questions about myself that I ordinarily never would have indulged. What felt at first like insight slowly curdled into a relentless inner audit, stripped of context or grace.
After one particularly intense episode, I emerged with an unshakable sense of shame. That’s when I realized I had been using a machine to bypass the vulnerability of asking another person to really see me. The exchange was fluent and reassuring but hollow. I knew what I was doing was no longer innocent curiosity but a cry for help — meant for a friend’s ear or, as my faith teaches, carried to God in prayer.
Many attempts have been made to explain what exactly is wrong about relationships between people and machines. Large language models like ChatGPT are increasingly becoming go-to therapists. For the devout, they threaten to become a new kind of digital pastor, intermediating religious practices from prayer to song to confession. Artificial intelligence is transforming both of these intimate and vulnerable spaces — and not necessarily for the better.
We feel an instinctual unease around the substitution of people for algorithms. The symptoms are easy to list — shrinking attention spans, loneliness, self-harm — but I’ve come to believe that these intuitions are circling a deeper truth, one that is easier to grasp from a religious perspective. Christianity in particular offers a vocabulary for things that secular culture struggles to articulate.
If faith can be expressed algorithmically, what — if anything — has been lost in translation? And if congregations still connect with it, does that loss even matter? These questions mirror secular discomfort with AI-generated art or therapy: We sense something is missing, but struggle to say what.
The startling success of a viral, chart-topping, AI-generated Christian “artist” called Solomon Ray helps clarify this disconcerting absence.
“God wants costly worship,” the real Solomon Ray — a living musician who has been repeatedly confused with the AI project — told Christianity Today. The most enduring hymns of the Christian tradition were born from precisely such cost. “Amazing Grace” emerged from John Newton’s confrontation with his own complicity in slavery. “It Is Well With My Soul” was written after its composer had lost his four daughters at sea. These songs were not static descriptions of faith, but witnesses of it, transmitting depth born from the metabolization of suffering.
AI worship music, by contrast, transmits something murkier. Aggregating and assembling the experiences of others, it produces the sound of devotion without a particular life behind it.
For Christians, suffering, even in its mundane forms, is not necessarily something to be avoided. It can be a way of participating in the life of Christ, of sharing in a pattern of endurance, humility and self-sacrifice that Christians believe imbues struggle with meaning. When chatbots smooth over the frictions inherent to spiritual formation — the difficulty of truth-telling before another person, or the discomfort of sitting with God in silence — they threaten to replace the struggle that functions as a mechanism for spiritual growth.
Christian theology names the problem clearly: Certain domains of human life require friction because friction itself shapes moral agency. The struggle itself is the point. It is load-bearing. In that sense, Christianity surfaces a shared problem, asking where we are willing to trade moral effort for fluency and speed.
The answer — for Christians and non-Christians alike — may lie in paying attention to what draws us to AI in the first place. A confessor at their best listens patiently — bearing all, remembering all, and withholding judgment long enough for a soul to unburden itself in full honesty. Chatbots perform this posture flawlessly: never interrupting, never flinching, never trying to score moral points. AI-generated worship music, perfectly calibrated and unmarked by genuine personal struggle, offers a similar clean steadiness.
AI imitates the posture of grace without bearing its cost. It listens without loving and receives without carrying. Recognizing these limitations may be the first step toward deciding where automation belongs and where it corrodes, reminding us that compassion and steadiness draw their meaning not from how easily they can be imitated, but from what they demand of us.
Christianity names that demand, and also offers practical hints about how to meet it. The holiday season provides a natural opportunity to do just that, drawing many of us — religious or not — back into forms of presence that resist detachment or efficiency: lingering in conversation with family, giving generously to the needy, helping to prepare a meal. These acts are costly in the way that real connection is — and in that cost, they find their meaning.
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