American Evangelicals Long for the Embrace of the Machine God

Pastors using AI to write their sermons. Evangelical thought influencers defending and promoting AI as a teaching or writing tool. Conferences dedicated to encouraging church leadership to adopt AI to manage their congregations. At evangelical colleges and universities, so many students use AI to do their schoolwork that at times it feels like it’s all that us faculty ever talk about. That’s not even counting the Christian universities who are choosing to give every student a professional subscription to ChatGPT and Claude.

Overall, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that evangelicals are one of the most AI-pilled demographics in America. Surveys show that persons who attend church more than once a week are more likely than any other group to report having “a great deal of confidence in artificial intelligence” and that Christians are more likely than others to say that they trust AI with major decisions.

There are some notable exceptions. John Piper has frequently spoken out against pastors using AI. Yet the fact that the man feels the need to spend his retirement publicly railing against ChatGPT suggests that he’s deeply concerned about an emerging trend. When The Gospel Coalition announced that it would not accept AI-written or assisted submissions, they received broad pushback online from evangelical pastors and thought leaders who accused them of Luddism, gatekeeping, and refusing to change with the times.

One might imagine that evangelicals, being theologically committed to the concept of the imago Dei and to the duty of individual believers to study the Bible without relying on intermediaries, would be at the forefront of criticism of a technology which seeks to blur the lines between human and machine. Yet the most prominent Christian critics of AI are either Catholic (Jennifer Frey, Jeremy Wayne Tate), mainline Protestants (Megan Fritts), Orthodox (Rod Dreher, Paul Kingsnorth) or of Catholic-adjacent liturgical denominations such as Anglicanism (Susannah Black Roberts). Why are so many evangelicals rushing to embrace it instead?

I believe evangelicals have embraced AI for three reasons, one political, one theological, and one psychological: They tend to strongly believe in free markets, they commonly hold certain theological positions that have left them without antibodies against AI, and AI promises a new source of certainty in an uncertain world.

Capitalism and AI

First, evangelicals tend to also be free-market capitalists. Therefore, they tend to see technological advancement as both beneficial and inevitable. If a company refuses to adopt a beneficial technology, they will get out-competed by those who do. New technology may leave more people out of work in the short term, but in the long term it will create new jobs while raising society’s overall standard of living.

AI also purports to solve two troublesome constraints on economic growth. According to Baumol’s Cost Disease, health care, education, and housing construction have increased steadily relative to inflation because these fields cannot be automated: one doctor can only see so many patients, one teacher can only manage so many students. If an AI-enhanced doctor can treat twice as many patients per hour, even at the loss of some quality, this could bring down the soaring cost of health care.

AI also purports to solve the social problem of what to do with those left behind by globalization, deindustrialization, and automation, who lack the skills necessary to shift to white-collar ‘knowledge economy’ jobs. Theoretically, AI will allow those with less aptitude for education to do work that once required advanced degrees.

But capitalism isn’t a sufficient explanation. American evangelicals reject the logic of the market in many domains: abortion, gestational surrogacy, fetal stem cell research, pornography, prostitution, and euthanasia are all instances where evangelicals believe the imago Dei should overrule the free market.

Theological Reasons Evangelicals are Uncritical of AI

There are certain theological positions commonly (but not universally) held within evangelicalism (but not within Catholicism, Orthodoxy, or other liturgical traditions) which have left evangelicals without antibodies that might otherwise have given them some immunity to the AI mind virus.

Mind-Body Dualism

As a made up-quote falsely attributed to CS Lewis puts it: “you do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” With the body reduced to a physical sleeve rather than a fundamental part of us, there is little theological basis to object to the merging of man and machine. If the soul is the only thing that really matters, then nothing AI does really matters, as it can’t touch our souls. (Mind-body dualism also lies at the heart of some evangelicals’ acceptance of cremation and opposition to psychiatry).

Individualistic Pietism

A pietist sees morality primarily as a question of individual choice, without systemic considerations. An individual’s will is taken as paramount: it is their responsibility to choose good and their failure if they don’t. Applied to technology, this leads to the position that a tool is morally neutral: the moral issue is in how you use it. Anyone familiar with the debate over gun control has heard this view expressed in the slogan “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” But this can be applied to any piece of technology, such as in the ERLC’s 2019 statement on AI, which states “When AI is employed in accordance with God’s moral will, it is an example of man’s obedience to the divine command to steward creation and to honor Him.”

Rejection of Natural Law

A commitment to the doctrines of sola scriptura and biblical inerrancy have left many evangelicals skeptical of arguments rooted in natural law. They are unlikely to be swayed by arguments that AI violates the natural order of things, or that technology has a telos beyond whatever the end user chooses to do with it. If the Bible doesn’t say that I can’t use ChatGPT to write my sermons, then it must not be wrong.

All of this leads to an antinomian view of art and technology, where objects have no inherent properties beyond their physical materials and all meaning lies in what we attach to them. The only thing that matters is how we respond, hence the concern in many colleges with teaching ‘ethical use’ of AI. What’s missing is any deep consideration of how the tools we use shape us, the virtues and vices that are promoted by offloading our thinking to a computer, or whether widespread adoption is good for society at large.

The Quest for Certainty

The third issue is psychological. Evangelicals crave certainty, even as evangelicalism continues to wrestle with fundamental questions of authority. Here I turn to an unlikely source: the godfather of postmodernism, Jean-François Lyotard. In his 1978 book The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard observed that computers were transforming knowledge into information, and thereby enabling it to be bought and sold. He foresaw that this would lead to knowledge being valued only for its utility rather than for any fundamental truth value, which in turn would lead to a loss of social consensus around what was true.

With enough foresight to recognize that everyone thinking they are right about everything all the time is not a recipe for a functional society, Lyotard spent the last pages of The Postmodern Condition considering possible ways to re-establish societal consensus around truth. He settled on the hope that a future hyperintelligent computer system could control access to knowledge, and aid individuals by “supplying them with the information they usually lack for making knowledgeable decisions.” If everyone relies on the same AI program to tell them what is true, then consensus around truth could be restored.

The person who posts screenshots of AI summaries to try and win arguments online, the pastor who turns to AI to ‘explain’ a difficult theological concept, or the student who turns to an AI-generated summary because they can’t figure out what Plato is trying to say all crave what modernity cannot give them. Unprepared for the hard, careful work of separating truth from falsehood, they long for Lyotard’s hypothetical computer to simply tell them what is true.

Of course, this is a mirage. AI cannot rise beyond its training data. It can only present statistically likely combinations of words. Biases in the training data become outputs of the model, and the same technology that allows AI programs to give detailed answers also makes them frequently hallucinate falsehoods.

No computer program can determine truth. But the authoritative-sounding voice and the ability to get an answer to any question that statistically feels right, even if it’s wrong, are beguiling. And so they move, haltingly at first, and then all at once, into the cold silicon arms of the Machine God.

Embodiment Contra the Machine God

Evangelicals are unlikely to reach a consensus any time soon on the theological issues outlined above. But both pro-AI evangelicals and AI-critical evangelicals (like the editors of TGC as well as this website) should be able to recognize that the source of truth was Himself embodied.

Embodiment is a profound antidote to the AI mind virus: the meaning of the Incarnation is that God is not an inaccessible, contextless Truth but the Logos made flesh who made his dwelling among us. Knowledge of Jesus Christ different from information about Jesus. Information is disembodied knowledge, rendered into the binary language of computer code, it can be transmitted from one form to another. Knowledge is embodied, experienced, and deeply entangled with what it means to be human. Knowing Christ means a relationship with Him.

The father teaching his son to ride a bicycle rather than telling him to watch YouTube tutorials, or the pastor who takes the time to help a parishioner think through a difficult moral dilemma, are practicing the transmission of embodied knowledge within the context of a human relationship. No AI program – even one trained on a pastor’s own sermons – can replicate this because it can only transmit information; not being human, it can never give knowledge.

The pursuit of embodiment is another area where Christians need to recognize the pre-eminence of the imago Dei over the logic of the market. Embodiment can be expensive and inefficient, because it doesn’t scale. Yet, in an AI-optimized world it is going to be crucial to retaining human connection and recognition of the imago Dei in ourselves and each other.

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