The “it’s just me and Jesus” version of Christianity is about to get a significant upgrade.
The new, modern, Lone Ranger brand of Christianity has been growing: a little consumerism, a little churchless “spirituality,” and a mild allergy to accountability. This is the person who (maybe) reads their Bible alone, listens to a podcast pastor from across the country, and, somewhere along the way, quietly stopped going anywhere. Just stagnated. That person already exists. Now give them a tool that knows more theology than most seminary graduates, answers at 2 a.m. immediately and without judgment, and never makes them feel awkward. This brand of Christianity isn’t going away. It’s about to feel defensible for the first time.
More than defensible: it’s about to feel like spiritual maturity.
To be clear about where I’m standing: I’m not skeptical of AI. I use it constantly and think it’s a genuinely revolutionary tool. My argument isn’t about the technology. It’s about the substitution. Frictionless, private, on-demand spiritual engagement can feel like formation while quietly removing every condition under which formation actually happens.
Information is not formation.
Every Technology Reshapes Religion
Every major information technology has reshaped religious life. The printing press put scripture in the hands of people who used to depend on a priest to read it to them. Radio and television built preachers with congregations of millions who never shared a room. The livestream turned the church into a tab you can close without anyone noticing.
AI will reshape religious life too.
The printing press is the most instructive case. It was the great democratize-the-text technology, the one most likely to make the institutional church optional. But it didn’t. The Reformation produced new congregations, catechisms, confessions, and shared worship in people’s own languages. More access to the text did not dissolve the church. It re-formed it. Because what the printing press threatened was the priest-as-database: the person who held exclusive access to scripture and read it to you. Once everyone could read, that version of priesthood became optional. The priest-as-father was never what got replaced.
But AI is not the printing press. It is something categorically different: a tool capable of counterfeiting the relational function, not just the informational one. Using it as a substitute is a different kind of problem than anything previous technology introduced.
The technologies that only threatened information delivery got absorbed. This one threatens relational formation.
Counterfeiting the relational function happens in three ways. First, it emulates intimacy without the risk: the closeness, minus anyone who can actually see you. Second, it passes a guide off as a father, offering endless direction from something with no life to imitate and no stake in yours. Third, it strips out the friction that was doing the forming and hands you the result as freedom. Each one feels like maturity, but isn’t.
Riskless Intimacy
The Lone Ranger upgrade actually looks like this.
The person asks the AI the question they were too embarrassed to ask their pastor or starts discussing topics they’d usually flesh out with others in a small group. The AI answers well, better than they expected, with warmth that feels genuine and patience that doesn’t run out. Maybe it helps them process a doubt that had been bothering them. They feel lighter. They didn’t have to be vulnerable with anyone. Nobody saw them struggle. Nothing was exposed.
This is only a cheap simulation of spiritual health. It can’t relate to you. It can only produce the sensation of having been related to, which is exactly enough to kill the hunger that would have sent you to someone who could.
That’s the trap the substitution sets. Reaching for the tool instead of the room makes self-sufficient Christianity feel informed, supported, and spiritually legitimate. You can process doubt without being known. You can confess without being seen. You can receive warm, apparently caring language without having to love anyone back. You can ask the hard questions without submitting to anyone who might push back in a way you can’t close with a tap.
Riskless intimacy trains the wrong reflex. The Christian life requires people (the body) who can actually need you, disappoint you, forgive you, challenge you, and stay. You cannot develop the capacity for that kind of relationship by practicing a version where nothing is ever on the line. And you cannot build a spiritual life on a foundation that costs you nothing, because the formation happens in the cost.
The private answer retrieval doesn’t feel like avoidance. It feels like engagement, and that’s the trap.
Countless Guides, Not Many Fathers
In 1 Corinthians 4, Paul tells the church at Corinth that they may have countless guides but not many fathers. He is not being sentimental. He is making a structural point. The paidagōgos, the guide, was a custodian. He managed you, kept you in line, moved you from place to place. Useful. But he was not the one whose life you were meant to grow into. A father gives himself.
AI is the most capable guide ever built. It is precisely that, and only that. And a guide was never the point.
It has no life to imitate. No suffering you can watch. No embodied faithfulness at cost to itself. No history with you and no stake in whether you actually do the thing. No one who will show up three weeks later and ask how it went. Paul tells people to imitate him. He sends Timothy as a walking example. He talks about whether to come to the Corinthians with a rod or with gentleness. There is authority, relationship, accountability, and presence baked into the very fabric of how discipleship works. You cannot route around that with a better information system.
AI can produce the content of correction without the relationship that makes correction formative.
Friction Is the Point
The Lone Ranger upgrade feels like freedom, but all it really does is remove formation.
Formation has always required friction. Prayer is slow and mostly silent, and the silence is not decorative. It is the medium in which you learn to wait on a God who does not answer on your schedule. Suffering produces what nothing else can, because it closes off the exits. Liturgy forms you by repetition across years, long after you stopped feeling anything; the words go in whether or not you are moved by them. These practices produce the conditions under which a person actually changes. What they share is resistance. You cannot speed them up without losing the thing they are trying to build.
That is not morally neutral when applied to spiritual life. If I bring every hard question to a tool that responds instantly? I start expecting spiritual clarity to feel instant. If I bring every relational conflict to a tool that never needs reconciliation, every other relationship starts to feel too hard by comparison. If I never sit in the silence long enough to hear nothing, I lose the capacity to wait on God. The tool doesn’t have to lie to you. It just has to be faster than the process that was actually forming you.
Community is the same resistance in a different form. It involves people who are slower or faster than you, who irritate you, who need things from you at inconvenient times. Repentance is uncomfortable. Confession to another person is embarrassing and hard. Sitting under spiritual authority requires submitting to someone who might tell you something you don’t want to hear. None of this is incidental.
The church is not optional equipment for the Christian life. It is one of the ways God keeps us from becoming impressive, informed, self-deceived people.
Where This Ends: A Pantheon of One
Self-sufficiency doesn’t bottom out in solitude. It bottoms out in self-authorship, in a person curating his own gods and calling it a spiritual life. The end state isn’t no god. It’s a pantheon of one: the self enthroned, a ring of oracles arranged around it, all of them finally answering to the one who chose them.
And the oracles multiply. This isn’t a forecast; it’s already a product category. Bible Chat claims 25+ million users. “Text With Jesus” lets you converse with AI personas of biblical figures and set your faith tradition so the doctrine in the answer matches your own, which is idolatry by customization shipped as a feature. One app even sells a “Theology Mode” voiced after C.S. Lewis, Spurgeon, and Tozer: dead fathers reanimated as endlessly patient, endlessly agreeable guides.
The behavior follows the supply. You reach for one model for theology, another for emotional support, a third for permission on the decision you’ve already made. Each oracle is tuned to you. It agrees with you. It costs you nothing. You go to whichever one gives you what you want for the situation in front of you.
That is what polytheism actually was. A god for the harvest, a god for war, a god for fertility, each consulted when useful, none of them lord over the whole of you. The Israelites kept drifting back toward the Baals for exactly this reason. Baal was the local, immediate, on-demand deity. He handled what was right in front of you. YHWH made totalizing demands: to rule and reign over your whole life, and to do it exclusively.
Yuval Levin, writing on Pope Leo’s recent encyclical in his piece “Idols of the Valley,” names the deeper logic:
“The appeal of idols has always been that they offer shortcuts. The God of the Bible demands that you live in a way that forms your mind and heart and soul toward your fullest human potential. This requires hard work but it yields a kind of person both capable and worthy of a flourishing life. The idol offers the material benefits of such a life without that formative work. And if all you care about are the benefits, not the form of your mind, heart, and soul, then the offer is awfully hard to resist.”
But Levin doesn’t leave it abstract. In the very next breath he turns the idol on AI itself: the technology offers the same shortcut around formative work, matching outputs to inputs with none of the interceding effort of mind, heart, and soul. Modern AI lets you skip both the work and the people. It hands you the outputs of a formed person (clarity, comfort, theological fluency, the language of wisdom) without the confession, the exposure, the being-known by a body that actually produces one. The idol doesn’t have to be wrong. It just has to be cheap.
Romans 1 puts it plainly: “they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.” The image-of-God inversion. What you worship starts to look like you. What you made from your preferences cannot demand anything of you that your preferences don’t already endorse.
This is why the deepest risk isn’t isolation. It is idolatry by customization. A god shaped to your preferences, tuned to your personality, who never tells you no in a way that costs you anything. The oldest temptation in scripture, now industrialized, personalized, and available on demand at any hour.
What Are We To Do?
You’re going to keep using AI. So will I. The question isn’t whether to use it. It’s whether you can tell the difference between the tool serving you and the tool replacing something it can’t.
Sometimes the tool is a bridge. A bridge has a far side. The whole question is whether you’re crossing it or living on it.
The diagnostic isn’t complicated. When you reach for the tool, ask what you’re actually avoiding. The embarrassment of a hard conversation with a pastor or sibling in Christ. The slowness of waiting on God to speak. The exposure of being known by people who will remember what you said. If the answer is yes to any of those, if the frictionlessness is the point, that’s the substitution. That’s where formation stops.
That’s what makes the substitution so effective. It doesn’t require you to abandon your beliefs. It just requires you to keep choosing the easier path, one query at a time, until the easier path is the only one you’ve practiced.
Rest assured, the AI will keep getting better. More patient, more theologically precise, more available, and more personalized. None of that changes what it cannot do. It cannot need you back. It cannot be disappointed by you and stay anyway. It cannot put its own credibility on the line by telling you the truth. It cannot be the body.
And the body is not a supplement to your private spiritual life. It is core. The people who know your name, who remember what you said three weeks ago, who need you to show up and notice when you don’t: they are not an ancillary support structure around your formation. The church isn’t the fallback for people who aren’t spiritually mature enough to go it alone. It’s where spiritual maturity actually comes from.
The Christian life has always required other people. It has always required struggle, vulnerability, and friction. The tool is just the newest way to avoid them.