The rise of the pocket gods

AI Bible buddies and spiritually flabby Christians

Paul Kingsnorth introduced me to the idea of AI as potentially demonic. His Substack caught my attention when his three-essay series, “The Vaccine Moment”[1] went viral during the COVID-19 pandemic. His captivating style and insights that flew in the face of the prevailing narrative kept me reading as he moved on to write about the tech-driven “Machine” that characterizes the modern Western world.

In reading his essays “What Progress Wants,”[2] “The Universal,”[3] and “The Neon God,”[4] I was struck by his suggestion that AI may be something more than the latest technological advancement: a demonic intelligence striving to manifest itself, manipulating humanity to birth it into the world.

I haven’t been able to shake the idea, especially as Silicon Valley elites continue to boast that they’re building God. Granted, like every angle of the AI narrative, it must be considered with discernment, so that’s what I’ll attempt do through the next several essays in this series on how Christians should view and use technology.

(If you’re not familiar with Kingsnorth, I recommend his latest book, Against the Machine, as a valuable introduction to his work and viewpoints. While I don’t agree with everything he writes, his perceptive musings on the framework that drives modernity are helpful and often refreshing in an age where the dialog surrounding tech is flooded with the polar opposite views of enthusiasm and doomerism.)

One note: I’ve chosen to be vague and not share names or links of AI Bible apps. I don’t want to give the impression of promoting them or supporting their use, nor do I wish to tempt anyone to try them. The spiritual dangers are too great.

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Our culture loves efficiency. We’re so desperate to curtail the insane busyness we face every day that we welcome any solution that can take tasks off our plates. Yet we rarely stop to consider the downsides or dangers of these solutions.

For Christians, the pursuit of efficiency becomes perilous when we start to see spiritual disciplines like Bible reading, Bible study, and sermon preparation as burdensome “to-dos” rather than practices essential to our spiritual formation. The drive to save time has already prompted dozens of one-page daily devotionals and five-minutes-a-day Bible reading plans. AI is taking it to the next level by promising to handle the “hard work” of reading and study for us. A quick perusal of the myriad websites and apps available reveals a landscape of (rather frightening) marketing language dressed in spiritual garb but unmistakably geared toward making our time in the Bible more “efficient.”

Chatbots are the most predominant apps. Built in a style similar to ChatGPT, they’re framed as interactive companions that purportedly draw from Scripture to aid with Bible study or answer spiritual questions. Some claim to distill insights from Bible passages and serve them with a side of suggestions for personal application. Other even claim the ability to clarify deep theological concepts.

Presented as unquestionably positive, these shortcuts are, in fact, designed to circumvent the challenges and hard work integral to knowing and understanding the Bible. Regular, deep, sustained interaction with God’s Word, in context, is how we grow spiritually. As we search the Word, it searches and changes us (Heb. 4:12-13). It strengthens and matures us into discerning, watchful disciples with the sensitivity to recognize our weaknesses and sins, the humility to repent, and the openness to let God do His sanctifying work in us.

Replacing this Spirit-led, Spirit-mediated process with AI disrupts the dynamic interaction between the believer, the Bible, and the Living God with a human-created, human-trained language model that doesn’t know — and doesn’t care about — our spiritual needs or the state of our hearts. Yes, users can input their struggles with and even ask for specific help, but a bot can never offer more than a sophisticated canned response that does nothing to promote spiritual maturity.

This doesn’t stop app developers from adding personalized prayer suggestions, ostensibly tailor-made for whatever problem or situation users face. Yet such a promise is a logical next step. If a believer isn’t reading the Word deeply and letting the Spirit apply it to his life, he won’t know what he ought to pray. But that, developers suggest, doesn’t matter. AI can tell him and deliver a custom list he can pray through — all without him going through all that trouble of searching and being searched (Ps. 139:23-24).

A phenomenon known as sycophancy compounds the problem. AI platforms are designed to keep users coming back, so bots tend to affirm users by mirroring their preferences and giving answers they most likely want to hear. The sycophantic AI “Bible companion” is more likely to deliver comforting platitudes supported with contextless verses than challenge users with penetrating truth from God’s Word.

Data from Barna suggests that a good chunk of the people asking AI for spiritual insight think little of its shortcomings. According to the group’s 2025 State of the Church report, almost one-third of U.S. adults and two-fifths of Gen Z and Millennials say AI’s spiritual advice is “as trustworthy” as a pastor’s.[5]

Unfortunately, they may be right. Pastors aren’t immune to the allure of efficiency and are just as easily drawn in by tools promising to simplify sermon preparation. All it takes is a quick search or prompt for these apps to spit out illustrations, practical applications, Bible study questions, outlines, and even whole sermon drafts. Pastors can customize the output with their desired topic, tone, and length, and the AI will even add helpful suggestions for delivery, including when to pause — which, the marketing language claims, will help the message have its intended impact.

But even if such apps didn’t exist, standard AI models like ChatGPT still offer tempting alternatives. When a pastor faces a difficult Biblical text he feels he doesn’t sufficiently understand, these models promise to act as “dialog partners.” And indeed, some pastors and Bible teachers do “discuss” their sermon ideas with ChatGPT,[6] right down to scholarly details like understanding the original language and interpreting the text.

The problems here should be obvious, as they are legion. While hashing out ideas with ChatGPT may seem harmless, it eliminates the essential human interaction God uses to grow and refine His people — including pastors. These interactions keep believers accountable and guard against the dangers of sycophancy.

Pastors who routinely use specialized AI tools or large language models as sermon helpers run the risk of creating echo chambers that magnify and reinforce their personal views, unintended biases, and interpretational assumptions. Despite these drawbacks, Barna reports that 43% of pastors are comfortable using AI for sermon research and preparation.[7] And the 2025 State of AI in the Church report from Exponential showed that 26% of church leaders use ChatGPT for “applications such as sermon preparation [and] research.”[8]

In a 2025 Q&A at the CCUK Pastors & Leaders Conference, mathematician and author John Lennox warned against the spiritual dangers of AI shortcuts. “We have a huge responsibility if we’re teaching the Bible to get together with God so that we have a sense of hearing the voice of God,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s not much use.”[9]

Dr. Alastair Roberts echoed his point on a recent episode of Mere Fidelity. Christians, and pastors in particular, he said, are meant to relate to the Bible “deeply and properly,” meditate on it, chew on it, and read and re-read it until it becomes part of them.

“This is how Scripture works. It’s a text you can never ‘have read,’” he pointed out. “To read the Scripture is to be constantly in the process of re-reading it.”[10] Rather than prioritize speed and efficiency, we’re meant to take time with the Bible, whether preparing a sermon or doing personal study. As Roberts said: “The process is the purpose.”[11]

Bypassing the struggle fundamental to producing rich, engaging, convicting sermons removes context and robs pastors of the experience of interacting with Scripture and multiple texts about Scripture. While researching, outlining, and drafting may seem tedious—and, indeed, inefficient—these stretches of time are when a pastor interacts with is own thoughts and makes new discoveries. he’s driven deeper into the Word and, to quote Roberts again, “being formed in the text.”

Bringing others into the conversation invites fresh insight on hard topics. Since they’re not mired in details, they can step back and look at the bigger picture to spot errors, weaknesses, or gaps in arguments. In the process, both the pastor and his (human) dialog partner grow in wisdom and knowledge of God (Phil. 1:9; Col. 1:9-10; 1 Peter 3:18).

Just as Job didn’t come to a fuller knowledge of God apart from wrestling with trials and questions (Job 42:1-5) and Jacob didn’t learn true humility and dependence until he wrestled with the Angel of God (Gen. 32:24-30), so we, too, won’t experience the blessing of spiritual growth unless we — and the pastors who teach us — wrestle with God’s Word regularly and deeply.

Many great commentators, academics, and theologians spent their lives wrestling and left a rich legacy in their writings. Their work conveys wisdom gained through serious study and examination of Scripture, wisdom that can help us grow if we’re willing to dig in and let the iron of their words sharpen the iron of our intellects and spirits.

This means actually sitting down with our Bibles and the works of great Christian thinkers. It means giving our sustained attention to books or public domain archives of full texts. And it means using our brains to carefully consider what’s before us, make connections, and let God lead us to a greater understanding of Himself.

Everything we take in as we study becomes part of a dynamic internal conversation between other words we’ve read, podcasts we’ve listened to, discussions we’ve had, movies we’ve watched, and experiences we’ve walked through. Each of us develops a unique perspective as we curate this mental library throughout our lives. No AI tool, no matter how sophisticated, can adequately draw from that complex mental, emotional, and spiritual landscape.

But when we dig into the Bible and resources like commentaries for ourselves, we’re free to encounter the Holy Spirit, Who speaks directly to our spiritual needs in every season of life. Insights emerge or re-surface, connect back to patterns we’ve noticed before, or simply repeat until we finally get the message.

All AI can every do, with its limited training data and empty imitation of humanity, is serve up the combinations it deems most logical based on user input. Such results may not always be wrong, and they may even seem deeply insightful at the time, but they always detract from the process we’re meant to work through, step by step, with God and other believers. We don’t go through this process simply to check off a box showing we’ve done our devotionals for the day. We go through it, in the words of Lennox, “to get to know God.”

Outsourcing our studies to AI gives us little more than Cliff Notes as an ostensibly more efficient approach to the spiritual disciplines that bring us closer to the One we claim to love and serve. It’s the spiritual equivalent of going to the gym, hiring a personal trainer to do our workouts for us, and expecting to come out stronger. Yet the Bible is very clear that the spiritual maturity to which God calls His people can’t be reached with shortcuts. We must encounter God in His Word daily with undistracted focus and commit to serious lifelong engagement with the inspired text in all its fullness (Rom. 12:2; Jas. 1:22-25). We must, as the writer to the Hebrews says, exercise our senses to gain knowledge and develop the spiritual discernment that leads to maturity in Christlikeness (Heb. 5:13-14).

A generation of Christians who doesn’t do this — or worse, believes it isn’t necessary because they can ask their handy little AI buddies for guidance any time — will become a generation of spiritual babes (1 Cor. 3:1-2; Heb. 5:11-12). Ignorant of their calling to spiritual growth, they’ll be content with contextless, bot-mediated Bible summaries they can consume with the same speed and ease as TikTok videos and forget just as quickly. Over time, sycophancy will craft a personal prophet for each one, a pocket god made in their image and tailored to their preferences. And their pastors will be just as ignorant of the problem as they stand in pulpits, dutifully reading words they didn’t wrestle for and pausing for effect exactly as their AI commanders direct.

For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass:

For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was.

~ James 1:23-24, King James Version

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[1] The full series is available for free at https://www.paulkingsnorth.net/vaccine

[2] Kingsnorth, Paul. 2022. “What Progress Wants.” Substack.com. The Abbey of Misrule. May 24, 2022. https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/what-progress-wants.

[3] ———. 2023a. “The Universal.” Substack.com. The Abbey of Misrule. April 13, 2023. https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-universal.

[4] ———. 2023b. “The Neon God.” Substack.com. The Abbey of Misrule. April 26, 2023. https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-neon-god.

[5] Barna Group, and Gloo. 2025. “State of the Church.” Stateofthechurch.com. 2025. https://stateofthechurch.com/.

[6] Reinke, Tony. 2025. “Authentic Preaching in the Age of AI.” Desiring God. May 21, 2025. https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/authentic-preaching-in-the-age-of-ai.

[7] Barna Group. 2024. “Three Takeaways on How Pastors Can Use AI - Barna Group.” Barna Group. May 23, 2024. https://www.barna.com/research/pastors-use-ai/.

[8] Exponential. 2026. “AI in the Church.” Exponential. February 26, 2026. https://exponential.org/product/ai-in-the-church-2025/.

[9] Calvary Chapel UK. 2025. “Q&a with Prof. John Lennox // CCUK Pastors & Leaders Conference 2025.” YouTube. March 11, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVuvUeUDARY.

[10] Mere Fidelity. 2025. “AI, the Infinite Work Day, and the Finite Pastor.” YouTube. Mere Fidelity. July 16, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKy-bMqSdrk&t=1983s.

[11] ———. 2025. “AI, the Infinite Workday, and the Finite Pastor.” YouTube. Mere Fidelity. Mere Fidelity. July 16, 2025. https://youtu.be/hKy-bMqSdrk?si=wUJ-FxT7u8gxyS55&t=2520.

Featured Image by Nicolas Lobos on Unsplash