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Christianity grapples with the rise of an AI Jesus - Salon.com
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Christianity grapples with the rise of an AI Jesus
How AI and podcasts are reviving “ancient heresies” and colliding with American Christianity online
By
Russell Payne
Staff Reporter
Published
December 27, 2025 6:30AM (EST)
Crucifix on a laptop / Luso / Getty Images
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Earlier in December, podcaster Joe Rogan suggested that Jesus Christ might return in the form of an artificial intelligence. While this moment garnered attention online and in the press, it’s actually just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the effect that AI is having on religious belief in highly online corners of American society.
In the viral Rogan clip, the host says “Jesus was born out of a virgin mother. What’s more virgin than a computer? If Jesus does return, you don’t think he could return as artificial intelligence? AI could absolutely return as Jesus.”
The response to the clip online was largely mockery or criticism of Rogan for his cozy relationship with tech oligarchs, like billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. But the notion of an AI Jesus is not as fringe as it might seem.
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Robert Geraci, a professor of religious studies at Knox College who has authored multiple books on technology and religion, told Salon in an interview that religious beliefs that incorporate AI are becoming increasingly mainstream.
“The apocalyptic AI mindset is now present in our culture in a way that someone who might be currently or formerly religious can now rely on that as a kind of groundwork for putting their thoughts together, for putting a worldview together,” Geraci said.
On one level, AI Jesuses — there are many — are already here. There is no shortage of websites or apps that offer access to a large language model that offers some sort of spiritual advice based on Christian teachings. Even the Catholic Church has experimented with AI Jesus, with a Swiss church in Lucerne experimenting with a Jesus-like chatbot that was set up to speak with churchgoers in a confessional-style setting.
“With the rise of AI, we’re having to kind of re-argue where authority comes from.”
The project, dubbed “Deus in Machina,” was an experiment aimed at seeing how people responded to the interaction with the chatbot, which was trained on biblical texts, and to explore “critical questions about ethics, spirituality, humanity, and personhood in the era of AI,” according to the researchers’ report on the experiment.
The collision of AI and religious belief has, however, gone far beyond experiments with chatbots and AI renderings of Jesus. Beliefs around the AI “singularity,” loosely defined as the point at which AI is capable of improving itself, have reached a fever pitch, with predictions often mirroring apocalyptic predictions and which are sometimes directly inspired by The Book of Revelation. Official religions that worship AI date as far back as 2017.
In Geraci’s analysis, religious beliefs about a coming AI superintelligence have broken Silicon Valley containment — and while they might have originated in the tech world, they’ve been able to graft themselves onto a preexisting apocalypticism in American culture and American Christianity in particular. This has been helped along by the fact that there are swaths of Americans who consider themselves Christians, but who don’t interface with traditional authority figures when it comes to faith.
A recent survey from the American Bible Society found that while 64% of Americans say they are Christian, only 55% of them attend Church. Although many of these self-identified Christians may be engaging with their religious traditions in a more casual way, others have turned to online spaces for religious community and guidance. Geraci said that this is a phenomenon that has been on the rise for decades, but has been supercharged by AI.
“It’s still the case that just about anybody can get online and tell you whatever they happen to think about authentic Catholic doctrine, or what it means to be a true Muslim, or whatever else, right?,” Geraci said. “That’s all over the internet, but people have also kind of accommodated the idea that they may not constitute an authority. Now with the rise of AI, we’re having to kind of re-argue where authority comes from.”
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Some of these arguments are going on in academic spaces while others occur in the context of mass media, especially that with a conservative slant. For example, conservative pundit Tucker Carlson recently asked OpenAI founder Sam Altman about his own spiritual and religious convictions and how Altman and OpenAI decide on which ethical values to give preference to in ChatGPT. The episode title, “Sam Altman’s Dystopian...