Being new to Christianity, I can’t pretend it’s not convenient. I’ve never read the Bible all the way through, but I have an app that summarizes it for me, that texts me a passage every day. I use #Bible and Hallow and Glorify. And I’m sure this kind of thing has attracted more young people, that it helps to meet a generation where they are. But lately I’m beginning to feel as if Christianity has become another thing to do on my phone. Now I need my faith fast and convenient. I can pray as I go. I can stay prayed up. I’ve got a streak going.

Soulless machines can never take the place of personal faith:

At their heart, things like computers and AI and ChatGPT and so on are just machines and technologies. Sure, they were created by real people, and things like generative AI are getting a bit more ‘human-like,’ but they are still machines. There can be no ‘Christian’ machines. Machines cannot have faith, and machines cannot have a personal relationship with the living God.

But we live in an AI world, and more and more people are surrendering their souls – or at least the wellbeing of their souls – to machines. We not only rely on machines and AI more and more, but there is even the temptation to worship at their altar.

On these pages I have often warned Christians especially not to let AI and the new technologies become a substitute for genuine Christian faith. See just one piece for example: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2026/05/04/girls-relationships-ai-and-simulations/

Such warnings are not just recent. Just as I was writing this piece, I came upon a quote from a letter Samuel Butler had sent to the press back in 1863: “Day by day, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.”

That ties into what I will present here: I look at a new book and a new article which speak further to these matters. Simon Christian Trepp just released a slim volume, Servants of the Machine: AI and the Abdication of Human Responsibility (Quaternity Editions, 2026). A short quote from the Introduction gives us a feel for his concerns:

The idea for this book came to me while scrolling on a train in Switzerland on my way to visit my family. I was half-distracted, reading yet another breathless debate about whether artificial intelligence might one day become sentient. I don’t know why but I really like these discussions. This time my reaction surprised me: I felt nothing. No curiosity, no impulse to take a side. The question everyone was fighting over seemed almost comically beside the point. It was very obvious to me that the appearance of sentience is enough. And we crossed that line long ago.

Since I had some time and not much else to do, I spent the rest of the trip thinking about this. I imagined how people would behave if they truly believed machines were conscious. That was unsettling. What followed was more disturbing still. I realised that much of this behaviour is already here. I do not think that the real danger is that a machine overlord will kill us all. To me, the real danger lies in us acting as if AI is already sentient and therefore quietly surrendering our judgement, our authority, and ultimately, our moral agency in the process. Al does not need to be self-aware for people to treat it as an authority. It only needs to seem capable of understanding. Once that illusion is accepted, we project onto it and with this comes the willingness to hand over decisions and moral responsibility to a statistical mirror of our own desires and fears.

I will not speculate about machine consciousness. I will also not urge a return to a pre-digital past or a destruction of our tools. I love technology and there are genuine benefits to our technologies when we use them wisely. However, this book is not really about technology. It’s about us and our tendency to abdicate. Our tendency to let something else take over the burden of judgement and choosing.

We will examine what is happening now. How people like you and me are deferring to algorithms in big and small matters.

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