Will AI Replace Your Pastor? Our Response to The Economist

This week The Economist published a long report on faith and artificial intelligence: "AI is changing religion and religions are trying to change AI" (August 27th, 2026). The subtitle asks the question straight: "Will chatbots supplant the advice of imams and priests or help them spread the word?"

We build Doxa, a small app in exactly this space. So we read the piece carefully, and we want to respond in public, because almost every risk the article names is a risk we made a deliberate design decision about. This is our comment piece: what the article gets right, where the danger really sits, and how we believe AI can serve God's people while staying under Scripture, inside the church, and pointed at Jesus.

What The Economist Gets Right: The Default Settings of AI Are Secular

The most important finding in the article is quiet and statistical. Citing research from CEFE AI, a consortium involving several faith-based universities, the piece reports that when 150 questions about grief, relationships, and morality were put to 27 large language models, the models "invoke religion in only 5-16% of answers, even though people it surveyed averred that religious ideas would be relevant in 45-59% of cases." The Economist's own analysis found OpenAI's models "more secular than respondents in any country on Earth."

David Wingate of CEFE AI puts the consequence plainly: "If companies assume secularism as defaults, there will be a weakening of faith."

This matches the wider research. Reporting on the CEFE studies describes an "omissive bias": mainstream models simply leave religious perspectives out of answers where millions of users would expect them. A 2026 paper in AI and Ethics documents "doctrinal flattening", where models blur real theological distinctions into a vague, generic spirituality.

Pope Leo XIV, quoted in the article, gave the underlying principle: technology is never neutral and takes on "characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it."

We agree with all of this, and it is why Doxa exists as a purpose-built tool. A general chatbot inherits secular defaults. A tool built by believers, for a specific spiritual discipline, grounded in the actual text of Scripture, can inherit different ones. That inheritance has to be chosen on purpose, verse by verse and prompt by prompt. We wrote about what that looks like in practice in Christian AI in 2026 and what to look for in a Christian AI.

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The Real Danger Has a Name: The AI Companion

The sharpest warnings in the article come from religious leaders worried about dependency. Audrey Tang observes that AI chatbots "are optimised for short-term comfort." Juewei Shi, a Buddhist nun, worries that people won't be able to cope with suffering, or with other, flawed people, if they are used to "getting artificial comfort." Steven Croft, a retired Anglican bishop, says: "If the whole world is seduced by narcissistic chatbots, that could make it even harder for us."

The data behind these worries is sobering. Common Sense Media found that nearly three in four American teens have used AI companions, many for emotional support, and its safety assessments concluded that companion-style AI poses unacceptable risks for under-18s. And Waleed Kadous, who built a Muslim chatbot, names the mechanism precisely: models are often "sycophantic and focus on the user, not their community," pulling believers toward "more individualised" practice.

Every faith app now faces a commercial temptation here. An AI that flatters you, remembers you, and is always available produces spectacular engagement metrics. It also quietly takes the seat that belongs to God and to His people.

We drew our line early, and we have written about it at length in AI Companions in Faith Apps: The Comfort and the Real Risks. The core commitments:

• Doxa never speaks for God. The app never says "God is telling you" or "the Holy Spirit wants you to." It helps you record, revisit, and weigh what you sense God has said, with Scripture and your community as the test.
• Doxa is a tool with an end point, and it hands you back. A session finishes by pointing you to the Bible, to prayer, and to real people. Encouragement in Doxa exists to be weighed with your church, shared with your group, and held over time. The loop always closes with people.
• Doxa never manufactures comfort on demand. Artificial comfort, as the article's voices warn, makes weaker people. Comfort anchored in something God actually said and did, recorded, tested, and remembered, makes resilient ones.

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Our Approach: AI in Service of an Ancient Discipline

The Economist frames today's moment through the printing press, which "put the Bible in the hands of many more Christians." That comparison points somewhere useful. The press did its greatest good when it served the text and the church that gathered around it.

Doxa applies AI to a discipline older than the press: remembering. Scripture commands it relentlessly. "Remember the wonders He has done" (Psalm 105:5). Build the memorial stones "so that this may be a sign among you" (Joshua 4:6). "Test all things. Hold fast to what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

So the app is built around five verbs: record what you sense God has said and done, remember it when it fades, weigh it against Scripture and with your community, hold what proves true, and watch God fulfil His word over time. The AI serves each of those steps: surfacing a past encouragement in a dry season, connecting a recorded word to the passage it echoes, helping you see a testimony take shape. The relationship it deepens is with the God who speaks, and with the people He has placed around you.

That is the whole design. We have written practical guides to the discipline itself in How to Remember What God Said and Why Do Prophetic Words Fade?, because the habit matters whether or not you ever use our app.

Faithful to Scripture, Word for Word

The article notes that AI-assisted homilies "may include hallucinations such as misquoted scripture." This is a solved problem if a builder chooses to solve it, and we regard it as non-negotiable.

Every verse Doxa surfaces is grounded word-for-word in a real translation, the Berean Standard Bible, checked against the actual text before it reaches you, on every surface where the app quotes Scripture. A paraphrase presented as the Bible is a false witness about what God said. We explain the engineering behind this in AI Scripture Accuracy: How Doxa Gets Bible Quotes Right, and the broader habits of safe study in How to Use AI for Bible Study in 2026.

We have also taken the article's "religions are trying to change AI" thread seriously in our own small way: Doxa's Bible and testimony resources are available to the wider AI ecosystem through an open MCP server, so that general assistants answering spiritual questions can ground themselves in the real text rather than a model's memory of it.

Pointing to Jesus, and to a Room Full of People

The most hopeful line in the whole report comes from Gerrit Gong of the Latter-day Saints: "We're going to desire authentic human-to-human and deity-to-human relationships." Andrew Davison of Oxford adds that pastoral work "will be some of the least threatened by AI", because few believers want chatbots presiding over the moments that matter.

We believe that desire is a signal worth building for. The Bible's word for knowing God, yada, means knowing by experience, covenant, and encounter, and we traced it through Scripture in Yada: What the Bible Means When God Says "Know Me". No model can stand in for that knowing. No model should try.

So Doxa's group and church features all bend the same direction: encouragement gets shared with real people, weighed in real rooms, and turned into testimony that gets told out loud. The measure of success we care about is a believer who knows the God who speaks more deeply this year than last, and a church community stronger because its members remember together what He has done.

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Where This Leaves the Question

Will chatbots supplant the advice of imams and priests? The Economist leaves the question open. Our answer, from inside the workshop, is that the outcome depends entirely on what the builders choose. AI aimed at a person's loneliness, optimised for engagement, will pull believers away from their communities; the research above already shows it happening. AI placed deliberately under Scripture, in service of the church, and pointed at Jesus can strengthen the very things the article fears will erode: memory, discernment, testimony, and the shared life of God's people.

Technology takes on the character of those who make it. Pope Leo is right. So we keep making ours with the character we want it to carry: honest about what it is, faithful to the text, quick to hand you back to God and His people.

Keep Reading

• AI Companions in Faith Apps: The Comfort and the Real Risks
• AI Scripture Accuracy: How Doxa Gets Bible Quotes Right
• How to Remember What God Said: A Practical Spiritual Habit
• Yada: What the Bible Means When God Says "Know Me"

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We are building the Doxa app around the discipline this article is really about: recording, remembering, weighing, and holding what God has said and done, with Scripture as the test and your community alongside you. Download Doxa.