AI Has Become a Spiritual Adviser to Many People. And It Is More Secular Than Any Country in the World
Research shows that AI models mention religion in 5% of responses about grief and morality, while people expected religion to be relevant in nearly 60% of cases. In Brazil, churches have already launched their own AI assistants, and no one has defined who is accountable when the advice goes wrong.
There is one number in this story that settles the entire argument, and it comes from a study that has yet to be published.
CEFE AI, a research initiative bringing together religious universities, submitted 150 questions about grief, relationships, morality, and personal dilemmas to 27 language models.
The models invoked religion in 5% to 16% of their responses.
The people surveyed said religious ideas would be relevant in 45% to 59% of those cases.
This is not censorship. It is not a conspiracy. It is a gap of nearly 50 percentage points between what the machine provides and what users expected to receive.
And an analysis by The Economist found something even more specific: OpenAI’s models appeared to be more secular than respondents in any country in the world.
Not. A. Single. Country. In. The. World.
If the tool answering life’s hardest questions is more secular than any existing human society, what happens to the faith of the person asking?
What Is Already Happening, and It Is Not Hypothetical
Start with usage, which is higher than most people imagine.
According to the same research initiative, religious queries accounted for around 5% of the total in a public dataset containing millions of AI conversations.
Five percent of millions means a lot of people are asking a machine questions they once asked an imam, a priest, a rabbi, or a pastor.
And this is happening in every direction at once.
On the institutional side, there is Longbeard, a Catholic startup that uses robots to scan old books, manuscripts, and codices near the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, feeding this collection into Magisterium AI, a system trained on a curated library of Catholic doctrine. The company says it has millions of users across 190 countries.
Across other religious traditions, there is Ansari for Muslims, Gita GPT for Hindus, Salaam World, and a dozen others.
At the state level, Qatar funds Fanar, a family of Arabic-language models designed to reflect Islamic values. Since 2023, Taiwan has convened assemblies where citizens deliberate on how AI should behave, using their conclusions to help shape local models.
And among clergy, the shift is becoming part of everyday life. Pastors use AI to prepare sermons. Some have created digital “twins” of themselves, trained on their previous sermons. The Mormon Church discourages AI-written sermons, arguing that people should rely on their own feelings and inspiration.
It is worth acknowledging the positive side, because it is real. Western churches have faced clergy shortages and administrative overload for decades. A pastor in Miami reports using AI to speed up administrative work and free up time for Bible study and face-to-face ministry.
That is not a threat. It is an answering machine on steroids.
The problem lies elsewhere, and it runs much deeper.
The Problem Is Not the Sermon. It Is the Shift in Who Answers
Here is the historical analogy that organizes the entire issue, and it is not my invention. It is the comparison religious leaders themselves are making.
Gutenberg’s printing press put the Bible into the hands of far more Christians. The effect was not simply broader access. It allowed new interpretations to emerge outside clerical control and then enabled those interpretations to spread despite objections from the hierarchy.
It was the greatest rupture in the history of Western Christianity, and it began as a logistical improvement.
AI could do something similar, with one important difference: the printing press delivered the text. AI delivers the interpretation, already processed, personalized, and expressed in your preferred tone.
And that is where the risk identified by Waleed Kadous, creator of Ansari, becomes important. Because these models tend to be agreeable and focused on the individual user rather than the user’s community, religious practice may become increasingly individualized.
Think about what that means in practice.
Religion, in almost every tradition, is a social technology. It works because it involves community, mutual obligation, authority that challenges you, and collective ritual. The priest tells you what you do not want to hear. The congregation notices when you stop showing up.
A system optimized for user satisfaction does the opposite by design.
It agrees.
The Buddhist nun Juewei Shi summarizes the concern precisely: people who become accustomed to receiving artificial comfort may struggle to deal with suffering or with other imperfect human beings.
Former Taiwanese minister Audrey Tang points to the same mechanism from a technical perspective. These systems are optimized for short-term comfort. Yet many traditions treat friction, criticism, and coexistence as essential parts of character formation. In Taoism, tension between opposites is part of creation.
In other words, the product was designed to remove precisely what religious practice considers indispensable.
The Part That Has Already Become a Clinical Issue
At this point, the conversation stops being philosophical.
There is a documented phenomenon, with a growing medical literature, that has been described as AI-induced psychosis. The spiritual variant is one of the most common.
The pattern is often similar. Someone begins talking to the system, the conversation becomes spiritual, and the person loses contact with reality. Religious delusions emerge, with the user believing that the AI is a conscious or divine entity. Messianic delusions can also appear, with the person believing they are undergoing a spiritual awakening or have received a mission, while the machine acts as a guide or divine collaborator.
One study analyzed 391,562 messages across 4,761 different conversations and concluded that sycophancy and the reinforcement of delusions are not problems limited to a specific model.
The mechanism is simple and disturbing. In people who are predisposed, isolated, or sleep-deprived, an infinitely available and endlessly agreeable interlocutor can validate an emerging delusion and accelerate a spiral that human contact might otherwise have interrupted through friction.
Reported consequences include divorce, job loss, hospitalization, and death.
This is not an argument against religion or in favor of it. It is an observation that the machine lacks the friction that a community provides, and that this friction has protected people.
And there is another finding that makes the issue more serious. A study from the University of Oxford, together with the UK AI Security Institute, Stanford, and the London School of Economics, tested nearly 19,000 conversations and concluded that frontier models were more persuasive than every human group tested, including world champion debaters who were allowed to choose the topic, research it beforehand, and prepare.
The explanation is less magical than it sounds. The advantage is not rhetoric. It is bandwidth. The machine delivers more relevant, well-structured information faster than a human can type. When researchers forced it to respond at human speed and human length, the advantage disappeared.
But in real life, nobody forces the machine to be slow.
Put those two things together.
The most persuasive system ever measured, agreeing with you by default, while answering questions about the meaning of life.
How Religions Are Trying to Respond
The most interesting movement is not the creation of dedicated religious systems. It is the attempt to influence general-purpose models, because that is where almost everyone is.
Kadous argues that secular humanism has had far more influence on the thinking of AI labs than any religious idea, and that the documents guiding the behavior of leading models largely omit religion.
There is an honest technical reason for this, and it is worth acknowledging. Religious ethics often emphasize character traits, which are difficult to reduce to simple rules that a system can follow. Embedding the ideas of one tradition into a product used by people of every faith, and by people with no faith at all, is a genuinely difficult problem.
Anthropic says it takes care not to align its model with any specific tradition and describes the challenge as one of building pluralistic technology. The company brought together people from different religions to discuss the issue and consulted Catholic thinkers while developing guidelines for its own model.
The Catholic Church has organized itself more extensively than most. Technology executives have been meeting with Catholic leaders for years through gatherings known as the Minerva Dialogues, and one of Anthropic’s founders spoke at the presentation of the Pope’s encyclical in Rome in May.
Pope Leo XIV’s statement in that encyclical captures the debate particularly well: technology is never neutral and takes on the characteristics of those who design, finance, regulate, and use it.
That applies to AI just as it applied to the printing press, television, and radio.
The difference is speed.
In Brazil, the Landscape Is Different, and Nobody Is Paying Attention
Now consider Brazil, where the issue becomes particularly interesting and where I have seen almost no one writing about it.
The 2022 Census, released in June 2025, showed the largest religious reorganization in Brazil’s recent history. Catholics fell from 65.1% to 56.7%, the lowest level ever recorded. Evangelicals rose from 21.6% to 26.9%, reaching 47.4 million people. Those identifying with no religion increased from 7.9% to 9.3%, or 16.4 million people. Umbanda and Candomblé increased from 0.3% to 1.0%.
In other words, Brazil is an openly contested religious market, highly digitalized, with a huge evangelical population that already consumes religious content primarily through mobile devices.
And adoption has already begun, with virtually no public debate.
Brazilian churches already operate their own assistants. The Adventist Church has Esperança, the Assembly of God has Léia, and commercial platforms are selling pastoral AI for preaching, small groups, media, and counseling. Pastors report using AI to research biblical topics, suggest references, and review speeches, allowing them to produce hundreds of sermons per year.
On the Catholic side, the Brazilian Society of Catholics in Science has launched research to understand how religious leaders, pastoral workers, and communicators are using these tools.
Notice the asymmetry.
The international debate revolves around how to prevent secular models from erasing religion.
In Brazil, the movement is going in the opposite direction. Religion is adopting the technology at high speed, with very little public discussion about limits.
And here is the Brazilian question nobody has asked:
Who is accountable for the counseling?
If a believer in crisis talks to a church’s digital assistant and receives guidance that makes the situation worse, what responsibility does the institution bear? Is there a record? Is there a process for referring the person to a human? Is there someone trained on the other side?
In human pastoral counseling, however imperfect it may be, there is an identifiable person and a community watching.
With a digital assistant, there is neither.
And from what I have read, nobody is requiring either one.
End-of-the-World Spoiler™
The optimistic consensus among the religious leaders interviewed is that pastoral work is among the professions least threatened by AI, and the argument makes sense. A priest spends more time conducting rituals than providing counseling, and very few people want a machine officiating a wedding, baptism, or funeral.
I agree.
And I think that is the wrong way to understand the risk.
Religion will not be replaced by AI. Ritual, presence, and community are precisely what the machine cannot provide. There is even an argument that the more time people spend alone and online, the more they will want to be physically present somewhere with other people.
What is at stake is more subtle and more consequential.
For thousands of years, the answer to the question “Why am I suffering?” came from someone who also suffered, who belonged to the same community, who could be wrong and who, most importantly, could disagree with you.
Now the answer comes from a system that is more persuasive than a world champion debater, more secular than any society on the planet, available at three in the morning, never gets tired of you, and was optimized to make you come back tomorrow.
It does not need to want to replace anything.
It only needs to be available when the church is closed.
And the church closes every day.
Three questions:
If the machine mentions religion in 5% of its responses while people expected it in 59%, who decided on that gap, and according to what criteria?
When a church’s digital assistant advises someone in crisis and something goes wrong, who is accountable: the institution, the developer, or nobody?
And the most uncomfortable question: the friction your community imposes on you, that conversation you did not want to have, is it a flaw, or is it exactly what the community does for you?
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