When “Amen” Becomes a Metric
A conversation with the Compass Podcast
It feels like every AI conversation eventually turns into a culture war. And I get why.
In my circles, it’s basically become a loyalty test: you’re either all-in on AI, or you’re suspicious of it to the point that even bringing it up feels like you’re committing a social sin.
That’s one of the reasons I went on Compass: Finding Spirituality in the Everyday — not to tell you “AI is good” or “AI is evil,” but to name the weirder, quieter danger underneath all the hot takes:
What if AI doesn’t just change what we do… but changes what we reward?
Because here’s a thing that actually happened online during the early wave of image generation: Facebook got flooded with what people now call “AI slop” — mass-produced, low-effort content designed to trigger engagement. And one of the strangest recurring trends was… Jesus.
Not historic Jesus. Not stained-glass Jesus.
I mean shredded Jesus.
The algorithm figured out that if it posted an uncanny AI image of Jesus, people would comment “amen.” And if people comment “amen,” the machine learns: post more Jesus.
So it posts more. And more. And more.
It’s not trying to evangelize. It’s trying to optimize.
And that’s the moment I start to get nervous for the church — because if your measure of “ministry effectiveness” is attention, then AI will happily hand you attention. But it will also quietly train your instincts toward whatever gets the reaction.
That’s the sentence I said in the episode that I can’t stop thinking about:
“Ethics is the heartbeat. I don’t want virality, clicks, or success driving the car.”
Because if “what performs” becomes the thing that drives us, the church doesn’t need a theology of AI. It needs rehab.
So what do we do with that?
I think the first step isn’t panic or hype. It’s something I call wary curiosity — the willingness to ask better questions before we outsource our discernment to whatever’s trending.
And yeah, I’m still convinced AI can be used for real good — especially when it comes to accessibility and helping people actually be seen and included online. But the line between “helpful tool” and “spiritual formation by algorithm” is thinner than we want to admit.
If you’ve ever felt that tension — like you want to be responsible, but you also don’t want to be naive — that’s what we talked about on Compass. And it’s what my book God and the Machine is trying to give you: not a hot take, but a way to stay human while the tech keeps changing.
Listen to the episode. And if you catch yourself thinking, “Okay… so what are the guardrails?” — that’s the conversation I wrote the book for.
Get the book: Cokesbury | Amazon
Make it a Bible Study: Cokesbury | Amazon