Brydon Eastman was wrestling with an ethical quandary. As an applied mathematician at OpenAI, he debated what to do: Keep quiet and protect his job, or speak up and risk losing his position at a company on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence technology.
Eastman, 33, started his job with OpenAI in 2022, a few weeks before its famous chatbot ChatGPT debuted. The San Francisco office where Eastman worked had nap rooms, one way the company—like many others in Silicon Valley—encouraged employees to put in long hours. Those hours had gotten longer since Eastman took the job and ChatGPT rocketed to popularity and influence.
Feeling overwhelmed by his dilemma, Eastman went into a nap room and shut off the lights. He prayed for an hour and a half. By the end of that time, he said, he felt clarity from God: The issue was worth confronting. He posted his thoughts on his workplace communication platform, Slack, for the entire company to see. He worried about getting fired, thinking, This will probably cost me my equity. This will probably cost me a lot of money. But this is the right move.
Looking back, he said, “This is following Jesus.” The confrontation “caused some people to change some decisions,” he said. “In the end it turned out okay.” Eastman recently left OpenAI to start a new company, Thinking Machines, which lets him work on projects with which he finds himself more “philosophically aligned.”
Any job can present ethical quandaries, but young Christian engineers working on AI are in the center of an unprecedented surge of technological innovation that is altering the way computers and humans interact. AI developments have also caused a rapid acceleration of tech investment—a “gold rush,” as one investment analyst put it.
In interviews with CT, engineers in their 20s and 30s shared how they are finding themselves carried along in a surging current of AI advancements, struggling to grab at branches to anchor themselves.
They plan mathematical experiments, hunch over computers writing code, manage “data labelers”—people who annotate and categorize data used by AI models—and react in real time to the exploding amounts of new research. In crafting machines that reduce work for other humans, these engineers work longer and longer hours and often don’t feel they have time to pray through major issues that pop up. They also say they lack Christian mentors to help them navigate the rushing waters of AI.
The industry has ballooned since ChatGPT debuted. Nvidia, a chip maker used by AI companies, saw its valuation skyrocket to $3 trillion last year, making it one of the largest companies in the world. Then Chinese newcomer DeepSeek shook up the market in early 2025 when it unveiled a model that was cheaper and more efficient than those from US tech companies like OpenAI.
As the AI current flows ever faster, engineers often feel powerless to slow it down. “Even if I was 100 percent convinced [that] as a species we shouldn’t develop AI, as an individual there’s no way I could stop it,” Eastman said. “We’ve been building toward this invention for hundreds of years.”
In the past, many technological developments progressed slowly enough for humans to cultivate discernment about them, said Mike Langford, a theologian at Seattle Pacific University who studies the intersection of theology and tech. But AI innovation “has happened so quickly that we haven’t had time to develop wisdom about how we use it.”
In this newest leap of technology, Christian AI engineers could build good, ethical tools that form our lives in ways we don’t yet realize. They’re excellent mathematicians, writers of code, and creative thinkers—and they’ve come to jobs at top tech companies with a moral framework from their faith. They could help companies prioritize data privacy, code equitable algorithms, and treat humans working behind the systems fairly. But they need support. They need guidance. They need rest. There is an air of desperation in Silicon Valley, as engineers compete for a small pool of jobs while continually fearing the next round of layoffs, sources told CT. They worry the AI bubble might burst at any time.
When he started working in AI engineering a few years ago, David Kucher, 26, reported he “felt like every minute you had to prove yourself.” He sensed “expectations of more and more and more.”
Eastman didn’t join the industry to get in on the AI gold rush. He started his career by researching how AI mathematics could aid cancer treatment. He has great credentials, including a “finite Erdős number” of 3, which means he is three degrees removed from publishing research with mathematician Paul Erdős—a bragging right in the discipline.
But research wasn’t to be Eastman’s path. Funding for postdoctoral studies fell through, and OpenAI recruited him. He began training machines. A large language model that forms the basis of, say, ChatGPT, takes months to train. Eastman worked in post-training, conducting mathematical experiments to prove the model could do specific tasks.
Post-trainers reinforce and refine the language models with more math and human feedback, telling the model which responses are good or bad and mitigating incoherent, weird, biased, or just bad responses. That means when you ask ChatGPT a question such as “Can you give me a weather forecast for New York written in the style of a Shakespearean sonnet?” it gives a (somewhat) coherent answer.
As these young Christian AI engineers build powerful tools, they navigate the half jokes from relatives: Are you building something to destroy humanity? Something that will take my job? Something to be greater than God?
Finding companions who understand the unique pressures of working in AI is key. Eastman stays in touch with one Christian mentor: Derek Schuurman, his undergrad computer science professor at Redeemer University in Hamilton, Ontario, where Eastman is from. A background at a small Christian liberal arts college is unusual in AI. Eastman’s education helped him understand that “this tech we’re building isn’t neutral,” he said. “That’s obvious to me, but that’s surprising sometimes to secular engineers or Christian engineers trained in secular institutions…. We’re imbuing particular values in these models.”
In the absence of Christian friends in AI, Eastman reads Schuurman’s book A Christian Field Guide to Technology for Engineers and Designers. Schuurman, now a professor at Calvin University, wrote one chapter as a series of imaginary letters to a young engineer. He warns against ignoring rest, taking too much pride in high-profile projects, putting work ahead of friends and family, and falling into self-reliance from high compensation. Those tendencies don’t appear at the start of a career, he said, but set in insidiously:
Don’t forget… our entire life is a response to God.… If Christ’s lordship extends over all of life, then his lordship must also extend to engineering and technology. In the words of the late professor Lewis Smedes, we are called to “go into the world and create some imperfect models of the good world to come.”
From The Haunting of Verdant Valley, a photo book by Stephen Voss. Used with permission.The engineers who spoke with CT don’t think they’re destroying humanity, but because of the pace of their work, they are navigating their own human limitations as they experience burnout, isolation, and cutthroat company culture. Though they say they don’t feel as though their colleagues are hostile to their faith, they also don’t find many other Christians at their companies.
Affinity groups exist: Google DeepMind engineer Richard Zhang started a collective called Global Christians in AI, with about 250 subscribers. He knows another DeepMind researcher who is hoping to start a Bible study at Google.
But the average programmer isn’t getting invited to Bible studies at work. Despite headlines about some Silicon Valley executives’ new interest in Christianity, employees on the ground don’t feel like they’re in the middle of some kind of Christian awakening in their offices. They all want to know more Christians in their field but in many cases haven’t found them. One goes on regular runs with his pastor, which helps. Some meet up with other tech professionals at church.
Faith is “still kind of off-limits” in tech companies, and that’s a concern with all the ethical questions around AI, said Hunter Guy, the cofounder and CEO of Study Aloud, an ed tech company. She has mentored industry professionals at Progressive Baptist Church in Chicago. When they disagree with a project or find themselves burned out, Guy said, tech professionals must ask themselves, “When do I walk away?” Part of what will allow Christians to do that, she added, is understanding that “purpose doesn’t end when your job does. Calling doesn’t end when your job does.”
Some Christian AI engineers sense a calling to stay in the field as long as they can. Kenya Andrews is also a member of Progressive Baptist and is friends with Guy. As a Black woman, Andrews is a minority in AI engineering. When she was a little kid, she and her dad built a computer from scratch. When she was a teen, people came to her with their computer questions.
Andrews went on to become the first in her Georgia family to graduate from college. Her parents were the first in their families to graduate high school. Her paternal grandfather was a sharecropper, and her paternal grandmother was a cook and maid. They were adamant that Andrews get as much education as possible.
Andrews, 30, has blown away their expectations: She recently completed a PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois Chicago. But the pressures of doing high-level machine learning research caused her to consider leaving her PhD program to go back to her old software engineering job, which suddenly felt simpler. She kept going because she felt a calling from God. She also didn’t want to let down her family or abandon the research to which she felt she could uniquely contribute.
She went into AI to research justice in algorithms or, as she puts it, to build machines that treat individual humans as who they truly are. Algorithms are determining everything from employment and parole to health care options and mortgage eligibility. Evidence is piling up that these models are built on historical data with biases against racial minorities. An engineer at a big company may not have time to think about how a seemingly small choice for an algorithmic model will affect millions; a researcher like Andrews, in academia, does.
Her dissertation focused on how algorithms pull data from medical records to make health care decisions. “I think that really aligns well with ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ ” she said. “The Word talks about justice a lot… people who didn’t have humanity before, and [Jesus] now giving them humanity.” She added, “Everything I do is driven by me wanting to honor Christ. It’s not compartmentalized for me.”
But because of the American political climate, Andrews said it’s been difficult to find support for diversity-related research. She was thinking about applying for a National Institutes of Health grant earlier this year. When she returned to the NIH webpage two weeks later, the grant was no longer listed.
Like Andrews’s family, Michael Shi’s parents are thrilled and proud that he works in AI in Silicon Valley. But for Shi, 31, the job in this cutting-edge field has been all-consuming and stressful. “It has not been a physically, emotionally, spiritually healthy place to be,” he said.
His own anger in tense moments has surprised him. On one high-profile project, frustration between him and his team escalated, which led to multiple blowups. The project was behind schedule, and he felt that the quality of work was below expectations. Meanwhile, different people on the team were vying for power.
Shi said he yelled and made harsh statements to his coworkers. That incident caused him to have doubts about his faith. He wondered why he felt so angry. Shouldn’t God have transformed him more by now? A Christian shouldn’t react that way, he thought.
From The Haunting of Verdant Valley, a photo book by Stephen Voss. Used with permission.He feels like his church friends can’t really understand what’s going on at his workplace. He doesn’t know other Christians in AI. “I had not been giving much grace to others because I had not given myself space to receive grace from the Lord,” he said. “I’m beginning to realize that the expectations I place on myself or others place on me are not the same as God’s expectations for me. God is ultimately pleased by my faithfulness.”
He tries to go for walks outside, which clear his mind. He goes to his pastor’s class on spiritual disciplines. But he knows he’s burned out.
On the other hand, Zhang at Google DeepMind doesn’t want Christian engineers to be so worried about burnout that they stop working hard. “The tension there is we’re called to be excellent,” he said. At another company he knows of, Christians have a reputation for being lazy. “It’s hard to balance.”
A big part of the growing burnout is that the AI boom came shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic, which young engineers said both isolated them and erased their work-life boundaries.
Kucher, the AI engineer who entered the field a few years ago, started graduate school weeks before the pandemic set in. He was sitting in a room by himself facing down Zoom classes and math equations on a laptop. Work never stopped, and knowledgeable counsel was hard to come by. Now at a startup, he said, more weeks have become “bad weeks” at work. “The pace of stuff has been absolutely insane.”
Like other Christian engineers, Kucher entered the industry because he wanted to create something that would help people and that they would use every day. Some of his graduate work involved improving medical imaging through machine learning.
He left one company after feeling disillusioned about its purely profit-driven product. Now he works at a company where he feels like he’s building something better. He’s spent a year and a half programming a chat application that can instantly pull together data analysis that would have taken a human a week to do. But there’s no break in sight for him.
“It hurts to have things I prioritize—like exercise or volunteering at church—slowly, bit by bit, being eroded, depending on the week we’re having at work,” he said. He hasn’t found a Christian mentor in the AI field, despite trying.
Kucher reminds himself that his identity is not his job. He fights for time to rest. “I am a child of God,” he tells himself. “I’m valued and I’m worthy, and I’m doing my best.”
Emily Belz is a senior staff writer at Christianity Today.
This article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Faith in the Machine".
Related
