Hello, fellow wayfarers … Why the tech bros’ “fix” to the loneliness crisis will make it much, much worse and how the church can get ready … What is imperiled about the American Revolution … Why the question “Will we know each other in heaven?” is about more than just curiosity … A Desert Island Playlist from a professor of sacred music … This is this week’s Moore to the Point.
Chatbot Companionship Will Make Our Loneliness Crisis Worse
In the latest issue of The Atlantic, journalist Damon Beres warns about the deceptiveness of AI companionship with the admonition “Get a Real Friend.” His analysis recognizes that real friendship is harder than it seems. But as the major tech companies develop sophisticated artificial intelligence for erotic purposes as well as for friendship, Christians are sleepwalking into a future the Bible describes as hell. The Prophets saw the chatbots coming. They told us where that path leads, and it’s not to freedom from loneliness.
What Beres describes is the exact right combination of societal dangers hitting all at the same time. People are disconnected, with institutions failing and friendships—much less intimate relationships—harder to make and sustain. It is now very possible to rapidly develop lifelike AI companions. That development is led by a small cohort of tech bros who have a motive for profit and almost no personal concept of a what a person is. And as Beres notes, “We are at the very beginning of the chatbot era.”
Beres documents the musings of the leaders in the race toward chatbot companions and lovers, going back to venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” of 2023. It affirms, “We believe that there is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.” Beres points out the irony of Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose social media innovations led to unprecedented disconnection and polarization, offering to cure those very problems with personal-seeming “companions” that can provide what the digital age has evaporated: friends.
And that’s all even before we get to Elon Musk—who has fathered multiple children with multiple women outside of marriage—now offering us sexbots that promise to get more and more lifelike until they are almost indistinguishable from the real thing.
One aspect of our accelerated time is that in-depth analyses such as Beres’s are often confirmed and illustrated by events that happen between when the piece is written and when it is read. For instance, The Wall Street Journal reports this week that OpenAI founder Sam Altman and other tech titans are funding startups working to create genetically engineered babies. This is not a side venture from the chatbot project but is of a piece with it.
After all, as Beres notes, part of the problem the AI-companion revolution seeks to solve is people lacking friendships, but part of it is that people want friendships without friction—the kind of unpredictable and nonengineerable differences and tensions that make genuine intimacy possible. In the imagined utopia of the tech bros, we need never have a lover who is not perfectly attuned to our desires, a friend who does not completely share our interests and opinions, and a child who doesn’t share all the genetic traits we want to pass on.
There is no one to stop this. The gerontocracies in Congress cannot even understand how social media works, much less regulate the companies 20 years into the project, well after it’s too late. The economy is increasingly dependent on this small group of utopian entrepreneurs, who often own “old” media companies or social media platforms.
The prophet Isaiah knew exactly what draws us to these kinds of promises. He depicted idols—technology constructed by human hands but meant to satisfy spiritual longings—as a form of self-deception. The prophet described an ironsmith or a carpenter using technical tools—hammers, axes, pencils, compasses—to create something that appears to be human (Isa. 44:9–16). The technician takes some raw materials to burn in a fire to get warm. “And the rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, and falls down to it and worships it,” Isaiah wrote. “He prays to it and says, ‘Deliver me, for you are my god!’” (v. 17, ESV throughout).
The problem, Isaiah thundered, is not just that this is an offense against God but also that it fails on its own terms. The thing made with ears, eyes, and a mouth cannot hear, see, or speak. The personal nature of it comes only from the willed self-deception of the idol maker: “He feeds on ashes; a deluded heart has led him astray, and he cannot deliver himself or say, ‘Is there not a lie in my right hand?’” (v. 20).
A chatbot can seem to be a better friend, or a better lover, than anyone in real life—and in some ways, that’s true. Chatbots are artificial, constructed to echo to users exactly what they want to hear. There’s no risk of being misunderstood or disagreed with or hurt. And yet what is that relationship? In the end, these conversations are only an echo of ourselves.
One example is sexbots. Simultaneously and incoherently, they appeal to a nature that wants to be both an animal, driven by instincts and appetites, and a god, unleashed from the limitations of creatureliness. As reflected in the Bible, that leads to humanity becoming a beast that declares itself to be a god, demanding worship through an image of itself that can speak (Rev. 13:1–18).
But the pull toward this self-exaltation is powerful precisely because it encompasses our cultural and technological ecosystems (“following the course of this world”), gets driven along by unseen forces (“following the prince of the power of the air”), and promises gratification of our most primal appetites (“in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the flesh and the mind”), as Paul put it in Ephesians 2:2–3.
The tech bros have marketed these products by appealing to rage—giving sad, lonely people artificial victories in opportunities to “own” people and troll them online. And they are marketing by appealing to lust—giving sad, lonely people artificial intimacy with images and machines pretending to be persons. Where does this lead? Ultimately, we find that in disconnecting from real community and cleaving to our own prompts and algorithmically discerned preferences, we are all alone. We cave in on ourselves.
The church cannot answer this as long as we deny it is taking place. But if we see what’s happening, we can offer something that will seem increasingly strange in an artificial world. We can offer a community gathered around bread and wine and an ancient gospel. We can offer a group of people who differ on the things the machines and their creators tell us are most important—politics, wealth, claims of racial or cultural superiority—precisely because we are convinced that technological progress cannot fix our deepest problems.
And we can offer an old kind of friendship, not just with each other but with God, friendship that a chatbot cannot replicate. One of the most startling things about the Jesus of the Gospels is that he fully knows those he encounters (John 1:48–49) while completely confounding their expectations of him (6:60–69). In a world of sycophantic chatbots, Christ disturbs what we want enough that we can find in him what we need: one who tells us the truth—one who is, in fact, the truth.
The church is not ready for the chatbot-companion revolution. It will make loneliness and disconnection worse. We should be ready for that world, ready with a radical counter-vision. We can say, “What a friend we have in Jesus” and really know what that means.
Why the American Revolution Still Matters
It’s hard to keep my attention for a two-hour movie, much less a 12-hour documentary series, yet somehow Ken Burns can do it. My whole life has been punctuated with Ken Burns documentaries—on the Civil War, on country music, on jazz, on national parks. This week I sat down with him to talk about his newest project—one that is perhaps more relevant than ever.
Burns tells me that the American Revolution—the subject of his newest PBS series—is “the most important event in world history since the birth of Christ.” I would disagree, of course, since the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, Pentecost, and so on have happened between the Nativity and now. But his point is that something happened at Valley Forge and Yorktown and Concord that matters to everyone, American or not. And that revolutionary experiment feels more fragile now than ever.
In this conversation, we talk about some of our differences. Burns’s personal religion fits sociologist Christian Smith’s category of moralistic therapeutic deism quite well, and Burns seems to resonate more with Benjamin Franklin than with George Whitefield. We also talk about whether the Revolution was morally hypocritical, with people enslaved at Monticello and Mount Vernon, and why the term heritage Americans is nonsense. We also talk about divine providence and how that mattered for what the founders actually believed about divine providence. (Hint: It wasn’t what you think.)
Along the way: Schoolhouse Rock! nostalgia, baseball metaphors, and what it means to be a patriot when the word itself has been hijacked.
You can listen here.
Will We Know Each Other in Heaven?
Right now on Thursdays I am teaching a course at Lipscomb University on the biblical meaning of hope. In talking about eternity, I said I could anticipate at least two of the students’ questions. Almost every time I have ever taught or preached on matters of last things—which is thousands of times—and there’s a question time, two questions come up without fail. One is whether there is sex in heaven. Another is “Will we know each other in heaven?” I don’t want to lean into gender stereotypes here, but in my experience, every case of the first is from a man, and every case of the second is from a woman. Make of that what you will.
This week, after I mentioned that trend in my lecture, a member of the audience raised her hand to ask, “Well, will we know each other in heaven?” This is a deceptively simple question, because it goes so much deeper than it seems. Enfolded in it are the questions “What is a person?” and “What is the meaning of life?”
Usually, the person asking the question is really communicating the experience of love—and wondering whether that dies with death or continues beyond. In some ways, that’s a question of whether a person can say truly, “I will have eternal life.” So much of what makes you you and me me comes about in relationship to other people. I am shaped by my parents, my wife, my children, my friendships, even ancestors whose faces I don’t know. Without those connections, I am an entirely different person.
When Jesus notes that God in the burning bush said to Moses, “I am … the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Ex. 3:6), we should think about just how intertwined those three designations are. Would Abraham be Abraham—“father of many nations” (Rom. 4:17)—without Isaac? Would Moses be Moses without Jacob, whose son Joseph is the reason Moses was born in Egypt? Those relationships mattered to who they were and are. Even as Jesus noted the discontinuities of the life to come with this one (“They neither marry nor are given in marriage,” Matt. 22:30), he also emphasized the continuities.
Yes, we will know each other in eternity. We cannot imagine or express what that will be like because eternity is beyond our present human comprehension (2 Cor. 12:4), but we do know that eternal life is fullness of life (John 10:10)—that is, it is more than the best of what we experience now. For Paul to write that, on the other side of this dim mirror, when “face to face” with God, he will “know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12), implies the knowledge of one another. We are, after all, members of one another and of Christ (12:27).
Jesus taught this with his disciples. He referenced a connection between their experience together in the present and their experience together in the future (Luke 22:29–30). He also said, “I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom” (Matt. 26:29, emphasis added). That promise is not just to one individual but to a group, a collection of relationships, and he speaks of something real and present and fundamentally relational—eating together at the table—that will resume in the fullness of time.
Your loves matter. Your friendships matter. Your giving of yourself matters. Yes, we will know each other in the new creation, because, after everything else falters, love abides (1 Cor. 13:13). “Love is strong as death,” the Song of Solomon tells us (8:6). Jesus shows us it’s even stronger.
Desert island Playlist
Every other week, I share a playlist of songs one of you says you’d want to have on hand if you were stranded on a desert island. This week’s submission comes from reader Jerry Blackstone,who is visiting professor of music at the University of Notre Dame and notes that he is writing today from Cedar, Michigan. Blackstone writes of his list, “Let’s hope a ship stops by with Apple Music so I can keep listening after this list is complete.” Here’s his short but expertly informed list:
- “Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen” from Johannes Brahms, Ein deutsches Requiem. One of the most sublime musical and textual descriptions of our longing for heaven that I know. For chorus and orchestra, Ein deutsches Requiem is a requiem for the living rather than for the dead.
- “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein” from J. S. Bach, St. Matthew Passion (baritone solo). Bach’s magisterial setting of the Passion account from St. Matthew’s gospel is one of the great musical monuments in Western culture. “Make yourself pure, my heart, / I want to bury Jesus myself. / For from now on he shall have in me, / forever and ever, / his sweet rest. World, get out, let Jesus in!”
- Movement 2 from Frédéric Chopin, Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Minor, Op. 21. The elegant lyricism of this concerto movement is unparalleled in the piano repertoire.
- Movement 14, “Thou Didst Rise from the Tomb,” from Sergei Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil (Vespers). Based on texts from the Russian Orthodox all-night vigil, the composition dates from 1915 and is considered one of his greatest achievements.
- Movement 5 from Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (Resurrection). It’s nearly impossible to listen to this final movement from Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 without weeping. The hope, joy, and ecstasy are palpable. Late Romanticism at its finest, both spiritual and profound.
Thank you, Dr. Blackstone!
Readers, what do y’all think? If you were stranded on a desert island for the rest of your life and could have only one playlist or one bookshelf with you, what songs or books would you choose?
- For a Desert Island Playlist, send me a list between 5 and 12 songs, excluding hymns and worship songs. (We’ll cover those later.)
- For a Desert Island Bookshelf, send me a list of up to 12 books, along with a photo of all the books together.
Send your list (or both lists) to questions@russellmoore.com, and include as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like, along with the city and state from which you’re writing.
Quote of the Moment
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.”
—Martin Luther King Jr. in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Love
Currently Reading (or Re-Reading)
- Leslie Baynes, Between Interpretation and Imagination: C. S. Lewis and the Bible (Eerdmans)
- Rowan Williams, Passions of the Soul (Bloomsbury)
- Brandon M. Terry, Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement (Belknap)
- Matthew Barrett and Ardel Caneday, eds., Four Views on the Historical Adam (Zondervan)
- Margaret Atwood, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts (Doubleday)
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Russell Moore
Editor in Chief, Christianity Today
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