We’re Committed to Humans

Staff Editor

A note from CT’s editorial director and art director for print in our July/August issue.

Illustration by James Walton

In 2008, Nicholas Carr asked if Google was making us stupid. It was “tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory,” as he put it. (Don’t miss an excerpt of Carr’s recent conversation with Russell Moore.) With the speed of technological advance, is our technology simply a neutral tool? Or will using AI, like using Google, not just change how we process information but also change how we are intellectually and spiritually formed?

Already, changes are afoot. In 2025, the primary way users interact with generative AI is for therapy, according to the Harvard Business Review. We’re using AI for advice, care, and intimacy—things once found within networks of institutions, churches, and in-person communities. Does our use of AI somehow make us less human?

In this issue of Christianity Today, we’re putting these questions front and center.

Many writers in the following pages focus not on technology’s efficiency, limitlessness, or productivity but on its impact on human lives—how we must define what being human means in relation to emerging inventions. Emily Belz introduces us to Christian tech engineers; Harvest Prude investigates the algorithms used in dating apps; and Haejin and Makoto Fujimura describe the intertwining of justice and beauty as what makes us uniquely human.

Miroslav Volf tells us that an algorithm is unable to say “who we ought to be . . . and what we should desire” (p. 80)—for that we need the capacious love of God. As Kelly Kapic puts it, God’s “highest value is not efficiency . . . but love” (p. 50).

In a recent TED Talk, technologist Tristan Harris warned of the necessity to take a “narrow path” in AI development, where “power is matched with responsibility.” As Christians, we know much about walking such a narrow path.

Ashley Hales is editorial director for print at Christianity Today.

Software companies like Adobe keep introducing AI tools that aim to streamline creative work. If the last couple of years have been any indication, this endeavor will only expand. But each update is met with mixed reception. Now well into the surge of generative AI, creative professionals and working artists continue to debate its use.

In 2023, I wrote that generative AI in the creative marketplace only increases the value and importance of human-made art. The mass production of AI-generated content will create a longer-term validation of the slow process of making things by hand. I still stand by this argument.

As our art department worked on the art for this issue and its numerous articles discussing AI, we didn’t do much differently than we normally do. There are certainly some winks at the theme—Nick Little takes us to the digital world of vintage video games (p. 39) and we purposefully feature handmade art by fine artist Emily Verdoorn (p. 51)—but when we considered the relevance of making AI-generated imagery ourselves, it just wasn’t appealing. We love working with people too much. Just as our editors continue to work with writers on the stories and ideas in our publication, we still give preference to working with illustrators, photographers, and everyone in between.

We don’t yet know where this age of AI will lead—whether to ruin or to prosperity. We’re building the plane while it’s in the air. But like the passenger on this issue’s cover art, we tend to cross a threshold where generative AI leaves us bored and disengaged—both as creators and as an audience. We want to be involved. We crave human ingenuity and personal connection. God designed us to make things, have ideas, and interact with other people.

Therefore, generating art through AI will never be as impactful as making things up yourself. It will never be as rewarding or insightful as collaborating with fellow humans. AI might be a fine assistant, but it will never replace artists.

Jared Boggess is art director for print at Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Editorial Notes".

- More from Ashley Hales

News

Meet the Christian Engineers Helping to Shape AI

Emily Belz

These young tech workers are struggling to live out their faith as they navigate a high-stakes industry.

All photographs from The Haunting of Verdant Valley, a photo book by Stephen Voss about the hidden toil of Silicon Valley. Used with permission.

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".

- More from Emily Belz

Testimony

Explosive Secrets Damaged Me. Surrendering to Jesus Saved Me.

Christine Caine

A balcony view, a warehouse church, and the sweetness of the Word led me to the safe home of God’s love.

Photography by Sarah Partian for Christianity Today

Growing up in Sydney, I could not fathom that God could love someone like me. At our Greek Orthodox church—the cultural hub of the Greek immigrant community to which I belonged—I did not understand the three-hour services in an ancient language that none of us spoke.

I figured that God was too busy running the universe to care about me, and I never felt holy or worthy enough to think I could personally commune with him. I certainly don’t remember ever being encouraged to talk to him directly, and definitely not in my own words.

Besides, I had other things to think about. At school, I was ridiculed and misunderstood because English was my second language. I had taramasalata on my sandwich rather than vegemite and ate spanakopita instead of meat pies. Though I made Australian friends, my parents never allowed me to go to their homes for birthday parties or to hang out.

Instead, our Greek friends and relatives came to our house, where we ate heaps of Greek food, danced to the soundtrack of Zorba the Greek, and listened to my aunts’ many matchmaking attempts. (The movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding is a glimpse into the first two decades of my life, Windex and all.)

As a daughter, I was told that my sole purpose in life was to become a suitable wife to another Greek, in order to give birth to more Greeks. The prevailing thought among our community was that girls did not need to be too educated, because then no man would want to marry them. But I loved learning and wondered why the future painted for me was not appealing.

On the surface, we may have looked like a typical immigrant family—tight-knit, churchgoing, not wanting to draw attention to ourselves. What few people saw, however, was that secrets hung in the air like a thick, impenetrable fog.

The first secret was our long history of forced migration. My grandparents fled Turkey in 1922 during the Greek genocide and built a new life in Alexandria, Egypt. Thirty years later, Christians became a persecuted minority there, so my parents’ generation had to leave Egypt for Australia. Mum was only 16 when her parents put her and her sister on a ship bound for Sydney, where they worked hard to pay for the rest of the family’s passage. My dad arrived much the same way. But we rarely talked about any of this or the trauma they carried.

The second secret was a trauma of my own. From age 3 to 15, I was the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of several men. I carried this secret silently and alone, because no one ever talked about such things. The weight of the abuse and shame damaged my soul and left me with a deep distrust of men. I did not think to take any of my pain to a God who I assumed was indifferent.

The third secret further tilted my world on its axis. When I was an adult, I learned that my older brother, George, was adopted. When George confronted Mum about it, she turned to me and asked if I wanted to know the whole truth: I was adopted too. Only my younger brother, Andrew, was my parents’ biological child.

I discovered that my biological mother was a single Greek immigrant who had left me in the hospital, unnamed and unwanted. My parents adopted me when I was two weeks old, but because of the shame they’d felt at not being able to have children yet, they kept our adoptions secret for more than three decades.

It’s no wonder I developed patterns of destructive behavior and entered unhealthy relationships in my young adult life. I desperately sought love, significance, and security—things I did not find until I completely surrendered my life to Jesus.

Photography by Sarah Partian for Christianity Today

When I look back on how I came to know Jesus, I realize that he was pursuing me my whole life. In my childhood, sometimes the stony barricade cracked and glimpses of God shone through in my Greek Orthodox church. In Australia’s public schools, where religion classes were compulsory, I felt drawn to the Bible in my elementary years.

When I reached high school, I met Carol, a parent volunteer who started and ended every class with prayer. She was the first person I’d met who prayed to God like she expected him to listen, like God cared personally about every one of us.

But if my journey to Jesus were a GPS route, it would have been “recalculating” at every turn. By the time I reached my college years, I was far from God.

In addition to carrying the pain of my childhood years, I blamed God for my dad’s unexpected death when I was 19. My dad had had cancer, and we were relieved he was in remission—until he was suddenly gone. Why would God want us to be in so much pain? I was so angry with him.

Naturally, then, when a Christian friend invited me to a series of lectures by J. John, a Greek evangelist from England, I was hesitant. But because he was Greek, I went. After the first lecture, my friend connected me with him. I made it very clear to John that I didn’t agree with what he was saying. He didn’t flinch. He simply said, “Let’s go have coffee.”

John answered my endless questions with care and compassion and kept inviting me to ask more. I came to trust him and began to see that perhaps God was not as distant and cruel as I had assumed.

Two years later, I took a trip to Switzerland with friends to celebrate my birthday. Sitting on a balcony, I thought about God and all the times he’d shown me glimpses of himself. Against a sweeping view of Zurich, the fractured pieces of my life came together in a panorama, aglow with grace. In that moment, I felt God gently calling me to surrender everything to him and follow.

So that very day, at the prompting of the Holy Spirit, I made four crucial decisions: Go back to Sydney, end the relationship I was in, finish college, and go to church. These seemingly simple actions meant that my life would change forever.

Greek Orthodox girls did not go to Protestant churches or get baptized as adults. Their families didn’t just let them go. These choices cost me my family—for a time—and the person with whom I thought I would spend the rest of my life. I didn’t know what was ahead, but I did understand what I had to leave behind to become a fully devoted follower of Jesus.

Months later, a friend invited me to join her for a Sunday service. It was the first time I stepped inside a Pentecostal church, and at first glance I almost mistook it for a disco. The inside of the former warehouse was dimly lit, and the stage was set with colored spotlights, drums, and guitars. People were milling around in clusters, chatting, and there was no priest to be found.

As strange and unfamiliar as it was, once the service started, I was deeply impacted by the worship. The words were personal and intimate, inviting me to love God with all my heart, soul, body, and strength. When the youth pastor, a woman, delivered the message, I was captivated. The presence of God was thick in the air. All I could do was keep going back.

As I began reading God’s Word for myself, its beauty and truth gripped my heart. Like most Greek Orthodox church attendees, I grew up kissing the Bible, but I had never thought I could read or understand it myself. What I tasted was sweeter than honey and more precious than gold. Day by day, I could feel myself changing as deep healing worked into my wounded soul.

One day, I realized that the girl damaged by explosive secrets had found a safe home in God’s love. Where there was once distrust, there was now faith in the one who works all things for our good. I realized that I was finally learning to walk freely by the Spirit in grace and truth—and I longed to help others do the same.

Seven years after I first walked into that church, I married Nick (whom I met at a class in Bible college), and together we founded Equip & Empower, through which we minister throughout the world and oversee our three churches in Greece, Bulgaria, and Poland. In 2008, we started A21, a global organization against human trafficking that operates in 10 nations to reach, recover, and restore those trapped in modern-day slavery. And in 2010, we began Propel Women to empower, equip, and mobilize Christian women for leadership.

Each of these ministries is a testimony of how God has transformed the trauma of my past into compassion for those he calls me to love.

Whether we cross oceans or tread through minefields of painful secrets, God holds us safely in his hands. If we veer off course into yet another detour, he takes our wrong turns and recalculates them into better paths, bringing us to where he intended all along. His plans for us are always to bring life, in ourselves and through our stories.

Christine Caine is a speaker, activist, and author.

This article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Testimony".

- More from Christine Caine

Theology

An Image of God for an Era of AI

Russell Moore

Columnist

Our understanding of the imago Dei must be shaped by awe, mystery, and the person of Jesus Christ.

Illustration by James Walton

Nearly 20 years ago, I took an artificially intelligent cyborg to vacation Bible school.

At the time, I was teaching a Christian ethics class at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and I had my students confront the question of AI in their final exam.

I asked them to imagine their future great-grandson, “Joshua,” as a minister within what used to be called the Southern Baptist Convention (but is now the “Galactic Immersionist Federation”). In this imagined future, Pastor Joshua sits across the desk from Aiden, a little boy going to the church’s summer outreach program. Aiden wants to know how he can become a Christian. He wants to repent of his sins, put his faith in Jesus, and go to heaven when he dies.

The catch: Aiden is manufactured, a Frankenstein’s creation of cloned human body parts with a generative AI mind. The question my students faced was “What would you advise Pastor Joshua to do?” Should he walk Aiden through the answer to the ancient query “What must I do to be saved?” (Acts 16:30). Does the “whosoever” in John 3:16 apply to him—or, should I say, to it?

The point of that final exam was to dislodge students from their tendency to treat ethical dilemmas like a world-view concordance of right answers to premade questions. I wanted to see not so much their answers as how they arrived at their answers—how they integrated the Bible and the gospel into a situation for which they probably didn’t have preexisting slogans.

Today, those students are still far from having great-grandchildren, yet here we all are. We’re on the cusp of what some are calling an “axial decade,” in which advances in artificial intelligence may spur on the contemporary equivalent of the Axial Age (when the emergence of literacy transformed the way human beings exist in the world).

Pastor Joshua might not be born yet, but Aiden is here. And the church is not ready. Indeed, to talk seriously about AI is to risk causing the same reaction that many of my students had to their final—categorizing it as futuristic science fiction. But the root of our unreadiness is not that we don’t adequately understand what a chatbot is. It’s that we don’t sufficiently understand what a human being is.

The crisis of our age is a radical reducing of human life to a flow of data and information, so much so that some tech pioneers suggest eternal life can be achieved by uploading our minds to a digital cloud. Douglas Rushkoff describes this mindset as “the belief that we can code our way out of this mess,” presuming that in a world of code, “anything that isn’t yet code can eventually be converted to a digital format as easily as a vinyl record can be translated to a streaming file.”

Christians, of course, have a distinctive view of the human person as imago Dei—made in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:27). The problem is that modern Christians often unintentionally speak of this distinctiveness in terms just as machinelike as those used by the world around us.

We try to identify what “part” of us bears the image. We are morally accountable, we say, unlike other animals—and that’s true, but the Bible tells us there are other morally accountable beings in the universe (1 Cor. 6:3). Or we point to our ability for relationship—and that’s true also, but what does that say when people fall in love with their chatbots?

Perhaps most problematically, we speak of the imago Dei as our rationality, our ability to think and to reason. But intelligence has never been exclusive to human beings. The Serpent of Eden is described as “crafty” or “cunning” (Gen. 3:1; 2 Cor. 11:3), and the apostle Paul spoke of the “schemes” of the Devil (Eph. 6:11, ESV throughout).

After Genesis, though, the Bible doesn’t further define the concept of the image of God until the New Testament. Even then, it defines that image not as a what or a how but a who.

Jesus, Paul wrote, is “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). The Incarnation means that Jesus joined us in flesh and blood, in our suffering and creatureliness, in order to free us from our captivity to the power of death (Heb. 2:14–15).

All creation is meant, somehow, to recognize humanity as signifying the reign of God (Rom. 8:19). And in the flesh-and-blood person of Jesus, it does. Even the molecular structures of fish and bread obey him and multiply. In strikingly personal terms, Jesus says, “Peace! Be still!” to the wind and waves, and they respond (Mark 4:39).

Paul speaks of creation as revealing the “invisible attributes” of God (Rom. 1:20) in ways that mirror the concept of the image of God. This is not the potential to trace philosophical arguments from the order of the world back to God; the Bible says this revelation to humanity is “plain to them, because God has shown it to them” (v. 19). Something in our being is meant to resonate with the awe and mystery of the world, triggering us to recognize something—someone—behind the veil of what we can see.

The church in the AI age must recognize that to be human is not about “stuff” that can be weighed or quantified. We must understand that there’s a mystery to life that cannot be uploaded or downloaded or manipulated by technique. Simply recognizing this in an age of smart machines is a good start.

The world has always asked what the meaning of human life is. It is about to start asking what it means to be human at all. That’s a final examination question for us all.

A robot can give an answer, but that’s not enough. We should point to a Person. And in an age of artificial intelligence, as always, that will be strange enough to save.

Russell Moore is editor in chief at CT.

This article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "A Different Image of God for an Era of AI".

Culture

Nicholas Carr on AI Doctors and Internet Edgelords

Interview by Russell Moore

The author and tech journalist joined the Russell Moore Show to discuss what we stand to lose when we embrace artificial intelligence.

Illustration by Ronan Lynam

Author Nicholas Carr joined The Russell Moore Show to talk about how technologies that promise to connect us are instead damaging our relationships and our ability to make sense of the world. This excerpt from their conversation appeared first in print. Listen to the entire episode after July 9. This interview was edited for clarity and length.

Illustration by Ronan Lynam

Nicholas Carr and Russell Moore

Russell Moore: A lot of people think of technologies (such as AI and social media) merely as tools. One of the arguments that you make in your book Superbloom is that the way we use these technologies changes our experience of the world.

Nicholas Carr: One of the big points that I try to make in the book is that human beings grew up in a physical world, in a material world. We are profoundly ill-suited to living our lives, particularly our social lives, online.

We thought that being able to communicate with a much broader set of people more quickly in much greater volume would expand our horizons, would give us more social context, a deeper understanding of each other.

What we’ve seen is that we are overwhelmed by the communication that we thought would liberate us. And it turns out that a lot of our social identity hinges on being in physical places with groups of people. That doesn’t mean we can’t extend that with telephone calls and letter-writing and everything. But human beings are very much dependent on being together in the physical world.

Until social media came along, you’d go out and you’d be with one set of people. Maybe it would be your classmates in school, or your coworkers at work, or your family. Maybe it would be a group of friends going out to a restaurant. You’d socialize there and you’d learn about one another. And then you’d separate, and there would be time when you were by yourself. You could think back over what just happened and about your relationships. You would have downtime, in which you could organize your thoughts, question yourself, and relax for a little while—because there is a stress involved in socializing. And then you would go on to another place at another time with another group of people. And it’s through these physical interactions that we expand our empathetic connection to other people.

RM: That makes me think of the ideal paradigm for church life that we have had over many generations: A group of people who are gathered together some of the time and then are doing their own spiritual work apart from that, and then gathering back together for acts of service or mission.

NC: And it’s both the being together and the being apart that’s important. When you transfer social life onto the internet and you interact with people through screens, then the rhythm of your life, the tempo of your life, is completely different. You can socialize all the time because the social world is there in the form of your phone, which we’ve trained ourselves to carry all the time.

It’s not just one set of people you’re interacting with. It’s everyone. It’s people you go to school with, people you work with, your parents, your children, your friends, anonymous crowds of commenters online, and so forth. All the socio-temporal divisions, the space and time divisions that are inherent to living and socializing in the real world, in the physical world, are simply decimated.

A lot of the antisocial behavior, the rudeness, the polarization of views, and the shunning of other people that we see online comes from the fact that our lives have lost their connection to space and time.

RM: One of the things that I’ve noticed for some time now in evangelical Christianity is a group of young men who don’t seem to aspire to be preachers or pastors or even scholars in the way that previous generations would have aspired to those things. They want to be “edgelords” on the internet. One of the ways to do that is to post something really shocking in the hopes that people will react to it. And you can see these young men become more extreme, sometimes to the point of Nazification.

I thought about that phenomenon as I was reading your book. You quote sociologist Sherry Turkle about this digital way of life as an “anti-empathy machine.” And what we have seen is that empathy itself is viewed as a sin, a fake virtue. What does technology do to our ability to have empathy?

NC: One of the great strengths of human beings is how adaptable we are. We can adapt to different situations very well. But adaptation doesn’t necessarily make you better. You can adapt to an environment in a way that makes you less empathetic, less sympathetic, angrier. When you have people saying that empathy is an enemy, I think that’s a manifestation of how people adapt to the online environment. Empathy gets in the way of promoting yourself, getting attention, being an edgelord.

One thing Turkle pointed out is that empathy is a complex emotion, unlike anger and fear, which are primal emotions that come from lower down in the brain and are triggered immediately. Empathy is something you learn how to feel, and it requires attentiveness to other people—trying to get inside their heads and understand them. One thing that online life steals from us is attention. Because we’re constantly overloaded with new messages, new information, we simply don’t have time to back away from the flow and say, “Let me think about whether this is important. Let me just pay attention to this person.”

When you’re constantly distracted, constantly shifting your attention rather than focusing it, not only do your thoughts become more shallow—because deep intellectual thinking requires concentration and focus—and not only does it affect your intellect. I think it affects your emotional capabilities too. You start to lose these deep, difficult, complex emotions that take time and attentiveness, and you revert to instinctive emotions like anger, fear, and belligerence. We see a lot of that online, and it is very concerning that people start to say, “Well, empathy wasn’t important anyway.” People are expressing the fact that they have destroyed their ability to experience empathy, so they say it’s not important anymore.

We see this on the intellectual side too, where people say, “I don’t need to read books anymore. I don’t need to focus on one thing for a long time. That’s just a waste of time. I need to process information as quickly as possible.” In adapting to our new environment, we start to take on the qualities of that environment.

RM: It makes me think of the way Jesus taught with parables in the Gospels. There was this sense of getting people to a point of perplexity: What does the father do when the son who has insulted him comes back home? Who was the neighbor to the person beaten by the side of the road? It’s almost required that we think this through and feel this through. And then Jesus turns it around and flips it on the person who’s hearing and reveals that it’s a completely different way of thinking.

I’m finding more young Christian students and others who really want to work on their spiritual development but say they don’t know how to read a text. They don’t know how to get lost in the Gospel of Mark or in the Book of Jeremiah. That’s the time we’re in, right?

NC: That’s absolutely right. Just as it takes time to learn how to feel complex emotions like empathy, you have to learn how to pay attention. This is one of the most important things in childhood education, because kids are naturally distractible. And so are adults. Being able to focus your mind on something important—maybe it’s what you’re reading, a conversation you’re having, or a work of art—is something that has to be learned and practiced.

We are not teaching kids the skills of managing their own minds. Instead, we give technology sway over our attention. We say that whatever comes up next on the phone is what I’m going to pay attention to. We’re not training kids how to manage their own conscious minds, which is essential to choosing what you want to do at any given moment. As adults, we’re losing that ability as well. We’re letting the technology make critical choices about what we think about rather than making those choices ourselves.

RM: I have found myself in some version of the following conversation countless times over the past several years: A group of religious leaders will say, “Look, Martin Luther used the printing press, and the Reformation exploded. Billy Graham used the newly emerging technology of radio and television. And if we’re going to engage with the generation to come, churches have to be able to do that via artificial intelligence.” But I haven’t yet found anybody who is doing that in a way that’s compelling to me.

A Roman Catholic group created an AI priest, Father Justin, who ended up being defrocked, even though he’s not real, because he became a heretic pretty quickly. What they assumed would be a delivery system that could help people with counsel and advice from their religious point of view ended up suggesting that baptisms can happen with Gatorade. You’re dealing with a technology that isn’t just a communications tool.

NC: Yeah, communication technology used to be just a transmission technology—people on one end, whether it was a telephone line or a broadcasting system, creating some kind of content and getting it to other people at the other end. It was just a transportation network for information. With Facebook and its algorithms and YouTube and TikTok with their algorithms, suddenly the machinery takes on an editorial function. It starts choosing what content to show or not show to people.

With AI, the machinery is going to take on what we long saw as the fundamental role of human beings in media systems, which is creating the content. So suddenly you have the network—the machinery—creating the content, performing the editorial function of choosing which pieces of content which people will see and then also being the transportation network.

When this happens, you have to start to wonder about the motivations of the people in the companies operating the networks, because suddenly they’re in a position of enormous power over everyone who is going onto these systems to socialize, to find information, to be entertained, to read, or to worship. We’re entering a world that we’re completely unprepared for and haven’t really thought about, because we’ve always assumed that ultimately it’s people who are creating the information that we pay attention to. With AI, that assumption goes out the window.

One of the dangerous possibilities is saying, “Well, it’s okay, we should just go with the flow, because at least AI can give us what we want really quickly and efficiently.”

So why sit down and struggle with writing a toast for my child at his or her wedding? Why sit down and write a sermon from scratch? Why write a letter to a friend when you can just plug the desired outcome into a machine and it’ll pump out adequate material very, very quickly?

I think that’s extremely tempting in many different areas. But in the end, what it steals from us is our own ability to make sense of the world and express understanding of the world. The ultimate effect is this flattening of humanity.

RM: One of the things that people will often point to as an upside of chatbots, for instance, is that people are sometimes reluctant to tell another person the truth when it comes to their mental or physical health. There have been studies that have shown a person will reveal how much he or she is drinking more accurately to a chatbot than they will to their doctor.

NC: I’ve been emphasizing the negative consequences of an overdependence on technology. That doesn’t mean that the technology can’t be useful when applied to a specific problem. If you have algorithms that look at medical x-rays, they can sometimes spot things that human radiologists can’t. What you need is both a deeply informed human doctor to look at an x-ray and the assistance of a digital algorithm. They can work together.

The dangerous thing is if hospitals, or the companies that run hospitals and are looking to cut costs, simply say, “We can get rid of the doctor because doctors are expensive. And the machine’s pretty good at this.”

This is what can happen in all sorts of areas. It may well be that a chatbot can play a role in therapy or in medical situations in some ways, but I think you still need the deeply trained and deeply experienced professional to play the central role. The danger is to say, “The machine’s good enough, and it’s much cheaper and less time consuming than actually having human interaction. So we’ll just go with the machine.”

If you look at where American society stands today, it’s pretty clear that we have a crisis of loneliness. I’m not saying that computers and smartphones and social media are the only cause of that. I think it’s a very complex phenomenon that’s been going on for quite a long time. But this idea that you can socialize simply by staring into a screen ultimately leads to a mirage of socializing that actually leaves people lonely.

Nicholas Carr is a best-selling author who writes about the human consequences of technology.

Russell Moore is editor in chief at Christianity Today and the director of the Public Theology Project.

This article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Guest Appearances".

Ideas

When We Make Intelligence in Our Image

Timothy Dalrymple

From Genesis to generative models, human creativity can echo the Creator’s design.

Illustration by Nick Little

The rise of artificial intelligence presents a dazzling array of philosophical and ethical questions. What is intelligence? How does it differ from consciousness and personhood? Is AI the simulation of activities of intelligent beings or the creation of a new kind of intelligent being? Will certain AI bots become so sophisticated that these beings have emergent brain states similar to animal or human brain states, and if so, what are our moral obligations toward them?

It also presents distinctly theological questions. Is the development of AI an act of hubris or idolatry, or a reflection of the image of our Creator and a fulfillment of our calling to bring order and fruitfulness to the world? What would it mean to align AI technologies toward human flourishing in a manner that reflects a Christian concept of what it means to be human?

Given the pace of the AI revolution, Christians cannot afford to be late to this conversation. Fortunately, the biblical narrative and Christian theology have much to say on these topics. They yield a vision of technology that’s neither utopian nor catastrophist but is rooted in a complex and critical view of what it means to be human, to be sinful, and to join with God in the cultivation and restoration of all things.

A Christian theology of technology should begin with the beginning. Humans, as the crown of God’s creation, were made in the image of their Creator and charged to fill and steward the earth (Gen. 1:28). The God who brought forth abundance and order invited humans to “keep” and “till” the Garden (2:15, NRSV) and thus join him in that work—what we often call the creation mandate.

And while we often imagine Eden as pretechnological because of an implied absence of “toil” (3:17), there’s no reason to suppose its gardeners could not have used simple agricultural tools (say, a hand shovel or pruning hook) in their cultivation of the natural world before the Fall.

After Eden, the biblical narrative describes agricultural technology in Cain’s farming (4:2), civil engineering in the construction of the first cities (v. 17), and metallurgy as Tubal-Cain “forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron” (v. 22). In the primordial narratives of Genesis 1–12, we see both positive and negative uses of technology. The ark was advanced seafaring technology for which Noah was given a divine blueprint, and it served an indispensable role in the preservation of life (6:14–20). The Tower of Babel was constructed using technological innovation (in brickmaking, 11:3–4), yet it resulted in the scattering and fragmentation of humankind.

Later, in Egypt, the Israelites participated in monumental works of engineering and architecture (Ex. 1:11). In the wilderness, they took great care in following God’s direction as they selected building materials and textiles for the ark of the covenant and the tabernacle (Ex. 25). The Mosaic Law advanced agriculture and public health. Military warfare in Israel’s early history involved things like iron chariots (Judges 1:19), missile weapons (1 Sam. 17:50), and advanced weaponry (2 Chron. 1:14–17). Under King Solomon, the Israelites applied their technological craftsmanship to the construction of a grand temple that reflected the glory of God (2 Chron. 3).

While the Hebrew Bible is primarily a story of God’s covenantal relationship with a family that becomes a people, it also illustrates how those people employed the technologies of their time to serve their common human vocation to steward and cultivate the created world as well as their specific calling as bearers of the Word and worshipers of God.

In the New Testament, we read that Christ was a tekton and the son of a tekton (Mark 6:3; Matt. 13:55), which was a craftsman or builder. Not only does Jesus affirm the intrinsic goodness of God’s creation in the Incarnation, but his earthly vocation exhibits the value of the technologist as one who makes new things and restores broken things. Later, Paul supported his ministry through tentmaking (Acts 18:3), and Lydia’s profits from a dyeing technology provided resources for ministry (16:14). And of course, the spread of the gospel in the early church was facilitated by Roman roads and rapidly improving technologies of seafaring, navigation, writing, and bookmaking.

At the same time, some ancient technological artifacts and methods were ethically complex. The same weapons that protected God’s people could be used against them; sometimes the Israelites found themselves at a technological disadvantage (1 Sam. 13:19–22). The same tools and skills the Hebrews used to craft the tabernacle and the temple were used to make idols (Ex. 32:2–4). From the Tower of Babel to the tower that collapsed at Siloam (Luke 13:4), technology could be built for the wrong reasons or built poorly to disastrous effect. Even the cross on which Jesus hung was a kind of technological weapon designed for destruction, a cruel instrument used to instill fear over a population and control their behavior.

As the message of the church spread, Christian theologians soon developed a theological lens for technological work. (As I’ve written previously on these topics in The New Atlantis, I am indebted to the writings and lectures of my former professor and mentor, Diogenes Allen.)

The Cappadocian fathers served artisans or craftsmen (tekhnîtai) in their congregations, and they wrote about the meaning and purpose of the technical crafts (tekhnai) in making the earth more orderly and beautiful. In his work On the Human Condition, Basil of Caesarea spoke of God’s artisanship and how we are artisans in his likeness when we join him in his purpose of restoration. In their commentaries on Genesis, many church fathers, from Basil to Ambrose to John Chrysostom, remarked on Adam and Eve’s “garments of skin” (Gen. 3:21) as a kind of primitive technological artifact and thus God as the first technologist.

In medieval times, Hugh of Saint Victor made the case that technology (in Allen’s thinking) has the potential to be spiritual. That is, the mechanical arts inquire into the natural order God ordained and thus into the mind of God himself. They also can restore right order, in which humankind is not subject to the natural world but steward over it. Hugh’s follower Godfrey even argued that the work of the technologist cultivates skills of patience and attention, which can benefit the life of prayer. Hugh’s work in his Didascalicon set the pattern for many later thinkers who saw the mechanical arts as essential to restoring paradise.

In On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology, Bonaventure described the mechanical arts as instruments of divine love and neighbor love. Artisans must study the order God created to craft their works, and this study shapes not only their knowledge but also their character. They produce objects that are noble, useful, and agreeable, bringing about a beauty that points to God. If it is remarkable that God could create a natural object such as a tree, how much more extraordinary that he could create beings with the insight, creativity, and will to craft useful and beautiful things with which to serve their neighbors and glorify their Creator?

Medieval Christians showed how technology could alleviate the more painful aspects of people’s labor. Monastic communities developed innovations in agriculture, animal husbandry, and sanitation, leaving more time for prayer, scriptural meditation, and the preservation of biblical and other classical texts. Monasteries also refined the technologies of writing and bookmaking in ways that made Bibles smaller and easier to transport, which were helpful for missionary purposes.

That is to say nothing of the printing press, which made the Bible available to far more people. Or steamboats, trains, and planes that carried missionaries to the far corners of the globe. Or medical and public health technologies that churches and ministries have used to alleviate suffering. Or mass media such as radio, television, and the internet, which have carried the gospel further still.

At the same time, we need to note that all of these technologies leave complicated legacies. The agricultural advances that let nomads settle in cities led to new powers of disease, despotism, and inequality. The same roads and sea routes that delivered missionaries and trade goods delivered armies for conquest and plunder. The same printing presses that produced Bibles also produced Mein Kampf. Automobiles, nuclear technology, televisions, computers, the internet—we can all name the benefits as well as the detriments.

From antiquity, Christianity has provided a theological framework that embraces the complexity of technology. It encourages innovation as a reflection of God’s creativity and imbues it with purpose—to join him in making creation beautiful and plentiful and hospitable to life, as well as in serving those around us.

But it is also mindful of the brokenness of sin that exists at the heart of humankind. We tend to make tools of productivity into weapons of plunder, to transform what was made to glorify God into instruments that exalt and enrich ourselves, and even to fashion objects of worship and devotion. As we shape technologies, our technologies shape us—which can lead to either pride, domination, and idolatry; or purpose, beauty, and service.

Where does artificial intelligence find its place in this story? For the most part, AI is similar to other revolutionary technologies. The ingenuity it represents is a divinely given gift. Insofar as AI serves the good, it reflects our nature as beings made in God’s image and our vocation to join in the cultivation and restoration of the world.

Humans are already using AI to diagnose diseases and develop novel medicines, fight human trafficking and find missing children, make crops more productive and businesses more efficient, improve education, explore the cosmos, and even decipher animal languages. AI “accelerationists” are not wrong to believe that AI could lead to extraordinary discoveries in fundamental sciences and life-altering advances for human civilization.

And as with many other technologies, the power it possesses for good is proportionate to the power it possesses for destruction. We have all witnessed in recent decades how AI algorithms have turned social media into massive engines of addiction, polarization, and dysfunction—while concentrating staggering wealth in the hands of a few technocrats. It remains to be seen how artificial intelligence will impact labor markets, the struggle between democratic and totalitarian regimes, information warfare, kinetic warfare, and matters of mental health and family cohesion. AI “safetyists” are not wrong to be concerned that, if we fail to align artificial intelligence with human flourishing, we could find human civilization twisted into something far worse than it is now.

Whether AI differs from other technologies on a categorical level depends on what it is. Many practitioners today envision that, as artificial intelligence models become more sophisticated, more “general,” or more “agentic,” they will need to be recognized as a new kind of being. Some of my friends in Silicon Valley speak of submitting themselves to an AI superintelligence that will guide their lives far better than they can—which sounds an awful lot like worship.

If it’s ever proven that humankind has created new intelligent beings, this would indeed open new fields of theological inquiry. Would these new intelligences be like animals that deserve humane treatment or like human beings who merit protections and rights? Would we be misappropriating God’s own prerogative to make intelligent beings or expressing our identity as beings made in his image? What if the intelligence we created rebels against us in the same way we rebel against our Maker? Would man and machine live out their own version of Genesis 1–3?

As interesting as these scenarios are to imagine, I’m skeptical that they will ever be realized. There is a kind of instability in the term intelligence itself. Sometimes we use the term to refer to a capacity for certain activities: A human, animal, or machine is intelligent if it demonstrates the ability to learn, adapt, and solve problems. Other times we use the term to refer to a being: A supreme intelligence or extraterrestrial intelligence is a being who demonstrates these capacities.

In his seminal 1980 essay, “Minds, brains, and programs,” the philosopher John Searle refers to “weak AI” as a simulation of intelligent processes and “strong AI” as the actual possession of a mind. Strong AI, he asserted then, is a confusion. A computer simulation of consciousness does not produce consciousness any more than a computer simulation of a hurricane produces wind.

I tend to agree with Microsoft theorist Jaron Lanier’s assessment that AI in the grander sense is, at least presently, more science fiction than science. What we call artificial intelligence today may be better understood as a new form of social collaboration. We draw on more sophisticated algorithms of data consumption, pattern recognition, and statistical prediction based on larger and larger information sets. These algorithms are powerful and may alter the course of history. But there is no concrete evidence that improving the simulation of intelligence could ever make the leap to creating intelligent beings.

Christians have particular reason to be skeptical that machine algorithms will ever approximate or compete with human personhood. While animals are conscious and possess varying amounts of intelligence, they are not persons in the rich biblical sense. To be a human is to be a God-breathed union of body and spirit, indissolubly connected. It is to be irreducibly relational, made for fellowship with God and with one another.

We can only be who we are meant to be when we rest our faith in the one who made and sustains us, when we are reconciled to God through Jesus’ saving work on our behalf. We are capable not only of intelligence but also of love and loneliness, grief and doubt, anxiety and joy—and we are meant to be caught up in families, communities, and covenantal relationships. We are also made to be stewards over the works of our hands, not subject to them.

It is ultimately an impoverished view to believe that intelligence is reducible to its behaviors or a being is indistinguishable from its simulated activities. A corpse can be manipulated to embrace a person, but this does not mean it loves the person. Photographs of a child can be thrown into a box and shaken, but this will never produce a child.

As the Vatican noted in “Antiqua et Nova” in January of this year,

AI cannot possess many of the capabilities specific to human life, and it is also fallible. By turning to AI as a perceived “Other” greater than itself… humanity risks creating a substitute for God. However, it is not AI that is ultimately deified and worshipped, but humanity itself—which, in this way, becomes enslaved to its own work.

This is the danger: that we should repeat the sins of the Tower of Babel or the golden calf, making the works of our hands into symbols of hubris or objects of adoration.

For all these reasons, we should be careful not to anthropomorphize or idolize artificial intelligence. Instead, we should welcome it for what it is—a reflection of God’s creativity in us that can lead to both extraordinary destruction and extraordinary good. And we should get about the business of making sure it’s the latter.

Timothy Dalrymple was president and CEO of Christianity Today from 2019 to 2025. He is leaving CT to serve as president of the John Templeton Foundation.

This article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Made in Our Image".

- More from Timothy Dalrymple

Books

Review

We Want What the World Can’t Give

Ronni Kurtz

How Ecclesiastes diagnoses our doomed quests for happiness.

Illustration by Meredith Miotke

As a writer, David Foster Wallace is probably best known for his gargantuan novel Infinite Jest—the copiously footnoted book many fans have started but struggled to finish.

But I first encountered Wallace through his essays. In college, I spent many evenings veering between audible belly laughter and choking back tears while absorbing classics like “Consider the Lobster” or “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.”

Bobby Jamieson’s new book Everything Is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes’ Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness transported me back to those days. In particular, it called to mind one of my favorite Wallace essays, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never do Again.”

The “fun” thing that Wallace had found disappointing was spending time aboard a cruise ship, an experience he chronicled in 1996 for Harper’s Magazine. The essay is both hysterical and moving in its anthropological insights. After cataloging the ship’s dizzying list of delights—the food, fashion, festivities, and the like—he asks a passing but vital question: “Is this enough? At the time it didn’t seem like enough.”

Summarizing his time aboard a floating paradise, Wallace writes:

There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes yet simple in its effect: on board the Nadir (especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety ceased) I felt despair.

Something of that same paradox—existential despair amid bountiful sources of delight—comes through in the question Jamieson, a pastor and author, poses at the outset of Everything Is Never Enough: “Shouldn’t you be happier?” Given all the blessings life has to offer—especially in advanced Western societies—the answer might seem obvious. Yet Ecclesiastes is relentless in proclaiming that none of it brings lasting satisfaction.

Jamieson will not leave his readers to wallow in despair, however. His book, built upon the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, delivers on the promise of its subtitle by offering a path toward resilient happiness in an unhappy world.

Throughout the book, Jamieson proves an invaluable guide to navigating a confusing and often dispiriting ancient text. In particular, he distinguishes himself in three ways: by clarifying the structure of Ecclesiastes, by articulating a deep understanding of human happiness, and by keeping Christ’s redemptive work firmly in view.

First, consider Jamieson’s exegetical blueprint for Ecclesiastes. Biblical scholars often disagree on how to interpret this book, even on basic matters like establishing the author, determining when it was written, and mapping its basic contours—to say nothing of the enigmatic pronouncements that fill its pages.

To understand Ecclesiastes, Jamieson argues, we should envision a three-story building. On each floor, we confront different questions, emphases, and views of the world. Everything Is Never Enough follows this three-story model, with the first 11 chapters examining the first floor, the next eight heading upstairs, and two climactic chapters giving the view from the top.

In Jamieson’s telling, Qohelet—the mysterious figure commonly credited with writing Ecclesiastes—remains on the first floor for most of the book. Here, his “far-seeing eyes take in the whole of human life,” as he “weighs the merits of work, sex, food and drink, wealth, power, and many other possible sources of meaning and satisfaction. He finds them all wanting and pronounces them all ‘absurd.’ ”

Qohelet only ascends to the second floor on a handful of occasions—“seven, to be precise,” as Jamieson argues. Here, he “surveys the same territory, considering many of the same subjects.” Yet “he sees something astonishingly different.” Certain things that had struck him as absurd on the ground floor are now revealed to be gifts worth savoring.

The third floor is visited even more rarely. As Jamieson writes, Qohelet “comes here only a few times, gives no warning before he does, and never stays long.” After venturing upstairs, he returns with “two crucial reference points: one, fear God because, two, he is going to judge all that you do and all that everyone ever does.”

Just as a three-story building remains intact even as the individual stories have different layouts and afford different views, the perspectives of Ecclesiastes cohere despite the outward tension between them. We learn something about the inherent limits of earthly life. We learn something about the gifts of contentment—and even the joy—we can experience within those limits. What holds it all together is the importance of fearing God, who reveals himself as the sole source of durable satisfaction through the limits and gifts alike.

As he guides readers through Ecclesiastes, story by story, Jamieson exhibits a mature and nuanced view of human happiness. This stands in stark contrast to the shallowness that pervades so many visions of the good life in contemporary culture.

To see this shallowness on full display, simply browse the self-help section of an average bookstore. The titles housed there often rely on upbeat exhortations and tidy formulas, avoiding any kind of deeper reflection on the good, the true, and the beautiful. By presenting happiness as easily within our grasp, such books set us up for disappointment when securing their promises proves harder than expected.

Everything Is Never Enough does not suffer from such shallowness. In one especially moving chapter titled “Enough,” Jamieson gets readers to consider one important reason we struggle to find happiness in this life. In short, God has planted desires within us that this life can’t fulfill. As Jamieson writes:

The problem with stuffing the vastness of eternity into the cramped compartment of the human heart is that it doesn’t fit. What God has put inside us guarantees an enduring mismatch between what we want and what this world can give…. The human heart is pierced with a hole that lets in the infinite. That is why all the finite goods that our toil gains fail to satisfy.

Jamieson’s insistence on the futility of our quests for happiness can bring about a measure of disenchantment. Occasionally, I found myself frustrated by sections in the book about the first floor of Ecclesiastes, where everything—money, sex, power, you name it—is judged worthless and absurd. Jamieson’s gloomy refrain—“It will not satisfy”—can grow wearying.

Overcome by exasperation, you might exclaim, “Fine, I get it. These things will not ensure happiness. So what will?” But here is where we encounter the beautiful irony of Everything Is Never Enough: By continually bumping up against these dead ends, we open ourselves to the possibility of paths we hadn’t considered.

Only after the book left me thoroughly discontented could it finally turn on some lights in my soul. If it seems repetitive, then this is a mark in its favor. Your soul needs to have the point driven home: The things of this world will ultimately come up short, even if—as the second-floor perspective reveals—they are good.

Once you recognize the absurdity of obtaining happiness on your own terms, you can appreciate another ironic lesson Jamieson emphasizes: Happiness can never be earned or bought. It can only be received. In each of the first 11 chapters, which spend pages unfolding the disheartening reality of what won’t lead to lasting happiness, he offers a sentence or two suggesting what will.

A few examples illustrate how Jamieson reframes happiness as something we receive from God, who gives from the plenitude of his own life.

About the ideal of control, he writes, “Happiness comes not from controlling your life but from realizing that everything you care about most is entangled with forces beyond your control.” About the pursuit of money: “Happiness comes not from building a contingency-proof cocoon of money around your life but from seeking and sharing what money can’t secure.” About the lure of power: “Happiness comes not from making it to the top but from love that won’t rise on the way up, fall on the way down, or desert you at the bottom.”

When we learn that “happiness can’t be taken by the world because it wasn’t given by the world,” we can laugh at the vanities and absurdities that might otherwise drive us to despair. And we can better appreciate that “every source of happiness in [our lives] is a comet, trailing celestial glory that discloses an origin beyond all [we] can see.”

I worry that some readers of Everything Is Never Enough will interpret Jamieson’s conclusion, titled “Pierced from Above,” as a “Jesus juke” of sorts—a cheap evangelistic trick that makes the book feel like a bait and switch. I will put it frankly: This is simply not true.

In fact, the book would be incomplete without it. Jamieson’s goal across his exploration of Ecclesiastes is to help us discover a depth of happiness this world cannot shake. To do that goal justice, Jamieson needs to make Ecclesiastes’ concerns his concerns.

Yet Ecclesiastes is not an isolated piece of literature. It is a vital book within a larger canon. We can’t grasp its full significance without following its echoes across the entire redemptive arc of Scripture. That arc, of course, bends toward fulfillment in Jesus Christ, who alone can offer the abundant blessings for which we yearn (John 10:10).

Up to this point in the book, Jamieson has convincingly argued that our hearts never wash up on the shore of satisfaction because they were built for infinity. Yet that insight could easily lead to hopelessness if not for an astonishing fact: Infinitude has taken on flesh and dwelt among us. Because of Christ, there is real hope that our hearts may find the rest that feels so out of reach.

In resolving the aching frustration that pervades so much of Ecclesiastes with the ultimate fulfillment found in Christ, Jamieson guides his readers to something far greater than temporal happiness. I feel confident that Qohelet himself would have been pleased with the outcome.

Ronni Kurtz is an assistant professor of systematic theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of Light Unapproachable: Divine Incomprehensibility and the Task of Theology.

This article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "You Should Be Happier".

- More from Ronni Kurtz

Church Life

Should Christians Avoid Writing with AI?

Karen Swallow Prior, Kevin Antlitz, and Kiara John-Charles

CT advice columnists also weigh in on a break from ministry and what to do about friends who are cohabitating.

Illustration by Jay Cover

Got a question? Email advice@christianitytoday.com to ask CT’s advice columnists. Queries may be edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: I’m concerned that if I use artificial intelligence to write, I’ll miss out on growth that comes from doing the work myself. Is this alone a legitimate reason for Christians to avoid AI in creative processes? Also, what about more explicitly spiritual or theological work? Should preachers disclose when their sermon is generated by AI? What if it’s just AI-polished or AI-copyedited? —Curious in California

Karen Swallow Prior: Your question addresses two separate but connected topics: the craft of writing and the ethics of writing.

First, just as with spiritual growth and maturity, the craft of writing offers no shortcuts. AI might be a useful tool in some cases, but it can never replace one’s own knowledge and skills. Similar to using a spell checker, you have to know enough of the craft to recognize whether or not a tool’s effects are correct and good.

Second, in terms of ethics, sources should always be acknowledged. Failure to cite any source (beyond what is common knowledge) constitutes plagiarism, which sadly is prevalent even in the church. Citing sources gives credit where credit is due and offers transparency regarding the authorities to which you’ve appealed. (Citations don’t need to be formal but can be passingly mentioned, as is usually done in sermons and speeches.) Would you be willing to cite AI as a source in your work? If not, ask yourself why not.

Moreover, because AI increasingly relies on copyrighted material taken without the authors’ permission, in using AI, you may be stealing someone else’s work, even if you don’t know whose work it is.

Finally, these two issues can be considered together in connection to your purpose in writing. If you are simply compiling previously existing information, then do so and credit whatever sources you choose. If, however, you write to create something new or to refine your thinking, then AI likely hinders that work.

Illustration by Jack Richardson

Karen Swallow Prior lives in rural Virginia with her husband, two dogs, and several chickens. Following a decades-long vocation as an English professor, Karen now speaks and writes full-time.

Q: I’m a solo pastor and would love to keep pastoring, but my wife needs a break from ministry life for health reasons. However, I don’t have an alternative line of work to fall back on, and we need income. I wonder whether churches with vacant pulpits are willing to hire a pastor in a situation like mine, where the spouse won’t be involved. Do you have advice for ministry families like ours? —Muddled in Missouri

Kevin Antlitz: From one pastor to another, I commend you for prioritizing your family. Far too often, pastors sacrifice their families for the sake of “the ministry.” This is a grave error. Without idolizing family, ensuring your family is in a position to thrive should be one of your top priorities. This should also be a priority for the church!

Working as a pastor is such a great and unusual vocation. I don’t know of any other job that takes into account a person’s family as much as churches can do with pastors, if they so choose.

And given the nature of the job and the biblical qualifications for such a position (1 Tim. 3:1–7), this makes sense. However, the healthiest churches and pastors have a clear sense of boundaries over what is expected of a pastor’s family.

Before assuming you must leave your role, why not speak with your wife and the church leadership to see if your work can be reimagined? There may be a way for you to continue doing your work but with different rhythms for this season.

If they are unwilling or simply unable to accommodate this, then I think the wise move is to find another way to earn your daily bread. The Lord will honor this, and managing your household well will make you eminently qualified to take another pastoral role in the future.

Illustration by Jack Richardson

Kevin Antlitz is an Anglican priest at a Pittsburgh church positively overflowing with kids. He and his wife have three young children who they pray will never know a day apart from Jesus.

Q: I have a few friends who know and follow Jesus—and live with their boyfriends. This is so normal in today’s culture that it’s become “normal” in many Christian communities too. But as their friend, what should I do? I’m afraid to call them out for fear of being too prudish or worrying too much about the speck in my sister’s eye. —Iffy in Indiana

Kiara John-Charles: It’s sad and discouraging when we see brothers and sisters in Christ following secular culture’s standards for relationships instead of God’s will (Rom. 12:2). However, you can stand firm in your convictions without fear of seeming prudish, knowing that God honors obedience and the desire to live a holy life
(1 Cor. 16:13–14). Your example of a different approach to relationships serves as a powerful witness to God’s purpose for our lives.

Commit to praying for your friends, understanding that your prayers are powerful and effective (James 5:16). Ask God to reveal his truth to their hearts and guide them toward a life that honors him.

Whether you should directly address the issue may depend on the depth of your friendships. Sometimes God is already working in someone’s heart, and approaching a conversation too soon can be a misstep. Have you ever talked together about faith in the past? If you have a history of good, tough conversations, your friends might be receptive to your intervention here.

If you do sense God leading you to speak, take time to reflect on your intentions. Ask questions, and make sure you have your facts straight. You have a perception of your friends’ relationships with God and their boyfriends, but you may not have all the information. And ultimately, it is the Holy Spirit’s job to bring change from the inside out (John 14:26; 1 Cor. 3:6–7).

Illustration by Jack Richardson

Kiara John-Charles is an LA native with Caribbean roots and a love for travel and food. She works as a pediatric occupational therapist and serves at her local church in Long Beach, California.

This article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Qualms & Proverbs".

Qualms & Proverbs: Got a question for CT’s advice columnists? Email advice@christianitytoday.com. Queries may be edited for brevity and clarity.

Readers Say Yes to Church Kitchens

Kate Lucky

And other responses to our March/April issue.

Photography by Abigail Erickson for Christianity Today

Church Kitchens Get Chopped,” wrote Daniel Silliman in a news article for our March/April issue (p. 77). The architects he interviewed said that newly built or remodeled spaces might have a “sink and coffee pot” or a café serving coffee and pastries, but no expansive countertop or industrial ovens.

“Makes me sad,” lamented one Facebook commenter. “I remember being in the big, beautiful kitchen at [my church] watching my mom and my Aunt Joe Ann help prepare big meals for church events and for people in need. Servant-hearted people doing good work. I think the church is missing out by not doing this anymore.”

Of course, many are still fighting the kitchen decline. “Not at my church, thank goodness!” said another person on Facebook. “Our church has quarterly Sunday potlucks, where you eat things you never see in restaurants, and we have Wednesday night dinners most of the year.” A third wrote, “We use our kitchen all the time. We paid off the mortgage and made a big dinner for the congregation of danish meatballs, rice, veggies, salads.”

For some churches, kitchens are essential to ministry. A reader shared: “One of the churches in our county was burned by an arsonist. They chose to rebuild the fellowship hall with a kitchen first and save money to do the sanctuary in the future. They wanted to be able to serve the community in addition to their worship services, and a fellowship hall fits both needs.”

What is clear is that church space, including kitchens (or their absence), affects church culture. “When I read your story, I thought of something I read years ago about the introduction of the bowl and how that changed civilization,” wrote Gene Kruckemyer of Sanford, Florida. “Before the bowl, people would eat what was individually cooked over a fire, or on hot rocks, or not cooked at all. But the bowl introduced communal cooking and eating, bringing people together … just like the church kitchen.”

Kate Lucky, senior editor, culture and engagement

Faithful Remnants p. 32

A great article addressing the prophetic witness of the Japanese evangelical church. We may not be many in number, but numeric growth is not the only way God is glorified.

@KazusaOkaya

There is so much life in that 1 percent that it eclipses anything I’ve found in the Western church. I am still moved by the level of devotion, trust, and perseverance I found among Japanese Christians. It’s no surprise that Japan has been the spiritual birthplace of so many sojourners to its shores, myself included. Take heart; God works powerfully there.

@lee.angesy

Keller’s Hope for Renewal p. 50

Collin Hansen writes that “we can unite as Christians around an apologetic method grounded in biblical theology and adorned with spiritual fruit.” When theological purity is cited, it is very often followed by a call to apologetics. However, the emphasis on apologetics causes unintentional problems. Apologetics is a method of defending one’s viewpoint from alternate viewpoints and often gives rise to an exclusionary orthodoxy. It is not a method for listening to and learning from other voices. It is all about tradition-centric content control, whether Reformed, Catholic, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, or Eastern Orthodox.

Tim Keller dreamed of a unifying vision for Christianity. I don’t believe a unifying vision for the kingdom of God will be realized through any one tradition’s apologetic. It needs to make room for followers of Jesus who may be questioners, doubters, those reconstructing, and those who may not agree with the majority of the faithful. Very simply, the ultimate sign of a unifying vision is being the “beloved community”—those who embody what Jesus said are the two greatest commandments upon which “all the Law and the Prophets hang” (Matt. 22:40). This is the “spiritual fruit” of unity.

Martin Willow, Champlin, MN

Justin Brierley Does the Unbelievable,” p. 56

[Brierley’s] program helped me a lot during the college years and the subsequent quarantine. The discussion helped me see more perspectives and increase my faith in the gospel.

@michaelliepr

The Ideal Church … Building p. 79

Church architecture matters. While the church isn’t the building, and believers can gather anywhere, having a dedicated place for worship and discipleship is important. What we believe about the church’s purpose, mission, and the authority of Scripture should shape how our churches look. People long for what is timeless, not trendy, because they long for the timeless God. The modern church should take the hint. Bring back the center pulpit. Let in natural light. Turn off the complicated production. Recover the regulative principle of worship. Remember the means of grace—Word, prayer, and sacraments. Spend less time chasing trends and more time preaching the Bible.

@MenYouMatter

I’m glad it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Meeting in a more “modern” facility now, I miss gathering in a space that conveys the holiness and grandeur and beauty of God and the gospel, just as I miss gathering in a mud hut in Uganda and on the floor in a Central Asian flat.

@KingdomGuy1

I find traditional churches often feel cold and uninviting. Wooden benches! And too formal. A big multipurpose space with partitions and so on is practical and can be made to look nice—traditional, even—if that is what is desired. We should recognize there is no exact model in the Bible for how church should be.

Ronald Eccles

This article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Responses to Our March/April Issue".

- More from Kate Lucky

News

What Algorithms Have Brought Together

Harvest Prude

Christian singles aren’t going to church to find life partners. They’re swiping on the apps.

Illustration by Simone Noronha

The first time Alex Entz saw his future wife, she was behind a paywall.

The popular dating app Hinge had deemed Leanne Brady a “standout” match for Entz—an attractive, compatible, and compelling person. So it put her in a special, separate category. Entz had to decide whether to shell out $3.99 for the chance to talk to her.

He didn’t pay.

It worked out anyway. A few days later, Brady’s profile showed up in his regular feed. This time, Entz responded, and they matched. They started to chat and hit it off. Today, the couple is married.

The Entzes are devout Christians and believe God wrote their love story. But like 57 percent of people under 30, they also have an algorithm to thank for bringing them together.

They never found it easy to trust the algorithms.

Many Christians in America feel the same way. But for singles looking for love, opaque code that materializes potential partners without explanation increasingly seems like the only choice. Data shows that only about 15 percent of people find a romantic partner through their friends. About 10 percent meet at work or through coworkers. Almost nobody marries their high school sweetheart anymore, and vanishingly few marry someone they met in college. Church is one of the least common ways to connect. Only around 3 percent of Americans in a romantic relationship say they met at a religious event.

That leaves the internet, according to Stanford University sociologist Michael Rosenfeld, whose research tracked how couples met from 1940 to 2021.

That doesn’t mean singles are happy about their new matchmakers, though. And it doesn’t mean they believe the algorithms will find them love.

Christians who put a high priority on their faith may have a particularly tough time finding partners on the apps who feel similarly. Historically, evangelicals have been slower than others to venture online for romance, according to Barna Group research. When they do start swiping, many find the algorithms’ methods don’t quite work for them. They have to tinker with settings and try different strategies to find people they would even consider as a potential life partner.

Before Leanne Brady matched with Alex Entz, for example, she matched with lots and lots of people that she didn’t find compatible.

She hadn’t completely filled out her profile when she first joined Hinge, skipping some biographical categories, including religion. When she went back and checked the box saying she was a Christian, her number of matches—and dates—fell dramatically.

“It was so discouraging,” she said. “People just weren’t swiping on me.”

She made more changes and, over time, developed a theory about what worked best on the apps based on her own experience. It’s hard to argue with her results.

Your first picture on a dating app profile should be a solo shot, she decided. Good lighting, big smile, aiming straight at the camera and potential matches. The second shot should be one with friends. But it should be obvious who you are, and ideally you should be doing an activity, like posing after a 5K mud run. For the third, choose a photo where you’re dressed up for a formal event, like a wedding. The last one can be goofy and show your personality.

Brady’s last photo showed her doing a karate chop at Jackie Chan, the martial arts star, at a wax museum.

That was the one that caught Entz’s attention, along with her megawatt smile and her intentionality about expressing the importance of her faith in her profile. He liked that a lot.

Entz was going through the same process of navigating the algorithms. If anything, for him it was more intense. Men have to wade through bots and fake profiles; when the women Entz saw were real women, they didn’t seem to want what he wanted.

“Basically every stereotype about the apps is true. The bad ones,” he said. “If you are a person who considers himself average, not a six-foot-tall Adonis… you might just have to work a bit more at it.”

Entz is an economist, so he attacked the problem as systems of inputs and outputs. He tried tweaking each of them to see if they would give him different results. In some ways, the apps were all the same. But in others they varied widely.

“Hinge was the most serious, Coffee Meets Bagel was probably the most religious, Tinder was the most frivolous and pointless,” he recalled. Another popular app, Bumble, he described as a “total misfire.”

Entz experimented with his profiles, making little adjustments to try to connect with serious Christians who shared his beliefs, put a high priority on their faith, and wanted to make it a big part of their lives. He rarely went more than a few weeks without changing everything around just to get the algorithm to give him some better matches.

The exact details of different algorithms and how they work are not publicly available, but most seem to use “collaborative filtering.” That means the apps consider what users say they prefer and also the way people interact with profiles, developing additional metrics of unstated preferences. How someone clicks, swipes, and even just pauses in the app all becomes data that the algorithms use to filter the feeds of options.

That makes sense. If you are a conservative Republican who automatically rejects anyone who identifies as a Democrat or a moderate in their dating profile, the algorithm will show you more of what you want, even if you don’t mark yourself “Republican.” Soon your feed will populate with women or men sporting MAGA hats. The same is true in reverse: If you’re a liberal Democrat, the algorithm will sort you that way whether you state a preference or not. Soon you’ll never have to look at someone who supports Donald Trump.

A growing political divide between men and women—a divide that is also showing up in the American church—is likely exacerbated by algorithm-created silos on both online dating and social media platforms.

“We’re seeing a segregation in online content that young men and young women are exposed to, and a lot of it portrays the opposite sex in a relatively negative light,” said Daniel Cox, survey director at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, DC–based think tank. “If that’s what you’re going to use to inform your views about dating and relationships, that will have fairly long-term impacts on whether you even want to have a partner, or if you want to get married, or if you want to have kids with someone.”

The algorithms learn what attributes someone does or doesn’t want to be shown and takes that into consideration as they filter options. They also appear to learn what everyone else does and doesn’t want to be shown. If one person’s profile gets a lot of interaction—clicks, comments, views (or whatever metrics the apps use), their value goes up, and that profile is shown to more people. Or the other way around: If a profile doesn’t generate much response, the algorithms respond accordingly and show it in fewer and fewer users’ feeds.

This may sharply limit the opportunities someone has to connect with potential life partners. Saying you are a committed Christian will filter out a lot of people you want to filter out, but it might also make your profile so unpopular that basically no one sees it.

This is a common enough concern for people of faith that some apps promise to make things easier by putting religion front and center.

Upward, for example, allows users to not only say that they’re Christian but also specify their denomination, state their dating intentions, and even upload a faith statement.

“Upward removes the mystery of ‘Is my potential date as serious about their faith as I am?’ ” said Rachel DeAlto, a dating expert at Upward. “Members are opting in on that very principle… to find someone that matches their faith values.”

According to Upward (which is owned by Match Group, the same company behind Hinge, Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, and many other dating apps), Christians are most likely to search for people on Sundays between noon and 5 p.m.

Some marriage and relationship experts wonder, though, if Christians could find more ways to connect on Sunday mornings. They worry that churches and Christian leaders haven’t done enough to help people find suitable partners.

According to a Barna survey, only 7 percent of churches have any kind of ministry for single people. Many churches aren’t large enough to do something like that successfully. Others don’t see the need. The rapid rise of dating apps may have given churches the impression that “someone else is solving the problem” of connecting single Christians, said J. P. De Gance, coauthor of Endgame, a book about the need to strengthen families.

“Churches leave that entire playing field unoccupied. Nobody’s on that field for our churches,” De Gance said.

His nonprofit, Communio, is trying to help. The group has organized events at 180 Protestant and Catholic churches, including swing dancing, pickleball, softball, and axe throwing.

“We have such loneliness and nihilism around us,” he said. “This is the great felt need of our moment.”

Some young Christians feel in-person meetings are better not because there’s an increased likelihood of finding someone compatible but rather because they worry about the side effects of being on dating apps.

John Shelton, policy director for Advancing American Freedom, tried a number of apps before he met his wife, Katelyn. He found they encouraged a “shopping” mentality that he didn’t like. Instead of interacting with a person as a person—a sister in Christ, a beloved child of God—he was asked to start with a list of things he wanted.

Katelyn Shelton had similar concerns, so she never joined the apps. But her friends’ stories of searching for romantic partners online always reminded her of being in middle school, when she and other girls would write endless lists of what they wanted in a future husband. As adults, they could do the same thing, just with the help of an algorithm.

“The high curation… all these different parameters—the height, their interests,” John said. “It makes it more fraught.”

The couple met and connected offline, outside the Supreme Court, at the most romantic of events: a Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) briefing.

John describes their love story as “hybrid,” since the internet did play a role. John, who interned for the ERLC, noticed Katelyn, one of the next crop of interns, in a photo on X. He found out they both had divinity degrees. That, plus another guy’s obvious interest in Katelyn, gave him a push to ask for her number. Fast-forward, and the pair now has four children.

Jessica Greensmith would like to see more of those kinds of in-person connections. The Christian mother of four has hosted matchmaking events since a women’s conference in 2023. One of the sessions asked people to think about “who in our church community is actually overlooked?”

She thought of the single Christian women she knew who were discouraged and exhausted from the dating scene. After a brainstorming session, she decided to host speed dating events with her cousin.

“I just became really annoying, where I would ask everyone I know, ‘Do you know any really solid single believers that you think should be at this event that we’re doing?’ ” she said.

Over the course of ten months, they organized eight events to help single Christians meet and connect. The speed-dating-style events had some competition mixed in. Singles carved pumpkins for a contest or tried to identify types of wine. There was a website, but no algorithms. The women used it to track referrals and potential matches.

Greensmith’s fourth pregnancy caused her to push pause on official matchmaking, but she still has a heart for singles around her. She said married Christians can sometimes hesitate to step into a matchmaking role because they worry about causing offense. But she’s found that single Christians often respond with gratitude to being set up in a low-pressure environment. She can take credit for at least one engagement so far.

But there aren’t matchmakers in every congregation, and most churches are not organizing pickle-ball tournaments or speed-dating-pumpkin-carving events for interested Christian singles.

Most are left to navigate the apps, tweaking their profiles again and again in hopes that the algorithms will finally work for them.

That’s what happened to Alex and Leanne Entz back in 2021. He changed his profile, she changed hers. Leanne’s profile moved into Alex’s main feed, where he could appreciate the picture of her karate-chopping a wax Jackie Chan and see that she wanted “a guy who will bring me chocolate and go to church with me on Sunday.”

He messaged her, she replied, and less than a dozen messages later, he asked her out on a date.

After all his trial and error with the algorithms, this is Alex Entz’s strongest bit of advice: Move from online to in-person as soon as you can.

“Waiting is for suckers,” he said. “Write that.”

Their first date was on Halloween. They didn’t dress up, but their rooftop restaurant reservation featured a DJ wearing a terrifying Joker costume and blasting music so loud that Leanne struggled to hear Alex. None of that seemed to matter.

The two got married in August 2023. They are expecting their first child this fall.

The Entzes see beauty in the way God brought them together—even if they are still surprised that God used an algorithm.

“I could not have anticipated the way that God has mapped out my life,” Leanne said.

But she also thinks it couldn’t have been planned any better.

Harvest Prude is a political correspondent for CT.

- More from Harvest Prude

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