The Transhumanist Question

Is our being merely human something that ought to be overcome?

Illustration by Robert Carter

Far before our time, the Renaissance humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was an early advocate of transhumanism. In his Oration on the Dignity of Man from 1486, he has the Creator speak the following words to Adam, the first human:

We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer. Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul’s judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.

Pico della Mirandola is the unofficial saint of transhumanists because he was pushing human plasticity over the edge. He believed that the higher forms of humans are, in fact, more than humans: They are divine.

Here in the 21st century, philosopher Nick Bostrom defines a posthuman as a being for whom at least one general central capacity, such as health span, cognition, or emotion, is “greatly exceed[ing] the maximum attainable by any current human being without recourse to new technological means.”

The neurotechnology company Neuralink has pioneered brain-computer interfaces for people with paralysis to help them communicate and control devices remotely. Neil Harbisson, born colorblind, received a skull implant in 2004 in the form of an antenna that allows him to “see” colors as audio vibrations. A filmmaker named Rob Spence replaced his right eye with a wireless video camera and calls himself an “eyeborg.” Biotech CEO Elizabeth Parrish underwent experimental gene therapy in 2015 and has claimed to have successfully slowed the aging process.

Still other potential developments are purely cosmetic. “If you could reshape your foot and turn it into a platform heel, would you?” asks one article about body modifications in the fashion world. “Or how about a statement piece consisting of soft, turquoise horns on either shoulder?”

One has only to read the great pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer—who wrote that “life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom”—to be tempted to join the transhumanist project. But whether the goal of transcending humanity is worthy of being pursued depends on whether we believe that being merely human is something that ought to be overcome.

I, for one, believe that just as there is beauty and goodness to being an eagle or a dolphin, there is beauty and goodness to being human and no more. The central article of the Christian faith, after all, is that the divine Word became human flesh. By dwelling among us, the Word sanctified humanity in its finitude and fragility. At the same time, upgrades—by which I mean our development and use of tools, even those that are integrated into our bodies—are not excluded.

A few years back, I taught a course at Yale University on faith and globalization with UK prime minister Tony Blair and a secularist colleague. At one point during the class, my colleague held up a pill and showed it to the students. When religious people are sick, he said, they pray, believing that God will perform a miracle. But secular people rely on the marvels of modern medicine, such as this tiny pill that almost instantly takes care of high blood pressure. He concluded that modern medicine, obviously, works better than God.

When he was finished, I turned to him and said, “You and I agree on one important thing: We both deny the same god!” He looked at me, puzzled.

“The god you deny is incompatible with human inventiveness and work—with all worldly processes,” I said. “I deny that god as well. In contrast, the God in whom I believe makes possible the entirety of the worldly reality in all its dynamic complexity, including human inventiveness and work.”

The first pages of the Bible tell of God working with such worldly realities. In the Garden of Eden, God didn’t drop food from heaven into the mouths of Adam and Eve and, applying pressure to their jaws, make them chew. Instead, they worked for food, tilling and keeping the garden; and in and under their work, God was at work too.

When it comes to the ethical dilemmas we encounter in transhumanism, we should exercise an abundance of caution. Yet it is a mistake to think that divine work and human work, including technological advances, mutually exclude one another.

Humans came to believe in God when they had no scientific knowledge about the basic structure of reality, when the best antiseptic was lavender, and when the dominant means of transportation was their own calloused bare feet.

Although our understanding of the world—and therefore of God’s relation to the world—has changed, we moderns can still believe in that same God now that we are exploring the astrophysical and quantum properties of black holes, editing the genome to prevent diseases and enhance human capacities, and traveling in driverless cars—and we can believe without abandoning reason.

The more power we have, the more important it is to choose wisely the basic direction of our lives. The more intelligent and powerful tools we create, the clearer we must be about the human purposes these tools will serve. And the only way to discern what purposes are worthy of our humanity is to know what we ought to trust and love above all things and what kind of humans we hope to be.

To be human—created in the imago Dei—is to live a vision of the good life. This vision sketches a portrait of the kind of humans we ought to be and provides the orienting criteria for what we ought to desire and how we ought to live. We all live by some such vision, whether we consciously embrace it or whether it remains inchoate and hidden from our sight, woven into the fabric of our beliefs and practices.

Since visions of the good life are by definition normative in character, science cannot formulate them. Knowledge about what was, what is, and what is likely to be, no matter how precise and detailed, can never prescribe what ought to be.

Imagine that we decided to give up privacy and permit all available data about us to be collected—all our conversations and correspondence, our health and habits and purchases. A highly intelligent algorithm could come up with an exceptionally accurate account of our behavior and therefore would likely be able to predict what we would do in many situations. It could tell us what we desire and what we find desirable, even what we believe about who we ought to be and what we ought to do. It might even come to know us better than we know ourselves, a scenario with which Yuval Noah Harari ends his book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.

But the one thing such a highly intelligent algorithm would not be able to tell us is who we ought to be—what we ought to do and toward what we ought to stretch ourselves, who we actually should be and what we should desire. Science and technological advancements cannot give us a vision of the true and good life. Reason cannot bring to light what should be most important to us—it cannot answer the question about how we as individuals and as the human community ought to live. For that, we believers turn to Jesus Christ.

Jesus is the measure of our humanity. We seek to move up, to ascend, to achieve with technology’s help a state of knowledge, power, and bliss comparable to God’s—to become gods. But we have a one-sided and therefore false image of God. In Jesus, the true God took on our limitations and came to serve the lowest, not considering

equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:6–8, NRSVue).

The coming of Christ radically changed how we should think not just of God but also of ourselves. If “the very essence of God is to love and serve,” as Max Scheler wrote, then what is most God-like is self-decentering love: in humility to regard others as more important than ourselves and to look to the interests of others, not primarily to our own (vv. 3–4).

This is not to say that technological developments are unimportant or that we should only fear them. But the crucial question for us is whether they help or hinder us in aligning our lives with the story of Jesus Christ. What we should fear most is a future devoid of faith in Christ and Christlike goodness.

Toward the end of the 21st century, surrounded by spectacular technology, it may come to pass, as Aldous Huxley imagined in Brave New World, that most of us will be so conditioned that we will not be able to “help behaving as [we] ought to behave.” And should anything nonetheless go wrong, some miracle drug would give us a “holiday from the facts.”

For Huxley, this was a dystopian vision. But the persistence with which we seek to eliminate suffering and multiply personalized pleasures suggests that this is the kind of future we want. With the help of science and technology, we may well find ourselves in such a world.

But like the swine in Jesus’ teaching who trampled over the pearls (Matt. 7:6), we will then have turned away from what matters most and squandered what’s best in our humanity. The crucial question for the future is thus the same one Jesus posed to his disciples two millennia ago: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8).

Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale University, founding director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, and author of The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse (Brazos Press, 2025).

- More from Miroslav Volf

Theology

For Most Muslims, Five Pillars are Crucial

Marvin Olasky

Saudis deserve credit for last month’s less fatal pilgrimage.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

(For previous articles in this series, see here and here.)

Journalists have become used to reporting annual disasters at the hajj, the once-in-a-lifetime trip to Mecca that all Muslims are obliged to take if they are physically and financially able. Last year, 1,300 pilgrims died as “lethal heat combined with humidity proved deadly,” one analysis declared.

And 2024 was not an outlier. A total of more than 4,800 Muslims have died in stampedes at the hajj’s Stoning of the Devil ritual in 1990, 1994, 1998, 2001, 2004, 2006, and 2015. Other years have brought epidemic outbreaks, building and crane collapses, and other disasters not unlikely when 2 million people from around the world crowd into a small area.

This year, at least 216 died, with the lessened total due in part to heat protection measures, including extra shade. Without 1,000+ deaths to report, it’s a good time to breathe deeply and explain why this pilgrimage is important in Islam. The starting point is that Muslims have not the Ten Commandments but the Five Pillars. (Some Shiites have different counts, such as seven, but since the requirements are similar, I’ll stick with the majority Sunni listing.)

The first four requirements are as follows: Make a profession of faith (“There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet”). Pray five times each day. Fast in the month of Ramadan during daylight hours. Give to the poor 2.5 percent of accumulated wealth above a specified amount, which at one time depended on the price of cattle, sheep, or camels. (A very rough approximation today might be $30,000.)

The hajj is the fifth pillar. As one Muslim website declares, “the one who goes for Hajj earns the pleasure of his Lord and comes back with all his sins forgiven. He also earns immense reward that he cannot earn in any other place; one prayer in al-Masjid al-Haram (the largest mosque in the world, located in Mecca), for instance, is equal to a hundred thousand prayers elsewhere.”

To understand what often has gone wrong and what went mostly right this year, start with the 2022 population of Mecca—1,578,722—and the 2020 census population of Phoenix, Arizona: 1,608,139. Almost identical, with a similar desert climate. Ramadan shifts through the year due to Islam’s lunar calendar adjustments, but what if Christians had a requirement to pour into Phoenix as Muslims descended into Mecca last month? What if they had to walk three to six miles in temperatures that rose above 90 degrees, as did Muslims in Saudi Arabia?

It would be doable without many deaths, given Phoenix’s omnipresent indoor air conditioning and the outdoor cooling systems that would be put into place. That apparently is what the Saudis have now accomplished: They boast of the world’s largest cooling system in the Grand Mosque and, through misting fans and other means, vow “to ensure the comfort of all visitors.”

Overall, though, comfort is secondary. Muhammad said a Muslim who goes on hajj “will return … as if he were born anew,” free of all sins. Doing it properly means entering the holy mosque at Mecca with the right foot first and reciting a prayer, then moving in a counterclockwise procession around a stone building that Muslims believe Abraham and his son Ishmael originally built.

In fact, a comfortable hajj might be a problem. Muslim websites say difficulties teach the fear of Allah: Standing in long lines “reminds the pilgrim of the throngs of people on the Day of Gathering. If the pilgrim feels tired from being in a crowd of thousands, how will it be in the crowds of barefoot, naked, uncircumcised people, standing for fifty thousand years?”

Similarly, a ritual of running back and forth instructs Muslims in what Hagar, the mother of Ishmael, did when she desperately searched for water: “Since this woman was patient in the face of this adversity and turned to her Lord, this teaches man that doing this is better and more appropriate. When a man remembers the struggle and patience of this woman, it makes it easier for him to bear his own problems.”

The most dramatic event might be throwing seven pebbles at a pillar (now a wall) to commemorate what the Quran says was Satan’s tempting of Abraham to disobey Allah’s command and not kill his son. Some rituals, like this one, cannot be done anywhere except in Mecca. Whereas Christians emphasize justification by faith, Muslims emphasize justification by works.

The hajj is one of the Five Pillars and thus an enormous opportunity for justification—an opening to a heaven full of sensual pleasure, with saved souls living in blissful gardens with fruit, rivers, carpets, and cushions (Suras 3:198; 4:57; 55:56; 56:35–38; 69:21–24; 79:41; 88:8–16). The one major time of deprivation, the month of Ramadan during which Muslims are not to eat from dawn to dusk, ends with Eid al-Fitr, a three-day festival of fast-breaking marked by celebrations with relatives and friends and frequently the giving of gifts and money to children.

One of Islam’s appeals is the existence of strict dos and don’ts. Each time of prayer consists of units containing set sequences of standing, bowing, kneeling, and prostrating while reciting verses from the Quran or other prayer formulas. The sequences are repeated twice at dawn prayer, three times at sunset prayer, and four times at noon, afternoon, and evening prayers.

Meanwhile, Christians and Muslims debate central issues: If original sin does not exist, why does the Bible tell the stories of so many sinners? Muslims treat the Bible respectfully as the word of prophets but see it as corrupted through the centuries and right only when it agrees with the Quran. Muslims believe that all people are weak but not inherently sinful. Christians do not believe that any works are sufficient to merit salvation, while Muslims believe that having faith in Allah and practicing the Five Pillars make salvation effective.

- More from Marvin Olasky

Church Life

ISIS Victims Welcome Christian Help, Not Christian Conversion

Jayson Casper

Yazidis, a religious minority in Iraq, still face displacement 11 years after the jihadist group’s attacks.

A Yazidi man prays at the entrance of a temple in Iraq.

John Moore / Getty

This is part 2 in a series on the Yazidi community. Click here for part 1.

The previous article in this series highlighted the impact of USAID cuts on the vulnerable Yazidi community in Iraq. ISIS displaced Yazidis from their historic home of Sinjar in northern Iraq in 2014, killing and enslaving thousands. The jihadist group claimed that the Yazidis, whose religion has roots in ancient Mesopotamia, worshiped Satan. (The nature of the Yazidi religion will be discussed in the final article of this series.)

After US coalition forces drove back ISIS, most Yazidis remained in United Nations camps for the internally displaced. USAID was a key aid provider, facilitating access to essential services for more than 30,000 people in Sinjar. The cuts have prevented vulnerable groups like the Yazidis from accessing food and health care they need to survive, wrote Amy Hawthorne, a former Obama-era State Department official.

Yet the legacy of USAID in the Middle East is mixed.

American foreign policy is “deeply unpopular” in the region, Hawthorne continued, while tens of billions of dollars in assistance have failed to create stability, prosperity, or democracy.

If USAID has its critics in the region, so too does faith-based aid.

“Some [Iraqis and secular expats] are very critical of Christians,” said one aid worker serving Yazidis. CT granted him anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue. “They accuse us of mixing help with the gospel.”

Humanitarian organizations of many varieties rushed to help the Yazidis in 2014 during their displacement. Yet large agencies like World Vision, Medair, and Doctors Without Borders began leaving in 2019 as the situation stabilized and crises multiplied around the world. Among the international groups remaining, the aid worker said, many are small and motivated by a long-term commitment to serve the Yazidi people.

For instance, the Kurdistan-based Zalal Life (highlighted in part 1) provides food distribution, vocational training, and medical services to three Yazidi camps and dozens of villages in the northern Iraqi governorate of Duhok. Other Yazidis are displaced to Iraq’s Nineveh valley, bordering Syria.

Ashty Bahro, who founded the Christian group in 2007, has never received USAID or UN funding. But this would not be a problem in Kurdistan, he explained, because unlike many Arabs in the Middle East, most Kurds love America.

Christian foundations and church support fund Zalal Life operations, he said, which recently included the repair of 100 tents left leaking in the wake of Trump’s budget cuts. And his two medical clinics are now serving twice as many patients as before, with three times the demand.

Bahro said the aid work is separate from his church ministry. He is also the pastor of Apostles’ Evangelical Church, which he registered with the Kurdish authorities in 2021—with its Kurdish name. Historic Christians in Iraq, like Bahro’s Chaldean community, worship primarily in Arabic or their ethnic languages. The vast majority of Kurds are Sunni Muslims. Few Middle East nations permit converts such public presence.

But the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has embraced a spirit of religious tolerance for many faiths, said Jeremy Barker, associate vice president of international strategies at Religious Freedom Institute. While not without its challenges, the government has granted recognition to not only centuries-old Orthodox and Catholic communities but also a number of Protestant churches.

Sam Brownback, former US ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, called the KRG a “rare example” in the Middle East. In April he attended Kurdistan’s first-ever national prayer breakfast, where Barker, who lives in Kurdistan’s capital of Erbil, facilitated two panel discussions on religious liberty.

Alongside his church ministry, Bahro runs a local stationery shop that also sells Bibles. He is upfront about his faith. But he said that some groups operate without consideration for the local culture. This issue—or at least this accusation—dates back to 2015 when ISIS was defeated.

“Attached with humanitarian aid, [Christian groups] distribute bibles and pamphlets containing information about Christianity,” Vian Dakhil, a Yazidi member of the Kurdish parliament, stated at the time. The Kurdistan region’s office of Christian affairs, however, commented that most established groups behave ethically and are not pushing conversion.

Samaritan’s Purse stopped working in the camps in 2023 but maintains six projects in the area.

“Like the biblical story of the Good Samaritan, we help people in the ditches of life regardless of their beliefs or background—without asking for anything in return.” CEO Franklin Graham told CT.

But the issue continues. Light A Candle, a humanitarian organization founded by Pentecostal worship leader Sean Feucht, distributes aid to the internally displaced. Two years ago, they conducted a prayer session at a Yazidi temple. After the group posted a video on Instagram of Christian aid workers praying for God to “break the power of the Satanic curse” it holds over Yazidis, local Yazidis were outraged.

Bahro apologized to the camp elders, as he had vouched for the group.

Hadi Maao, a Yazidi profiled in the previous story, said the incident at the shine angered his community not because of the prayer itself but because of its accusation that their religion is associated with Satan.

However, conversion is also a sensitive topic. If a Yazidi converts to another religion, they cannot return to their faith. Depending on the family, they may also be ostracized.

Local believers who want to promote Christianity can also complicate aid work. Last October, members of Bahro’s church distributed coloring books of biblical characters within a Yazidi camp where Zalal Life operates. The material was not evangelistic, but the incident with Light A Candle had troubled relations. Though the distribution was not associated with Bahro’s organization, Kurds and Yazidis both tend to see all Christians as the same, he said. The elders complained to the government, and as their pastor, Bahro once more apologized.

While the offense could have resulted in the expulsion of Christian aid work, the elders were gracious, he said, replying, “Just don’t let it happen again.”

Bahro advises eager Christians—local or expatriate—to consult with experienced local believers before working with non-Christian populations, whether Yazidis, Kurds, or Syrian refugees. Government officials, he said, do not have a problem with people sharing their faith. But the authorities also do not want to deal with problems between religious groups.

“Some have money; some have zeal,” Bahro said. “But all should have wisdom.”

Such insight has led Bahro to strive to increase local religious harmony. From 2021 to 2023, he ran seminars for government, religious, and community leaders to strengthen local religious relations. They were held in the regional capital of Duhok, home to Muslim, Christian, and Yazidi populations. On average, about 50 people would attend.

Most Kurds believe Yazidis share their ethnicity, and many help in the camps, Bahro said. While more-religious Muslims tend to reject them for their religion, Syrian refugees in Kurdistan view them through an ethnic rather than a religious lens, and Christians are also usually on good terms with Yazidis.

In private conversations with intolerant Muslims, Bahro emphasizes that Yazidis are humans created by God. But in the seminars, he did not discuss the particulars of the Yazidi faith or any creed—wishing to avoid disputed theological issues. Instead, his message focused on the ethics of neighborliness and common citizenship, noting that religion was not a reason to hate someone.

He even employed an implicit object lesson. Bahro’s co-presenter was an elder in his church of Kurdish Muslim background. Some present in the meetings knew this; others did not. But out of respect for all, his religion was not advertised. The elder was speaking as a fellow Iraqi citizen.

“People will see what we do and glorify our Father in heaven,” Bahro told CT, quoting from Matthew 5. “But we are all stronger if we love one another.”

- More from Jayson Casper

Ideas

What Is (Artificial) Intelligence?

Kara Bettis Carvalho

Four experts weigh in on knowledge in the age of AI.

Illustration by Zhenya Oliinyk

Theologians have historically identified several markers concerning what it means to be made in the image of God: rationality, the capacity to love, and the state of human righteousness before the Fall.

“It has proved all too easy in the history of interpretation for this exceedingly open-ended term ‘the image of God’ to be pressed into the service of contemporary philosophical and religious thought,” writes biblical scholar David J. A. Clines.

Today, we wrestle with the term anew given the technological landscape of nearly autonomous robots and large language models (LLMs). In many ways, we are asking what it means to be human. Particularly as generative artificial intelligence gains ground, we might start to question our place in the world. Can we have interpersonal relationships with ChatGPT? If we lose our jobs or our craft to artificial intelligence, do we drop down on the societal food chain?

Our questions aren’t just about our work but about theology and ethics. As Christians, we must ask what role intelligence plays in the imago Dei and whether AI is truly intelligent. We are not God, animal, or machine. Much of our world is set up for us to live less humanely, so how do we think about imaging God in an increasingly technological world?

For our July/August print issue, CT invited a software engineer, a researcher, a tech entrepreneur, and a professor to consider how we define intelligence—whether in mathematical calculations, our ability to love, or our ability to know experientially.

We are human, after all.

Kara Bettis Carvalho is ideas editor at Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "What Is Intelligence?".

- More from Kara Bettis Carvalho

Ideas

Don’t Conflate Intelligence with Value

Chris Krycho

Our obsession with AI’s capabilities misunderstands what intelligence actually is.

Illustration by Zhenya Oliinyik

Much of the contemporary debate about artificial intelligence tools such as large language models (LLMs) asks, first, whether such tools are truly intelligent and, second, what that means for us as human beings—for our work, for art, and even for our relationships. For Christians, this is often closely followed by questions or assertions about AI and the imago Dei. These are reasonable things to wonder about.

I submit, though, that these are mostly the wrong questions. They begin from wrong assumptions about intelligence. Consequently, they carry misleading notions about what it would mean for technologies like LLMs to be genuinely intelligent.

Worse, they misunderstand how intelligence relates to human nature. Intelligence is not one single thing at all. IQ tests deceive us because they suggest that intelligence is measurable and that a single number meaningfully represents intelligence.

Those tests do capture something real. They accurately predict how people will perform in college, for example, and are broadly indicative of people’s chances of success in a knowledge-based economy.

But there is much they do not capture. To illustrate this, consider: Are elephants more intelligent than dolphins? It depends on the kind of thing we ask them to do. An elephant cannot use echolocation to hunt and catch fish, and a dolphin cannot use its nose to pull fruit from a tree. Both of those surely entail kinds of intelligence and senses that are utterly alien to humans.

Likewise, some software systems can outperform humans at certain tasks that we think of as matters of intelligence because we experience them as part of our mental life. These include mathematical calculations or even sophisticated games like chess.

On the other hand, the most advanced robot cannot (yet) beat a person in a one-on-one game of basketball or scurry up a tree like a squirrel. Embodied action is still far beyond even our best programming ability, including the famously dexterous Boston Dynamics robots.

This highlights one way Western culture’s view of humanity is distorted: We have made more of intelligence than we ought. We valorize people who create software, write books, or pursue “the life of the mind.” We pity those left behind in society’s transition to knowledge work; we treat physical labor as menial instead of valuing the inherent goodness of embodied work.

Even this is reductive, though. It treats intelligence as a matter of facility. Living beings and humans in particular are not mere task-accomplishing machines. We have greater purposes. Playing games around a table does not “accomplish a task.” Neither does loving someone!

Thus, we cannot say what intelligence per se requires of us. Not only does intelligence belong in different measures and wildly differing functions to many kinds of creatures; it is also the wrong starting point for thinking about ethical obligations.

In fact, treating others’ intelligence as the basis of our ethical duties to them is perverse. This would imply that the more intelligent someone is, the deeper the obligation—and vice versa. Unborn infants, people suffering from progressive dementia, and severely mentally handicapped people would require less of us than a brilliant mathematician, scientist, composer, or poet. But our Lord teaches us the opposite: Whatever we have done to the least of his brothers and sisters, we have done to him (Matt. 25:40). Christians treasure and value humans of every capacity, not fixating on things like intellectual giftedness.

We could perhaps try to thread this needle by speaking of capacities instead of abilities. There is a long tradition of Christian thought dating back to the church fathers that connects the image of God to rationality—the ability to reason and act—rather than being reliant on or chained to instinct. This tradition distinguishes between a natural capacity in a kind of creature and the ways it may be distorted or absent in particular creatures of that kind. That is, we must distinguish between humans’ general capacity for reason and their individual ability to reason.

At its simplest, rationality is that ability to reason, and even that varies enormously. Both a newborn infant and a person with late-stage dementia may be unable to reason in this sense, but both still bear the image of God.

Even apart from disabilities, people have very different degrees of intelligence along the many different axes of intelligence. We have no reason to suppose that these differences resulted from the Fall or will be eliminated in the Resurrection. This seems obvious when considering physical talents, such as running or doing complex mathematics.

Intelligence is thus not the same as rationality, and it is certainly not identical to the image of God. We must not conflate actual intelligence with creaturely value or the image of God.

What then are the right questions? One is what it is to be human. This is an ancient question, but our new circumstances may help us reflect on it more carefully. Another is how we value human beings rightly (and perhaps other creatures too), not in terms of intelligence but in terms of their creatureliness. Our answers to these questions might give us cause to reject such paths or to walk them in a particular way.

Chris Krycho is a software engineer and composer. He is a member of Holy Trinity Anglican Church and has an MDiv from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

This article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "We're Asking the Wrong Questions".

- More from Chris Krycho

Ideas

Why We’re Desperate to Measure Intelligence

Marcus Schwarting

Humans’ ability to reason is not the same as AI gathering information.

Illustration by Zhenya Oliinyik

Five months prior to the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, AI researcher and Google vice president Blaise Agüera y Arcas described in The Economist his conversation with Google’s LaMDA (Language Model for Dialog Applications), a precursor of later Gemini models. He wrote of the experience, “I felt the ground shift under my feet. I increasingly felt like I was talking to something intelligent.” Around a week later, Google engineer Blake Lemoine publicly alleged that LaMDA had become a sentient intelligence.

When we interact with an AI model, it can be easy to subtly ascribe some measure of natural intelligence to the system, even though none is present. As these models continue to be integrated into our technology and devices, how should we view AI systems, especially in the context of our own natural intelligence?

Natural intelligence is the God-given gift to understand and reason about reality, one another, and ourselves. By contrast, artificial intelligence is the subdiscipline of computer science concerned with building models to perform tasks often associated with natural intelligence, like solving a puzzle or summarizing a text. The gap between natural and artificial intelligence is sometimes portrayed as small but is in fact a wide chasm.

While some AI techniques are inspired by ideas in neuroscience and behavioral psychology, most models bear little resemblance to biological systems. Other AI methods draw from disciplines like signal processing, evolutionary biology, and Newtonian mechanics. For example, genetic algorithms are a class of optimization techniques inspired by evolutionary principles of natural selection, mutation, and speciation. AI researchers have remarked that “biological plausibility is a guide, not a strict requirement” for designing AI models. While a task may appear to require the biological machinery of natural intelligence, an AI model need not emulate this machinery to be successful.

Natural and artificial intelligence are not effectively interchangeable. Believing they are equivalent is an affront to those possessing natural intelligence and a disservice to those developing artificial intelligence.

Measuring natural intelligence is different from quantifying the performance of an AI model. Psychologists have long known that natural intelligence cannot be condensed to a single score, such as IQ. Many theories made to quantify natural intelligence have troubling roots in pseudoscientific ideas like eugenics, phrenology, and social Darwinism. And many intelligence scores were designed to privilege certain individuals over others.

Still, it’s challenging to measure natural intelligence, especially when including nonhuman intelligences. Evaluating the performance of an AI model at a specific task is comparatively straightforward: We query a model with a set of inputs and compare the outputs with our expectations. A growing number of benchmarks for large language models seek to quantify performance on tasks ranging from passing the bar exam to accurately translating texts to making moral decisions.

As AI models continue to improve according to industry-established benchmarks, we should learn from our mistakes when quantifying natural intelligence. Scoring the intelligence of participants with a single number can be dangerously reductive, regardless of whether the comparison is between two people or between two models.

Our need to measure the intelligence of our models and ourselves reflects how valuable (socially and monetarily) we consider intelligence. At least one open letter written by the Future of Life Institute and signed by many AI experts contained the same notable phrase: “Everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence.”

Prioritizing intelligence as the only source of progress discounts other God-given traits like creativity and wisdom. Idolizing intelligence dismisses long-held Christian attributes like piety, humility, and self-sacrifice. Our societal worship of intelligence amid powerful AI models has led many to fear their own imminent devaluation. The science fiction stories we tell about a hypothetical artificial general intelligence (AGI)—wherein a superintelligent machine subjugates those it deems intellectually inferior—tend to mirror our own history. Our colonizing predecessors have readily done so in the past.

Christians can forge a path between the extremes of idolizing and repudiating intelligence. We know that we are required to “act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with [our] God” (Mic. 6:8). Intelligence alone is insufficient to carry out God’s will for our lives. We are called to “not conform to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of [our] mind” (Rom. 12:2). So let us willingly surrender our natural intelligence to God for him to use and mold.

As for artificial intelligence, we should not confuse the tools we build with the minds we are granted. Let us instead wield all the tools given to us to further God’s kingdom.

Marcus Schwarting is the senior editor at AI and Faith. He is also a researcher applying artificial intelligence to problems in chemistry and materials science.

This article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "We're Desperate to Measure Intelligence".

- More from Marcus Schwarting

Ideas

AI Offers Information. God Offers Wisdom.

Vineet Rajan

The data-information-knowledge-wisdom model puts artificial intelligence in its proper place.

Illustration by Zhenya Oliinyik

As a Marine Corps intelligence officer in my previous life, my job was to help senior leaders answer the difficult question of “What should I do?” I was to collect millions of pieces of data, organize them into information, put them into context, and through analysis give them meaning so we could have knowledge of the situation at hand. The senior officers would take that knowledge and then, using wisdom born out of experience, decide on a course of action. These decisions could mean life or death for the men and women under them, and as officers, we regularly felt the weight of that responsibility.

Today, as a father, husband, and CEO, many decisions I make still carry much weight. As humans, we’re always in life stages that contain risk: the development of our children, the relationships of our marriages, the jobs of fellow employees. We all make decisions daily—hopefully with wisdom. In the era of artificial intelligence, it only makes sense to appropriately incorporate this powerful tool into our decision-making processes.

The process I followed as an intelligence officer of moving from data to wisdom is not too different from how many of us make decisions in our everyday lives. In fact, the Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom (DIKW) framework established by systems thinker Russell Ackoff more than three decades ago captures the steps many of us unconsciously go through when moving from basic data to wisdom. Within this framework, data becomes information when it’s organized and put into context; it becomes knowledge when the information is analyzed and given meaning; and it becomes wisdom when we understand how to apply it.

If we’re being honest, we’re drowning in data and inundated with information, yet we’re always looking for knowledge and wisdom. Thankfully, AI tools can help with a lot of this process. Their algorithmic and computational capabilities are perfectly suited for collecting terabytes of data and organizing and contextualizing it into information for decision-making—typically in a matter of seconds rather than the hours or days it would take a mortal.

While AI provides informational knowledge, it’s also a slave to the data and information available to it. For the complex decisions of life—the ones involving real risk, often relational—we need more than information.

Knowledge can be informational, experiential, or (ideally) both. The Bible’s definition of knowledge expands beyond that of merely organized data and contextualized information. Instead, the Christian view of knowledge is deeply rooted in embodied people experiencing life in relationship with others—whether with God or with other humans (John 13:35; 2 Cor. 4:5–7).

Scripture speaks about how God wants us to know him—certainly through informational knowledge but ultimately in a personal relationship. Moses knew God. David knew God. In a similar but different way, Adam knew Eve. The knowledge God wants us to have is intimate and experiential, not merely informational.

AI can help us with so much in life, but like any created thing, it also has its limits. Rather than applying AI tools to generate data and information, many are attempting to leverage such systems to generate experiential knowledge and even wisdom.

A recent essay in Harvard Business Review highlighted the top use for AI as “therapy/companionship.” Acknowledging the differences between therapy and companionship, author Marc Zao-Sanders grouped them into one category because both “fulfill a fundamental human need for emotional connection and support.” Human connection and being known by others is a core part of what it means to be human. While the article speaks to the advantages of applying AI in this way, the arguments are made on the grounds of efficiency: It’s available 24-7, it’s inexpensive or free, and it does not “judge.”

But AI is not effective in terms of relationships. AI cannot provide companionship for the same reasons that it is limited in providing experiential knowledge or wisdom: It is not an embodied person who has perspectives and experiences from which to empathize and come alongside our lives. And therein lies the challenge. AI cannot know what it means to be a human because AI isn’t human. And in the midst of Western culture’s loneliness epidemic, mimicking relationships with AI has already had tragic consequences.

Attempts to apply AI in this way are akin to going back into Plato’s cave in search of the shadows of self-gratifying relationship, rather than enjoying the essence of relationships. In so doing, we are privileging efficiency over effectiveness, the artificial for the real.

While AI is very well-suited for complicated problems, humans are complex; what we need are experiential knowledge and God-given wisdom. We could attempt to use AI beyond its limits of processing complicated problems and providing informational knowledge and move into the realms of experiential knowledge and companionship, but it would be unwise to do so.

Vineet Rajan is the CEO of Forte, the fastest-growing platform for mental fitness. He has graduate degrees from Stanford and Cambridge, is a Marine combat veteran, and is an adviser for AI and Faith.

This article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "From Data to Wisdom".

- More from Vineet Rajan

Ideas

AI Is Making Humans Dumber

O. Alan Noble

Mimicry is not the same as having intelligence, or as comprehending love and art.

Illustration by Zhenya Oliinyik

We are, I fear, entering a human intelligence drought even as artificial intelligence is beginning to blossom. And this is not a baseless fear. According to a long-term study of teenagers’ and adults’ reading and numerical skills, both have been declining since 2012.

A Financial Times article that covered the study noted that 18-year-olds self-reported a marked increase in “difficulty thinking or concentrating” and “trouble learning new things” over the same time period.

These startling trends began before the COVID-19 lockdowns, which certainly had an additional adverse effect on students who were forced to switch to virtual classrooms. The first iPhone was launched in 2007, a few years before these trends started to appear in the data. It’s possible this is just a correlation, but given our real-world experience with smartphones, I think most of us would not be surprised that they are making us less able to concentrate, less able to read books or understand numbers—simply, dumber.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines intelligence as “the faculty of understanding.” To elaborate, I think intelligence refers to our ability to reason and understand information and experiences. Some of these experiences will be irreducible to data, like our feelings of love or beauty or injustice—things to which you can’t assign a number value.

Our intelligence is our holistic way of comprehending, interpreting, and reasoning through the information and experiences we receive and have. It is part of what separates us from animals and machines—we can think about ourselves thinking.

There is a reflexivity to our intelligence that is lacking in other creatures or creations. A machine, even an advanced AI model, cannot contemplate itself in the act of thinking. It can only process more information, like analyzing its performance or finding errors.

But I can tell you what it’s like for me to think about myself thinking about writing this article. And in fact, that quality of reflective intelligence is important to the human experience. It’s part of what gives our inner worlds texture and richness. It’s probably not a coincidence that those inner worlds are also currently under threat by the same technological forces that are making us dumber.

Intelligence is also more than mimicry. It’s true that, given enough data and processing power, AI systems will be able to generate content that appears to capture profound human experiences like love, beauty, or injustice.

You’ll be able to ask ChatGPT for a love poem for your valentine or an explanation of a great work of visual art, and the result will be a reasonable mimicry of real human experience, because it has processed billions of pieces of data and trained itself on others’ love poems and art. But that is not the same as having intelligence, as comprehending and understanding love or art. It’s the difference between knowing that a rose is used as a symbol for love and knowing what love feels like.

Understood as a unique human gift, intelligence demands a great deal of us. First, it compels us to humility. Any time an opportunity to comprehend information or an experience comes before us and we choose a posture of superiority or seclusion, we fail to exercise the full gift of intelligence God has given us. It is only in humility that we can accept a reality unfiltered by our prejudices and sins so that we can understand it in light of God’s revelation.

How you will interpret information or an experience using your intelligence is largely determined by a posture of humility or pride—like a book that confronts your assumptions about politics or a walk in the park that confronts you with the beauty of God’s creation. Pride shuts down our intelligence by defaulting to our prior assumptions and biases. Humility remains open to revelation and possibility, to correction and wisdom, engaging with intelligence in a process of understanding.

Second, we have a duty to exercise our intelligence by reading, reasoning, and practicing the virtue of temperance with our digital devices. Whether or not the data charted in the Financial Times article marks a direct causation between smartphones and a decline in intelligence in America, I think most of us have seen this decline in ourselves or those we love who are addicted to smartphones.

We don’t need a study to tell us what common sense and personal experience show: Spending hours every day on digital devices that train our attention to adapt to 30-second videos harms our ability to read and understand. God has given us a great gift in intelligence, but we squander it on ephemera and nonsense when we could be using it to glorify him and work for the common good of our neighbor.

Given the examples set by social media, we should expect that technology will only become more organized to appeal to our vices and worst instincts rather than training our intelligence, even as AI developers gain billions upon billions in funding. In other words, our society will probably continue to grow against our common good, including our collective intelligence. There’s just too much money to be gained in appealing to vice.

We have an opportunity to exercise what God has given us or to acquiesce to these social forces. We can practice humility and temperance, humbling ourselves before reality and using our technology in moderation. Whether technology makes us dumber or not is a choice we make. It is not inevitable. We can choose to read books, form our own opinions, and write our own ideas, or we can leave it all up to the algorithms, AI, and the machines. Let’s not squander the gift of intelligence.

O. Alan Noble is associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University and author of several books, including On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living.

This article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "AI Will Never 'Know'".

- More from O. Alan Noble

News

Universal Injunctions Are Over, but Not the Fight for Birthright Citizenship

Harvest Prude

The ruling left unanswered the question of what will happen to children born to immigrant parents in the US.

A protest outside the U.S. Supreme Court against the Trump administration looking to end birthright citizenship.

Alex Wong / Getty

A group of immigrant rights groups and parents are continuing their legal fight over birthright citizenship, days after the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration to limit judges’ ability to block presidential policy via nationwide injunctions.

Nationwide or universal injunctions stop the government from enacting or enforcing a law or policy anywhere in the country.

The Supreme Court decision did not address whether the Trump administration could end birthright citizenship, which guarantees citizenship to nearly anyone born in the United States, as the president attempted to do with an executive order issued on Inauguration Day in January. Instead, the 6–3 decision curtailed the judiciary’s ability to issue universal injunctions.

The majority sent the case back to the lower courts to decide how to act within the constraints of the new ruling, with instructions to “determine whether a narrower injunction is appropriate.”

It represents a massive win for the Trump administration, allowing officials to carry out policies without being hampered by nationwide pauses issued from any federal district court in the country. The administration will still face challenges in court, but it can carry out the president’s agenda in the meantime.

Presidents from both sides of the aisle have been hampered by injunctions in the past. A federal judge in Texas paused the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone during the Biden administration, and the second Trump administration has racked up many pauses, such as for firing federal workers and over deportations.

The Supreme Court decision raised as many questions as it provided answers, including for pregnant mothers with temporary or no legal status in the country. Legal analysts expect that questions around the constitutionality of birthright citizenship will appear before the Supreme Court again. In the meantime, the Supreme Court issued a 30-day pause on President Donald Trump’s executive order from going into effect.

The same day the decision came down, CASA Inc. a nonprofit membership organization that advocates for immigrant and working class communities, and a group of other plaintiffs filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of babies who would be impacted by Trump’s executive order and their parents. Babies born on or after February 19 are “ineligible for birthright citizenship” according to the executive order.

“We are here to say that we are committed to fight to ensure that all US-born children have US citizenship at birth, regardless of their parents’ immigration status,” Conchita Cruz, with one of the groups, the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), said at a press conference on Friday. ASAP was also a plaintiff in the case.

Also on the call was a Russian woman in the US on a student visa. When she and her husband found out about the executive order, they joined the lawsuit out of concern for their baby..

The woman, who only identified herself by her first name, Liza, said that because she and her husband had fled their country, they did not feel safe going to the embassy to get their baby Russian citizenship, and that without the injunction, their baby, who was born after February 19, would have been born stateless and without citizenship.

“I’m sad about what today’s decision means for all of the parents whose children are not protected by the preliminary injunction and who are now even more scared about their children’s future. Each of those parents should have to file to protect their children’s rights. That’s why we filed a class action today, and why I will be a class representative,” she said.

In the dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said for lawsuits “challenging policies as blatantly unlawful and harmful as the Citizenship Order…lower courts would be wise to act swiftly.”

Legal analysts were divided. Some viewed the decision as the Supreme Court ceding ground on checking an overreaching president, while others viewed reigning in the judiciary’s reliance on nationwide injunctions as long overdue.

“That universal injunction remedy is extremely important in cases where you have nationwide illegality by the government, as in the birthright citizenship case,” Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, said in an interview with CT ahead of the decision. And, he added, injunctions are also important in a separate case he is litigating on behalf of businesses concerned about Trump’s tariffs, “where many of the victims, for various reasons, are too poor or otherwise poorly situated to file their own cases, yet it may be hard to do a class action.”

“Class action lawsuits can help, but they’re not a complete replacement for nationwide injunctions, because there are class action certification requirements which will sometimes be hard to meet,” Somin said.

Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, acknowledged that taking nationwide injunctions off the table means more possibility of legal “unevenness,” where one part of the country is subject to a law that has been found unlawful in another part. But he said there are still legal remedies available to curtail a president who is abusing his authority.

“The Supreme Court can move quickly. And when it realizes that there are heavy concerns of national importance, where there is unevenness, it might be inclined to move more quickly as a result of it,” he said.

Since parties should be the ones to bring cases, courts shouldn’t give orders that affect people who aren’t party to the case, Muller argued.

Universal injunctions are “useful tools against executive orders and claims of executive overreach,” he said, “but there have always been claims of executive overreach and mechanisms to deal with them. It will definitely slow down some of the process, but it won’t fundamentally undermine our ability to get courts to resolve these issues.”

He noted that universal injunctions were “essentially nonexistent 15 years ago” and that their usage has skyrocketed, along with presidents relying more on executive orders rather than working with Congress to get things done.

As American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Adam White noted in The Dispatch, Trump has courted controversy by issuing a “tidal wave” of executive orders around dismantling federal agencies, defunding programs, and deporting immigrants. Many of his executive orders have faced injunctions.

The Harvard Law Review found that former president George W. Bush received 6 injunctions, former president Barack Obama received 12, and Trump received 64 during his first term. Former president Joe Biden received 14. So far, the second Trump administration has racked up at least 40.

“Trump has given a flurry of executive orders at much, much higher rates than other presidents,” Muller said. “So there’s no surprise that there’s going to be a much, much higher rate of challenges to these executive orders and a much, much higher rate of court orders related to those issues.”

The court did leave open the prospect of more litigation in the lower courts about exactly how much the injunction power should be curtailed. The justices also noted that plaintiffs negatively impacted by the ruling could seek remedy in other ways, such as through class action lawsuits.

“Federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority in Trump v. CASA. “They resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them. … When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the courts to exceed its power, too.”

On day one of his second term, Trump issued an executive order that would end the practice of granting citizenship to children born of parents who were in the US unlawfully or on a temporary basis. He said the 14th Amendment was rightly applied to the children of former slaves but should not apply to the children of undocumented immigrants.

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution, approved in 1868, says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

It came in response to the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, which held that a Black man who was descended from enslaved people was not a US citizen and thus had no standing to sue. The 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution a year later. In 1898, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that a man born to Chinese parents was a US citizen.

Trump’s order soon sparked legal challenges, and lower court judges of a few different jurisdictions sided with a group of states, immigrant rights groups, and pregnant moms to block the administration from enforcing the order. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to curtail the scope of the judges’ orders, arguing that these actions were stopping the executive branch from being able to accomplish its agenda.

The majority was persuaded.

After the decision came down, Trump said he was “grateful to the Supreme Court for stepping in and solving this very, very big and complex problem, and they’ve made it simple.”

“Thanks to this decision, we can now probably file to proceed with these numerous policies and those that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis.”

With universal injunctions weakened, the administration signaled plans to go after birthright citizenship as well as other executive actions that have run into judicial roadblocks, including ending funding for sanctuary cities and suspending refugee resettlement.

Correction: An earlier version of this story had “nationwide legality” in a quote that should have read “nationwide illegality.”

- More from Harvest Prude

News

Died: Jimmy Swaggart, TV Minister Caught in Scandal

Daniel Silliman

The spellbinding Pentecostal preacher became, for many, an example of what is wrong with Christianity.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

Jimmy Swaggart, the Louisiana televangelist whose name became a watchword for scandal, died in Baton Rouge on July 1. He was 90.

Swaggart was one of the best-known and most successful TV preachers in the 1980s, reaching an estimated half-billion people every week with riveting sermons about the struggle against sin and the good gift of God’s redeeming grace. Then, at the peak of his popularity, Swaggart was caught at a rundown motel paying a woman for sex.

In 1988, he confessed on TV that he had sinned, face contorted with tears as he apologized to his congregation, those watching at home, his wife, his son, his son’s wife, other Pentecostal preachers and evangelists, the Assemblies of God, and, finally, Jesus Christ.

“I have sinned against you, my Lord,” Swaggart said, “and I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God’s forgetfulness, never to be remembered against me.”

Forgetfulness couldn’t come fast enough for Swaggart, though, and when the Assemblies of God told him he couldn’t preach for a year, he rejected the discipline, left the denomination, and went back to doing what he had been doing.

He was caught paying a woman for sex again in 1991.

This time the confession was different: “The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business,” Swaggart said.

The televangelist went on to shift the blame to Satan and to talk about the scandal as spiritual warfare, describing his own sexual acts as demonic attacks on him.

Swaggart also said Satan was behind all the criticism and condemnation. He argued that those who said he was wrong to stay in the pulpit through scandal were just giving voice to the Accuser, trying to convince Swaggart that he was a joke, “a sideshow,” and an international disgrace. He reminded himself the Devil is a liar and paid them no mind.

Swaggart’s ministry collapsed—but not completely. Eighty percent of his viewers disappeared. His 7,000-seat sanctuary emptied. Sales of his gospel albums slowed. Donations didn’t arrive in the mail as frequently. But Swaggart kept going.

He’s been used as a case study of scandal ever since.

Christianity Today editor Rodney Clapp saw Swaggart as an example of the failure of the modern church.

“Too often, in the spirit of an extreme individualism, the grand Reformation doctrines of sola Scriptura and sola fidei have been turned into pitiful escapes from responsibility and accountability,” he wrote. “Cases like Swaggart’s indicate just how much we need to restudy and then take seriously the New Testament doctrine of the church.”

More recently, historians such as Suzanna Krivulskaya have looked at Swaggart to see how ministers have avoided consequences.

“Disgraced celebrity preachers experimented with obfuscation and confession” and “learned to rebrand their downfalls as evidence of the gospel’s effectiveness,” Krivulskaya wrote. “Resolute in their insistence on the right to preach despite being caught in acts they otherwise label immoral, charismatic ministers of the television age appeared to be unstoppable—scandal and all.”

Swaggart was born on March 15, 1935, in the tiny town of Ferriday, Louisiana, near the Mississippi River. He was the first child of Minnie Bell Herron and Willie Leon Swaggart. His father—known as “Sun” or “Son” Swaggart—played the fiddle at dances and parties.

The younger Swaggart remembered a lot of parties in the earliest years of his childhood. He recalled them as drunken affairs, frequently ending in fights. His parents also drank and fought at home. Then, when he was five, they had a conversion experience, and everything seemed to change.

“Jesus came to my house,” Swaggart would later say. “When they got saved, the fighting ended.”

Swaggart had his own religious conversion a few years later, at eight, standing in line for the movies. He heard God speak to him, as he would recall the story, and say he wanted young Jimmy to give him his heart.

When the ticket machine jammed, Swaggart took it as divine intervention and gave himself to God. He felt God tell him that he had some special work for him to do and had set him apart “as a chosen vessel.”

He started preaching and preforming gospel music as a teenager. By 17, he’d dropped out of high school, married 15-year-old Frances Anderson, and gone into full-time ministry as a traveling evangelist.

It was a hard life. He frequently played piano, sang, and preached from the back of a flatbed truck. The young family struggled to survive on meager donations, sometimes as little as $30 per week. In later years Swaggart would tell a story about awakening to find their campsite consumed by a flash flood.

“The Devil had tried to take our lives,” he said. “For years to come, I would dream about struggling against that current and almost drowning.”

Swaggart said his greatest struggle, however, came from the temptation to join his cousin Jerry Lee Lewis, who was on the road pioneering rock-and-roll with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Elvis Presley. Lewis was getting rich and famous singing and playing “Great Balls of Fire,” “Good Golly Miss Molly,” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.”

Memphis record producer Sam Phillips, founder of the legendary Sun Records, wanted to sign Swaggart, too, to add some gospel music to the lineup. Swaggart turned him down after a great internal battle.

“Jerry Lee can go to Sun Records,” he said. “I’m on my way to heaven.”

Swaggart was ordained in 1961 and brought his ministry to radio. Within a few years, his program was on 700 stations across the US. He built a church in Baton Rouge that could double as TV studio and made the jump to television in 1971 with The Jimmy Swaggart Telecast.

Even people who didn’t believe Swaggart’s message were often mesmerized by his Pentecostal preaching.

“He bobs and weaves and shouts and cries and spins his own magic,” historian Randall Balmer wrote in CT. “Raucous and controversial … Jimmy Swaggart has rarely had trouble keeping people’s attention.”

People magazine called him “a spellbinding performer” who would “rant, weep, thrust his Bible high in the air,” using the whole stage and “whipping his followers and himself to a devotional frenzy.”

The TV ministry grew until, at its zenith, his sermons were reaching an estimated 510 million people in 145 countries. In 1987, Swaggart was receiving an average of $500,000 in donations every day.

Then came the spectacular fall. A minister named Marvin Gorman was mad at Swaggart for Swaggart’s role in forcing him to confess to an extramarital affair with a deacon’s wife. Gorman sought revenge, and his son Randy was a police officer who knew Swaggart was a frequent guest at a Travel Inn, where men rented cheap rooms for quick sexual encounters.

The Gormans set up a sting operation and captured Swaggart on camera going into the motel with a 27-year-old. The woman, Debra Murphree, later said he’d been paying her $20 to pose for provocative photos and perform oral sex a few times a month for several years. She knew who he was but said he told her to call him “Billy.”

Swaggart confessed to the Gormans. Then to church leaders. Then to everybody, including his wife and God.

He didn’t offer many details but said he’d been succumbing to this temptation since the early days of his ministry—nearly 30 years. He agreed to stop preaching for three months but wouldn’t accept the Assemblies of God’s requirements for a longer restoration process.

Three years later, Swaggart was caught again when a police officer pulled him over for reckless driving in Indio, California. There was a 31-year-old woman named Rosemary Garcia in the car. She said she didn’t know Swaggart. He had picked her up.

In case the implication wasn’t clear, Garcia explained it to a Los Angeles TV station: “For sex. I mean … that’s what I do. I’m a prostitute.”

This time, Swaggart offered the world no tears. He returned to the pulpit after just a few days.

His reputation suffered, though, and the ministry was never the same. Early in 1992, Frances Swaggart sent out a fundraising letter pleading with supporters to help make up a $1.5 million deficit.

“Despite what the world (and most of the church) says,” Frances Swaggart wrote, “we believe the best days for the ministry are ahead.”

In 1998, CT found the vast parking lot around his church mostly empty. Inside the sanctuary, large sections of seats were curtained off, the balcony was dark, and camera angles for the TV broadcasts were carefully controlled to keep viewers at home from seeing the “dearth of congregants.”

But not everyone turned away from Swaggart. Some at the church said they still believed he was anointed and that God didn’t withdraw anointing just because of a moral failing.

They forgave Swaggart his faults and even took some of the responsibility.

“The man is human,” one woman said. “Maybe he got so caught up in being an example that he couldn’t tell someone something was terribly wrong. Now he has. He’s said it to the Lord, and the Lord is going to get him some help.”

Others thought the scandals actually made Swaggart a better minister: He wasn’t as judgmental as he’d once been, they said, and put a lot more emphasis on grace.

Besides, they argued, wasn’t that the point of the gospel? Swaggart’s life and message showed “somehow God can take things that are wrong, like this problem,” a family member said, “and turn them around to His glory.”

Others, however, took away very different lessons. They saw hypocrisy. They saw abuses of Christian theology. They saw evidence that the whole idea of God and forgiveness was all a fraud.

“Religion is nothing more than an excuse,” one woman in California concluded. “Why does ‘God’ allow cheap grace? Because there’s no other kind but accepting responsibility for our own actions.”

Swaggart, for his part, insisted that grace was real. He said that was the truth of his life, that God had healed him, forgiven him, and cleansed him of his sin. He returned to the theme again and again, in sermon and song.

He re-released two songs on streaming platforms on June 13, a few days before he suffered cardiac arrest and went into the intensive care unit in Baton Rouge. One song is called “Mercy Rewrote My Life”; the other “He Looked Beyond My Faults.”

“My faults were great, and I’d wandered so far away in sin,” Swaggart sings on the nearly-eight-minute track. “But his loving heart knew just where, my Lord, I had been. / I cried aloud, and Jesus heard my, my humble, humble plea. / He looked beyond all my faults and saw my need.”

At the time of his death, Swaggart’s ministry said he’d preached on television for longer than any other evangelist. Swaggart is survived by his wife, Frances, and son, Donnie.

- More from Daniel Silliman

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