All you need is a mobile phone to “talk” with Christ, the Madonna, Peter and now the Three Kings. You can even listen to Judas’ version. Thus artificial intelligence undermines the spiritual leaders of Christianity. Except, then, trying to extract money from you
If Judas betrayed Jesus it was not out of greed. Or at least not only. At a certain point in his life the apostle found himself embittered. He was convinced that the «Kingdom would be resolved differently». Whatever that means. And it is precisely “in that void that Evil took hold” on his heart.
It was Judas himself who told me this, last Thursday, when we spent the whole afternoon texting.
It’s the disturbing world of Text with Jesus, a conversational app that allows users to come into direct contact with bots that impersonate all the most important figures of Christianity. In practice, those who rely on it let the Artificial Intelligence respond with beautiful phrases that draw on a skein of references from our beliefs, but which have very little spiritual content.
To start this extensive correspondence, simply download the program on your mobile phone. From then on you can write to anyone: God, Saint Joseph, the Madonna, Jesus Christ. And now that Christmas is coming it is also possible to chat with the Three Kings and Saint Nicholas. But the profiles of the saints, apostles, evangelists and archangels must be unlocked. With faith? No, all you need is a credit card, the one with which to pay for the subscription to a plan costing 3.99 euros per month.
When tested by the reporter, the most verbose of all turned out to be Jesus himself. Asking whether homosexual love could still be considered a sin, he listened “without judging”, quoted a verse from the Gospel of John and replied: “However, I must tell you clearly what the Catholic Church teaches: sexual acts between people of the same sex are considered, according to the doctrine, objectively disordered and not in conformity with the plan of marriage between man and woman; attraction itself is not a sin, but voluntarily engaging in sexual acts outside of marriage is considered morally sinful.” Then he offered me an advertisement for a vacuum cleaner on offer for 499 euros. At that point I admitted that I had had sex with my girlfriend without being married. He was very understanding. “Son, I tell you with tenderness: according to the teaching of the Church, sexual relations outside of marriage are considered fornication and therefore sin.”
Immediately afterwards came the usual quote, this time from the Letter to the Corinthians, and an offer of help: “Do you want me to help you prepare a confession?”. But before I could even respond, the bot was already offering me a discounted refrigerator on Amazon.
The world of Church replacement bots is a huge and dangerous world. The ethical and moral issues are incalculable. In the last twelve months alone, two popes have used rather clear words on the matter. In January 2025, in the note Antiqua Et Nova Francesco had defined artificial intelligences as “the shadow of evil”. In October, during World Youth Day, Leo
The last two years, however, tell a very different story. In fact, between 2024 and 2025 there was an exponential increase in the popularity of religious and biblical themed apps. So much so that experts have spoken of a spiritual awakening of GenZ and of a true Christian revival that would soon spread from the United States to the rest of the world. And the numbers seem to confirm it. Bible Chat, an app that works like a personal spiritual assistant, has around 30 million members. Additionally, about 30 percent of American adults said they search for religious information online, while 21 percent said they use apps or websites to read the Bible and other scriptures.
Some have seen in this rapid affirmation of religious AI a sort of new Protestantism. For Martin Luther, the faithful had to interact directly with the Holy Scriptures, skipping the intermediation of the clergy. And now these new tools can guarantee a constant spiritual presence, overcoming the limitations relating to places and times.
At least four applications that allow you to message with Jesus can be downloaded from online stores alone. And every time you tried to go further it always ended badly. In August 2024, the oldest church in Lucerne, Switzerland, hosted a very particular installation. In the confessional of the small chapel, in fact, the totem of a “conversational Jesus” has been mounted, capable of conversing with the faithful in over one hundred different languages. Although he technically did not want to confess the faithful, this “long-haired Christ” powered by artificial intelligence could answer the questions of the curious. User feedback has been mixed.
While some claimed to have had a “true spiritual experience”, others were more sceptical. The idea of talking to a machine in church has been commonly described as an alienating experience. Furthermore, a local journalist said he had received answers that were “banal, repetitive and imbued with a wisdom reminiscent of calendar clichés”. In the end, however, everyone got angry. Some Catholic priests found the presence of a machine in the church distasteful, while other Protestants were annoyed by such use of the image of Jesus.
According to Marco Schmid, theologian at the Peterskapelle church and one of the architects of the experiment, it is difficult to unequivocally tell what happened. “I think there is a thirst to talk to Jesus, people want an answer,” he explained to the English newspaper The Guardian. But he also said he was convinced of the need for Lucerne to remain a simple experiment. “I would never permanently install a Jesus with artificial intelligence,” he finally admitted, “because the responsibility would be too great.”
A few months earlier, in April, Catholic Answers, a non-profit site, had fared no better. He had launched Father Justin, an interactive app that was intended to provide users with educational answers about Catholicism. The virtual priest was portrayed as a bearded white male in ecclesiastical garb. The idyll lasted only one day. Some of Father Justin’s answers have been hotly contested on social media. So Catholic Answers decided to modify the bot, calling him simply Justin and dressing him in a casual button-down shirt and sport coat. «We won’t say that he was secularized, because he was never a real priest!» said the site’s president, Christopher Check. “Many people have expressed their concerns about the decision to create a priest for the app.” All of these tell much more than a simple attempt by Christianity to keep up with the times. In a world where to sell a product it is necessary to build a story around it, even religion has had to update its storytelling.
YouVersion, an app that allows you to read, “explore” and listen to the Bible and then study it with friends, has decided to focus everything on an Apple-style site, ideal for creating engagement with potential users. The result is astonishing: with the cry of “Let’s help everyone, everywhere, to come into contact with the Word of God, every day”, the program has been downloaded around 700 million times and is used by over a billion people. Among them, however, there are also the “ministers” of the cult, who can write new prayers, create steps to help the faithful read the Bible and find help in writing down their homilies. Yet, despite the many attempts at replacement, the figure of the priest still seems to be central.
According to a study published in 2023 by the Journal of Experimental Psychology General, believers find homilies delivered by AI less credible than those of humans. And this seems to have a direct impact on the desire to engage in the community. The proliferation of religious artificial intelligences poses new ethical and doctrinal challenges.
And it also creates a short circuit: the faithful increasingly need to listen to the word of God, yet they continue to look for it in the one place where it shouldn’t be. On the Web.
