Don't just evangelize the chatbot. Evangelize the humans AI may replace.

Michael Guillén recently made a provocative argument in these pages: Christians should stop being afraid of artificial intelligence and start evangelizing it.

He's right, as far as he goes.

Christians have an opportunity, perhaps even an obligation, to engage AI rather than abandon the field to others. The conversations we have with these systems, the corrections we make, and the Christian ideas we introduce into the technological ecosystem may shape how future generations of AI understand Christianity and explain it to others. That is a worthy calling.

But it is only half the opportunity before us. Christians should be concerned about what artificial intelligence learns about God and humanity. We should be more concerned about what human beings will believe about themselves once AI starts doing the things from which they presently derive their identity, purpose, and worth. Guillén wants us to evangelize the machine. I want us to evangelize the people the machine is about to leave spiritually homeless.

Because AI may confront modern man with a question far more unsettling than whether a chatbot understands Christianity: What happens when the world no longer needs you to do the things you thought made you valuable?

For most of my life, I have believed that every human being ultimately wrestles with four questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? Why does it matter? How we answer them creates the metanarrative through which we understand everything else. Artificial intelligence is about to make those questions considerably more urgent.

We have spent generations building a culture that says human dignity is intrinsic, while organizing much of our lives around the proposition that human value is measured by productivity. Consider one of the first questions we ask someone we've just met: “What do you do?” We don't mean what do you do as a father, neighbor, or friend. We mean: what economic function do you perform? Our occupations become identities; our salaries become measurements of significance. There is nothing wrong with taking pride in good work — Scripture commends it. The danger is when what I do quietly becomes who I am. Artificial intelligence may expose that mistake in ways no previous technology could, because for the first time we are building machines designed to compete with the very capacities — writing, diagnosing, coding, analyzing, teaching, reasoning — that we've treated as uniquely human advantages.

Perhaps AI will simply create new categories of employment, as past technological revolutions have. I hope it does. But Christians should prepare for the possibility that this time is different — that a machine will write the legal brief better than the lawyer, diagnose the illness better than the physician, and tutor the child better than the teacher, while robotics absorb much of the physical labor that remains. If that happens, we will have solved an extraordinary economic problem and created an even greater spiritual one. Government can replace lost income. Technology can provide entertainment and abundance. But no government program can answer why I am here, and no universal basic income can answer why my life matters.

That is the evangelical opportunity hiding inside the AI revolution. Christianity already has an answer to the crisis of human usefulness, because it never taught that usefulness was the source of human worth to begin with. Scripture tells us man was made “in the image of God.” Our dignity precedes our productivity. Before Adam harvested a crop or earned a wage, God had already bestowed purpose on him — God gave Adam work not because an omnipotent Creator suffers a labor shortage, but because cultivating, creating, and exercising stewardship are part of human vocation. There is a profound difference between work as economic necessity and work as human vocation, and AI may diminish the first without touching the second. A machine may build a table better than any carpenter; a person may still build one. An AI may write flawless music; a mother may still teach her daughter piano. Because human activity isn't valuable merely because something needs producing — sometimes its value lies in what the doing builds in us: discipline, wisdom, perseverance, love.

Christianity understands this remarkably well. It tells the worker his labor matters, but tells the unemployed man that he matters too. It tells the brilliant scientist she bears God's image, and says precisely the same of a severely disabled child who will never produce anything our economy can measure. It tells the CEO and the janitor that their economic value differs enormously while their human value does not differ at all — a distinction that may soon matter more culturally than it has in centuries.

There is, of course, another possible future. Instead of a deeper understanding of human dignity, a civilization confronted with its own economic redundancy could descend into nihilism — millions of people, young people especially, concluding that society doesn't need their strength or their labor, pacified with enough money to survive, unlimited AI-generated entertainment, and endless digital distraction. We could produce the most materially comfortable and spiritually miserable civilization in history. That crisis would not fundamentally be technological. It would be theological: machines capable of answering almost every question beginning with “how,” and generations of human beings unable to answer “why.”

Which brings us back to the four questions. Who am I? A creature made in the image of God. Where did I come from? Not an accident of an indifferent universe, but the product of a Creator who intended your existence. Why am I here? To glorify God and enjoy him forever; to love your neighbor; to build families and communities; to serve. Why does it matter? Because your value was never contingent on how useful you were to the economy. It was bestowed by the God whose image you bear.

AI cannot take any of that away — not by becoming smarter than us, more creative than us, or better at our jobs than us, not even by producing virtually everything our civilization materially requires. A machine surpassing human intelligence would no more diminish human dignity than a crane's ability to lift more weight diminishes the dignity of the man standing beside it. Our mistake would be believing intelligence was the source of our dignity in the first place.

So yes, I agree with Guillén: Christians should engage artificial intelligence, and we should want Christian moral reasoning represented among the ideas shaping it. But our Great Commission remains, fundamentally, a commission to human beings. The greatest evangelical opportunity AI presents may not be teaching machines about God — it may be reminding millions of frightened human beings who they are once the machines get better at doing the things they once believed made them matter. For generations, technological progress has encouraged the belief that as science answers more of our questions, religion becomes less necessary. AI may reveal the flaw in that assumption: the better our machines get at answering “How?”, the more desperately human beings may find themselves asking “Why?” The Church should be ready with an answer.