When AI Becomes a Spiritual Shortcut

Last updated on: July 6, 2026 at 9:42 am by Rob Giannamore

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When AI Becomes a Spiritual Shortcut 2026-07-06T09:42:48-04:00 Rob Giannamore

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I do not think technology has to be treated as an enemy of spiritual life. The danger begins when the usefulness of AI is used as a replacement for the slower, more demanding work of spiritual formation. | Image created in Gemini for Patheos.

AI can assist spiritual practice, but it cannot replace spiritual presence, obedience, community, patience, or direct encounter with God. Used unwisely, it may train believers to seek instant spiritual clarity rather than the slower formation that faith often requires.

When I was researching for the philosophy class I teach, I found a long-lost memory that I had forgotten: that Socrates, known for not writing his own work and relying on students such as Xenophon and Plato for records, attacked writing for supposedly weakening memory and harming critical thinking. Socrates believed that written words are static and cannot engage in the back-and–forth debate like a teacher, and he was quoted as saying, “They will seem to be men of wide knowledge, when they will usually be ignorant.”

The Promise and Problem of AI-Assisted Faith

I was going to use this AI generated image until I realized the girl had too many fingers on her hand.

It is felt that AI can be a genuinely useful tool for people who are trying to think more clearly about faith. It can help organize scattered thoughts, summarize complicated ideas, generate study questions, and even prompt reflection when someone feels stuck. In that sense, I do not think technology has to be treated as an enemy of spiritual life. The danger begins when the usefulness of AI is used as a replacement for the slower, more demanding work of spiritual formation. I have been in the process of becoming since I was 17 years old; I am now 49, and there have been deep ebbs and flows in my spiritual journey that I would not have wanted to miss.

What makes AI attractive is also what makes it spiritually risky: it offers immediacy, clarity, and convenience in a world where prayer, Scripture, silence, and discernment often require patience, uncertainty, and surrender. The line between using AI as a tool and depending on it as a spiritual guide is crossed when the believer begins to seek answers from a machine instead of allowing God, community, conscience, and time to form the soul.

Outsourcing Discernment

Every person who sits with a board of ordained ministry or is trying to work for a church at some point or another has to talk about their call to ministry. My first call was when I was 17, a Junior in high school. I have had several calls since then. All of these moments require a cultivation of wisdom, consultation with community, a lot of time in prayer and scripture, and following the obedience of tradition that cannot be optimized by an AI tool.

When one asks AI what they should do, the question is not only whether the answer is useful, but whether the process has bypassed the very people, practices, and holy friction through which God often forms discernment.

Perhaps the greatest danger is when we turn discernment into consumption. When a believer asks, receives, and moves on – without prayer, waiting, counsel, repentance, or accountability- they blindly walk into a decision that may not be ready to reveal itself. Discernment is about the wait, God’s time.

Frictionless Faith and the Loss of Spiritual Struggle

It is felt that AI can cheapen the experience of faith development when it is used to bypass the long contemplative journey, much as shortcuts to mystical experience such as the use of psychedelics can bypass the discipline, surrender, and transformation that give such awareness depth and meaning. During my formation process for the monastery and priesthood, I had to endure long hours saying the rosary, attending Mass and chapel, and praying the hours.

The spiritual practice of Questing begins with learning to ask better questions. Learning how to ask questions requires struggle, sometimes because we do not know the question(s) we need to ask. Sometimes our first questions are shaped by fear: “Why is this happening to me?” “How do I get out of this?” “What did I do wrong?” Those questions are honest, and God can hold them. But spiritual questing invites us to ask deeper questions too: “Where is God in this?” “What is God revealing?” “Who am I becoming on this road?” Questing helps us stop assuming that hard places are empty places. It teaches us to look again and ask whether God may already be present in ways we have not yet recognized.

As a clinician, I know people are afraid or uncomfortable with this friction. AI removes this, and it enables the anxiety that people are avoiding. But it is in the struggle where faith matures.

Conclusion: AI as an Assistant, Not Spiritual Master

I want to reflect on Pope Leo’s thoughts on technology from his Magnifica Humanitas encyclical:

Technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity. On the contrary, it has formed part of our history since the beginning as “a profoundly human reality, linked to the autonomy and freedom of man.” Pope Leo reflects on the tower of Babel as one of the biblical stories to anchor his thoughts on AI technology. He offers that the Babel narrative in the Book of Genesis appears near humanity’s beginnings, immediately after the genealogies of Noah’s sons. After settling on a plain in the land of Shinar, the people decide to build a city and a tower “with its top in the heavens” (Gen. 11:4). Their goal is to avoid being scattered and to secure stability, power, and identity by making “a name” for themselves. The story emphasizes that their project depends on uniformity—a single language, shared technology, and one collective direction. Rather than cultivating true communion, this uniformity collapses difference into homogenization. Because the project is conceived apart from God, it becomes spiritually dangerous: pride and self-sufficiency fracture communication, confuse language, and destroy mutual understanding. Babel therefore reveals that grand human projects rooted in self-affirmation can sacrifice human dignity for efficiency and attempt to reach heaven without God’s blessing.

I have found AI to be a powerful tool for expressing my thoughts more effectively. I have never used it for lectio or discernment. As a child, I was deprived of several educational opportunities due to perceived learning challenges related to having Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. As such, I missed out on the kind of learning that would have helped me improve my grammar. I am often criticized for creating dense, long, and tediously heavy material, and AI has been a big help in expressing myself in a way that is more approachable to most people.

So perhaps the question is not whether AI belongs in the life of faith, but where. It can help us speak, study, organize, and understand, but it should never be allowed to replace the slow and holy work of being formed by God. Faith still requires waiting, struggle, community, prayer, and obedience. If AI helps us become more honest, more thoughtful, and more attentive to God, then it can serve a good purpose. But if it teaches us to avoid the very friction through which grace often works, then it has become less of an assistant and more of a spiritual shortcut.

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