AI Ethics for Christians

The two evangelical consensus documents

A Christian ethic of AI is not something each believer has to invent from scratch. Church bodies and theologians have already done serious, public work on it — and two evangelical documents anchor the conversation.

The first is "Artificial Intelligence: An Evangelical Statement of Principles," published by the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) in 2019 and signed by more than 70 leaders, including the theologians Wayne Grudem, Michael Horton, and Richard Mouw. Across its articles the statement holds two lines that shape everything else: AI is a creation of human hands that has no moral agency of its own, and it must never be worshipped or treated as more than a tool. Its starting point is the imago Dei — the conviction that human beings, not machines, bear the image of God and carry inherent dignity.

The second is the Southern Baptist Convention's 2023 resolution "On Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies," passed by the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. It affirms that AI can be used for legitimate good while warning the church to keep human dignity, truth, and accountability at the center as the technology spreads. Russell Moore, who led the ERLC when the earlier statement was drafted, framed the stakes plainly: "It's critical that the church insist AI be used in ways consistent with the truth that all people possess dignity and worth."

Together these documents give evangelicals a shared vocabulary — dignity, stewardship, truthfulness, no idolatry — that any believer can apply to the tools they actually use.

The Catholic teaching: Antiqua et Nova

In January 2025 the Vatican released Antiqua et Nova, a doctrinal note from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith on the relationship between artificial and human intelligence. It is the most detailed official Christian treatment of AI to date, and its central warning is blunt:

"The presumption of substituting God for an artifact of human making is idolatry." — Vatican, Antiqua et Nova (2025)

From that root the note works outward to concrete harms. It cautions against letting AI replace genuine human relationships rather than support them, and it names the deception risks directly — deepfakes and manipulated media that "can gradually undermine the foundations of society" by making it impossible to tell the true from the fabricated. It also warns about mass surveillance and the way data-hungry systems can erode human freedom and privacy.

The remarkable thing is how closely the Catholic and evangelical documents agree. Different traditions, arriving independently, land on the same guardrails: human dignity first, truth over deception, and God alone in the place that belongs to God.

The core principles

Strip these documents down to their load-bearing ideas and four principles carry the weight of a Christian ethic of AI:

1. Imago Dei — human dignity comes first. Because people are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), dignity belongs to persons, not to machines. Every use of AI should be measured against whether it honors or diminishes the worth of the human beings it touches. A tool that treats people as data points to be manipulated fails this test before any other question is asked.

2. Truthfulness — no deception. "Thou shalt not bear false witness" (Exodus 20:16) reaches into the age of generated media. AI that fabricates quotes, invents Scripture, or produces convincing fakes trades in exactly the kind of deception the ninth commandment forbids. A Christian ethic prizes tools that are honest about what they know and honest about what they don't.

3. Stewardship, not idolatry. Scripture calls people to "subdue" and cultivate the world (Genesis 1:28) — a mandate that welcomes good tools as instruments of that work. But the moment a tool moves from servant to object of trust or reverence, stewardship becomes idolatry. As the psalmist says of man-made idols, they are merely "the work of men's hands" (Psalm 115:4). AI belongs in the first category and must never migrate to the second.

4. AI has no moral agency. This is the quiet backbone of the ERLC statement, and it changes how blame works. A machine cannot sin, repent, or be held responsible; it has no soul and no conscience. Accountability always rests with the humans who design, deploy, and lean on it. That is why the ethical burden of using AI wisely — checking its claims, refusing to outsource conscience to it — falls on the person, not the program.

Named voices worth hearing

Beyond the official documents, a handful of respected Christian thinkers have sharpened the ethic in ways worth quoting directly.

John Lennox, the Oxford mathematician and author of 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the End of History, warns that the ancient temptation to worship "the work of our own hands" has simply found a new object. His caution is stark: "The world will end up worshipping an intelligent machine — and being enslaved by it." The antidote is not fear of technology but a refusal to give it the place that belongs to God.

Jason Thacker of the ERLC, who has written extensively on technology and faith, puts the tool-versus-savior distinction as cleanly as anyone: "AI is not a savior. It is a tool that must be wielded with wisdom."

Russell Moore keeps the focus on people, insisting the church hold AI to the standard that "all people possess dignity and worth" — the imago Dei applied to design and deployment, not left as an abstraction.

And Jonathan Sams, writing for The Gospel Coalition, names a subtler danger he calls "mis-formation" — the way over-reliance on AI can quietly reshape our habits of the heart. His warning is one every user of a Christian tool should sit with:

"Even if the counsel AI gives is biblically sound, it's still spiritually detrimental if it trains people to rely on AI for what God intends to mediate through his Word, his Spirit, and his people." — Jonathan Sams, The Gospel Coalition

None of these voices is anti-technology. The wider evangelical posture, captured in The Gospel Coalition's "two cheers for AI," treats it as a morally neutral instrument of the stewardship mandate — genuinely useful, and genuinely in need of limits.

Putting the ethic into practice

Principles become real at the moment you choose a tool. If truthfulness and human dignity are the standard, then the ethic favors AI that is honest about its limits and grounded in Scripture rather than confident and unaccountable. This is not a small concern with the Bible: YouVersion founder and CEO Bobby Gruenewald has said the best general-purpose models still "misquote Scripture at least 15% of the time. Some of them as much as 60% of the time." A tool that invents verses while sounding certain fails the truthfulness test the ethic demands.

That last row matters most. A tool built on this ethic does not try to be your pastor, your conscience, or your God. It shows you the verse from a named translation so you can check its work, drives you deeper into your own study, and keeps pointing beyond itself. If you want to see how those guardrails are engineered, read how we stay biblically accurate. If the deeper question is nagging at you, we address it head-on in is it a sin to use AI? And for the wider picture — the surveys, the trust data, and the whole debate — start with the pillar guide to AI and Christianity, or the sibling explainers on is AI biblical? and what Christians think about AI.

The ethic, in the end, is not a wall against a new technology. It is a way of keeping the technology in its place — a servant held to the truth, under the lordship of God, in service of people who bear his image.

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