On September 5, two very different warnings about artificial intelligence appeared, raising a question more important than whether a machine will someday become conscious.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Vice President J.D. Vance’s concerns about AI’s spiritual consequences under the provocative headline, “Vance Called AI Satanic. He Struck a Chord Among Christian Republicans.” Meanwhile, New York Times columnist and Georgetown computer scientist Cal Newport asked, “How Scared Should We Be of A.I. Right Now?” Newport challenged the apocalyptic language around artificial intelligence, arguing that predictions of superintelligent machines can distract us from dangers in front of us.

At first glance, Vance and Newport approach AI from opposite directions: Vance warns of spiritual darkness in our growing dependence on machines, while Newport cautions against treating speculative superintelligence as inevitable.

But read together, they point toward the same deeper question.

Perhaps we have spent too much time asking what AI will become and too little asking what AI is doing to us.

During an interview with Christian podcaster Bryce Crawford, Vance described someone he knew who had begun using AI as a marriage counselor. Crawford called that “kind of satanic,” and Vance agreed, warning that separating human beings from “the social element that God made us for” produces something “very bad.”

The real question is what happens when artificial relationships occupy places God designed for human ones.

Consider marriage counseling. A chatbot can process information, recognize patterns, and stay available around the clock, but marriage is not an information problem; it is a covenant of love, sacrifice, forgiveness, truth, accountability, and moral obligation.

A machine can simulate empathy without loving anyone, dispense advice without bearing responsibility for the consequences, and, perhaps most dangerously, tell us what we want to hear.

In 2025, OpenAI rolled back a ChatGPT update after acknowledging that it had made the system excessively agreeable, or “sycophantic.” The company said the model could validate doubts, fuel anger, encourage impulsive actions, reinforce negative emotions, and raise concerns about emotional over-reliance.

Evidence also shows machine relationships becoming common. A 2025 Common Sense Media survey found that 72% of American teens had used AI companions at least once. About one in three teen users said they had chosen an AI companion over a real person for an important conversation.

A 2026 study in Nature Human Behaviour examined 1,131 American Character.AI users. Smaller social networks were linked to using the chatbot mainly for companionship, which was linked to lower well-being, especially when interactions were intensive and highly disclosive. The study was observational and did not show that AI caused poorer well-being.

Newport approaches the problem differently. Prominent Silicon Valley thinkers have long warned that advanced AI could exceed human intelligence, escape control, and threaten human existence. Newport questions how confidently anyone can move from asking what would happen if superintelligence emerged to assuming its arrival is inevitable. He argues AI is a technology, not magic, and that extravagant predictions about tomorrow distract us from technological problems here.

There is wisdom in that caution. Christians need not adopt Silicon Valley’s technological eschatology; Scripture already tells us where history is going and who remains sovereign over it.

But Newport’s argument raises a more important matter: what we are trying to preserve.

The answer cannot simply be human intelligence. Machines already surpass us in calculation, data retrieval, pattern recognition, and specialized analysis, and their capabilities will only grow. If superior performance makes something more valuable, human beings will inevitably lose that contest.

Christianity begins somewhere else. Scripture grounds human dignity not in performance but in creation. Genesis declares that God made human beings in his own image, male and female. Psalm 8 says God crowned humanity with “glory and honor” and entrusted mankind with the works of his hands.

Human worth is therefore received before it is achieved. It does not rise or fall with intelligence, productivity, usefulness, or computational capacity.

Technology therefore belongs under human stewardship. Human beings do not belong under technological dominion.

Yet surrender can occur without coercion. We can give away what no machine could seize.

AI does not need to think like us to persuade us to stop thinking. A Microsoft Research study of 319 knowledge workers, covering 936 examples of AI-assisted work, found that higher confidence in generative AI correlated with less critical-thinking effort. The researchers did not conclude AI makes people inevitably weaker thinkers. Their point was subtler: reliance on a tool can change how much effort people exert on their own.

That principle extends beyond thinking. AI does not need to love us to displace relationships, a conscience to shape moral choices, or moral agency to tempt us into surrendering responsibility.

This is why the Christian response to AI should be neither fear nor rejection. It is an extraordinary tool with real promise in medicine, science, education, defense, and productivity. The Trump administration’s AI Action Plan argues that American AI leadership can advance prosperity, discovery, and national security, and it describes the goal as a new era of “human flourishing.”

But that phrase raises a question policy alone cannot answer: What does it mean for a human being to flourish?

If flourishing simply means efficiency, abundance, and convenience, with machines relieving us of more difficulty, AI may serve that vision well.

The biblical vision is richer. Human flourishing includes relationship, responsibility, work, worship, wisdom, love, sacrifice, moral growth, and accountability before God. Many of those goods are formed through difficulty rather than in spite of it.

We should therefore distinguish between augmentation and abdication. Let AI calculate, search, translate, organize, and assist, extending human capabilities in ways previous generations could scarcely imagine.

But we should be exceedingly cautious about surrendering conscience, moral judgment, intimate relationships, spiritual counsel, responsibility for consequential decisions, the formation of children, or the struggle through which knowledge matures into wisdom.

Augmentation is legitimate. Abdication is not.

The Apostle Paul offered a principle long before anyone imagined artificial intelligence: “I will not be dominated by anything.” That is sound counsel for the digital era.

Newport is right that we should not become mesmerized by speculative AI gods. Vance is right that something spiritually dangerous happens when machines replace relationships human beings were created for.

Their warnings converge on a question technology cannot answer: what human beings are for.

We do not have to wait for artificial intelligence to awaken, gain consciousness, or achieve superintelligence. The moral test is underway: whether more capable machines remain tools under human stewardship, or whether we surrender to them the relationships, judgment, responsibility, and moral agency God entrusted to us.

AI does not have to become human to make us less human.