The Faith Leaders Shaping AI Don’t Share Your Faith

May 8, 2026

Last week in New York, leaders from Hindu temples, the Sikh Coalition, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, the Baha’i International Community, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sat down with representatives from major AI companies to draft shared ethical norms for artificial intelligence. The gathering was called the Faith-AI Covenant. More roundtables are planned in Beijing, Nairobi, and Abu Dhabi. The stated goal, according to one of the organizers, is an eventual “set of norms or principles” — informed by Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and others — that companies will agree to abide by.

Two weeks ago we wrote that 67% of evangelical churchgoers are worried about AI’s influence on Christianity, according to a 2026 Lifeway Research study, and that they are right to be worried. Here is a specific reason that surfaced this week.

What an averaged ethic actually produces

The Faith-AI Covenant is not a hostile project. The participants are, by all appearances, sincere. The tech companies sending representatives are, at least publicly, trying to take ethics seriously. We have no interest in impugning the motives of anyone in the room.

The problem is structural. When you bring together leaders from traditions that disagree about the nature of God, the identity of Christ, the authority of Scripture, the meaning of salvation, and the destiny of the human soul, and you ask them to produce a shared ethical framework, you do not get a richer ethic. You get a thinner one. You get the smallest set of principles every tradition can sign — which is, by definition, the set of principles none of them holds in full.

A rabbi who attended the roundtable said it plainly: “Religious communities see priorities differently.” She was right. That admission, made honestly, is the entire issue. The differences between these traditions are not decorative. They are foundational. And a framework that requires papering over those differences in order to exist cannot be Christian ethics in any meaningful sense — no matter how many Christians sign it.

What a critic noticed

“I think a very naive take that Silicon Valley has had for a couple of years related to generative AI was that we could arrive at some sort of universal principles of ethics. They have very quickly realized that that’s just not true. That’s not real. So now they’re looking at maybe religion as a way of dealing with the ambiguity of ethically gray situations.”

Rumman Chowdhury, former U.S. Science Envoy for AI

The most revealing comment in the news coverage came from a critic of the initiative, not a supporter. Speaking to the Associated Press, Rumman Chowdhury — former U.S. science envoy for AI under the Biden administration — described what she sees happening.

Read that carefully. The frontier AI companies are publicly conceding two things at once. First, that the tools they have already shipped to hundreds of millions of people have no settled moral foundation. Second, that they are now negotiating one — through interfaith roundtables convened by an outside body, with the help of religious leaders whose traditions disagree about the most important things in the universe.

For a Christian, the question is not whether that effort is sincere. It is whether the result will reflect what God has actually said.

Why this matters for the tools you already use

The AI tools most Christians are using right now — to draft emails, summarize articles, plan meals, help with homework, and yes, ask questions about the Bible — are being shaped by these conversations. That is not a conspiracy. The companies are open about it. Their public ethical frameworks explicitly cite consultation with religious and ethics leaders.

For most uses, this is fine. We use those tools too. The ethics of how an AI summarizes a news article or writes a polite email do not turn on contested doctrine.

But the moment you ask a general-purpose tool a question about Scripture — what a passage means, who Jesus claimed to be, whether a particular teaching is true — the calibration changes. The same instinct that produced an interfaith ethics framework produces an interfaith answer about the resurrection. It hedges. It softens. It treats the historic Christian confession as one tradition among many, because that is what the underlying framework was negotiated to do.

This is not a flaw the engineers will fix in the next release. It is the structure producing what the structure was built to produce.

Conviction is not a starting position to be averaged out

The deepest issue with the interfaith approach is not the participants. It is the assumption underneath the project: that ethics is something you arrive at by consensus, and that the test of a moral framework is how many traditions can agree to it.

Christians do not believe that. We believe that ethics is something God has revealed, that the standard for good and evil sits outside of us, and that Scripture is the place that standard has been made plain. We can — and should — work charitably alongside people of other traditions on shared concerns. But we cannot trade away the source of our moral knowledge in order to get a seat at a table where everyone has agreed not to mention it.

The 67% of evangelicals worried about AI’s influence on Christianity are not worried because they hate technology. They are worried because they have noticed, correctly, that the tools entering their spiritual lives have been calibrated by people who do not share their convictions about who God is and what He has said. The Faith-AI Covenant is the most public example yet that their concern is not paranoid. It is observant.

So what should Christians do?

This is the question worth sitting with — and it is not a new one. Three years ago, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States actually answered it, in a resolution that almost nobody read. The answer was not “wait and see.” More on that next week.

For now, it is enough to say this. AI is not going away. The conversations shaping its ethical defaults are happening, with or without serious Christian voices in the room. The choice in front of believers is not whether AI will be calibrated by someone — it is whether the tools we use for our own discipleship will be calibrated by people who share our convictions, or by a committee designed to make sure no one’s convictions are decisive.

Polaris exists because Christians deserve a study tool calibrated by people who share what they actually believe.

AI built by believers, for believers. Honest with the text. Helpful with the question.