The Church Already Answered the AI Question. Most Christians Missed It.

May 11, 2026

In April, Lifeway Research released a study showing that 67% of evangelical churchgoers are worried about artificial intelligence’s influence on Christianity. Last week, the Associated Press reported that tech companies are now convening interfaith roundtables — Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and others — to negotiate shared ethical norms for AI.

What most Christians don’t realize is that the largest Protestant denomination in the United States already answered the AI question three years ago. They did it clearly. They did it on the record. And almost nobody read it.

What the resolution actually says

“We must proactively engage and shape these emerging technologies rather than simply respond to the challenges of AI and other emerging technologies after they have already affected our churches and communities.”

SBC Resolution on Artificial Intelligence, June 2023

In June 2023, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution on artificial intelligence and emerging technologies at its annual meeting in New Orleans. The resolution is short — under a thousand words — and most of it is the kind of careful, biblically grounded reasoning you would expect from a denomination thinking out loud about a new technology.

But one sentence in the resolution does something most Christian responses to AI have not done. It names a stance.

There are two stances the SBC explicitly rejected in that sentence. The first is passive avoidance — letting AI happen to the church, hoping it will pass, and then mopping up the damage. The second is reactive engagement — waiting until tools are built, deployed, and integrated into ministry before asking whether they should have been built that way at all.

The stance commended is the third option. Engage. Shape. Do it before, not after.

That is an answer the church already has, and it has been sitting on the SBC’s website since the summer of 2023.

Why “shape” is the load-bearing word

The temptation for Christians worried about AI — the 67% in the Lifeway study — is to retreat from it. Refuse to use it. Treat it as the latest cultural threat to be resisted. We understand the instinct. There are real things to be cautious about, and we have written about them before.

The temptation for Christians excited about AI is the opposite. Adopt the general-purpose tools uncritically. Use whatever ranks well, whatever is free, whatever your friends are using. Treat the technology as morally neutral and the underlying convictions of the people building it as somebody else’s problem.

The SBC resolution rejects both of those instincts in a single sentence. Engagement is not optional, but neither is shaping. Christians are called to be present in the building and forming of these tools, not just to be careful consumers of them.

That word — shape — is the load-bearing one. It assumes that AI tools are not yet finished, that their convictions are not yet fixed, and that the people who show up to do the work of shaping will determine what the tools become. Three years on, that assumption is being vindicated in real time. The interfaith roundtables in New York were exactly the kind of shaping the SBC anticipated. The question is whether convictional Christians will be doing their own shaping, or whether the only Christians at the table will be the ones willing to sign documents negotiated to be acceptable to traditions that reject the deity of Christ.

What proactive shaping actually looks like

This is where the resolution gets practical, even if it doesn’t say so explicitly. If “engage and shape” is the call, what does it look like in actual Christian practice? Four things, at minimum.

One: refuse to outsource the work of Bible study to a tool that treats Scripture as one religious text among many. A general-purpose AI tool answering a question about a passage is doing so through a framework that was calibrated to be acceptable to readers of every tradition and none. That is not a neutral starting point. It is a specific theological commitment, even if the engineers who built the tool would not call it that. Christians who care about the authority of Scripture should not pretend otherwise.

Two: choose tools whose convictions are explicit rather than averaged. Every AI tool has a worldview baked into it. The honest question is not whether the tool has theological commitments, but whether those commitments are disclosed. A tool that tells you upfront what it believes — and why — is one you can evaluate. A tool that hides its commitments behind a veneer of neutrality is one you cannot.

Three: hold pastors and ministry leaders accountable to use AI as a study aid, not a substitute. The Lifeway study found that 43% of churchgoers oppose pastors using AI to prepare sermons, and 24% of those oppose it strongly. We agree with the instinct. Preaching is a calling, and the labor of opening the Word for God’s people is not a job that can be delegated to software. AI can help a pastor research a passage, find a cross-reference, or stress-test an outline. It cannot do the work the Spirit gives a man called to preach.

Four: be honest about where AI helps and where it cannot go. This is the hardest one. AI can surface original languages, parallel passages, historical context, and the interpretive options that careful study requires. It cannot exercise faith. It cannot be illuminated by the Spirit. It cannot pray for you, weep with you, or sit beside you in a hospital room. The line between what it does well and what it cannot do at all is not a marketing line. It is a real one. Christians shaping AI tools should be the first ones drawing it clearly.

A line worth borrowing

“AI cannot replace the gift of divine inspiration or the individual work required to receive it. However, AI can be a useful tool to enhance learning and teaching.”

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, General Handbook

We have significant theological disagreements with the LDS church. Those disagreements are real and they are not small. But the boundary that sentence draws is exactly the right one. AI is a tool. It can help with learning and teaching. It cannot replace what God does in a believer’s heart by His Spirit and through His Word.

Christians have sometimes been slower than other traditions to articulate this line clearly. We should not be. The line is biblical. The Spirit applies the Word. No technology, however impressive, can replace that work. Saying so plainly — in our marketing copy, in our product decisions, in our public conversations about AI — is part of what proactive shaping looks like in practice.

What this requires now

Three years ago, the SBC told its churches and its institutions that the moment to engage AI was now, and that the goal was to shape the technology rather than be shaped by it. Three years later, that mandate is more relevant, not less.

The interfaith roundtables in New York will keep happening. The frontier AI companies will keep iterating. The defaults of these tools — what they say about Jesus, how they handle Scripture, whether they treat the historic Christian confession as truth or as one tradition among many — will be set by whoever does the work of setting them.

Polaris exists because we read the SBC resolution and took it seriously. We are not the only Christian voices in this space, and we hope we are not the last. But we are one example of what “engage and shape” can look like when Christians decide to build the tools they wish existed, rather than waiting to see what the rest of the industry produces and then objecting after the fact.

The Lifeway data showed that two-thirds of evangelicals are worried. The SBC resolution, written three years before that survey was even taken, showed what to do about it. The defaults are being set right now. The only question left is who sets them.

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

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