Artificial Sanctity

Who gets to decide what counts as authentic spiritual guidance?

In a recent article, Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad looked at a range of spiritually-oriented chatbots and concluded that whether they enrich or hollow out religious life will hinge less on the models and more on how communities critically adopt and integrate these tools into their shared spirituality.

To think through these possibilities, I want to explore three dimensions of the challenge: the temporal structures that shape spiritual growth, the nature of religious authority, and ultimately, what we mean when we talk about authentic spiritual encounter.

Ahmad points out, that for many people, connections to their spiritual traditions is constrained by geographically dispersed communities, shortage of clergy and financial barriers. If AI can help address some of these constraints while preserving the core functions of religious guidance, isn’t there a moral argument for embracing it?

Shouldn’t we want spiritual resources to be more widely available rather than artificially scarce? For a Buddhist in rural Montana, struggling with questions of interpretation or ritaul, if they can engage meaningfully with the Dharma through a well-designed AI, isn’t that a net positive?

You can see the value in a crisis or for occasional look-up questions. The on-demand availability of AI advisors, companions or guides may be a great benefit to people struggling or searching. But for longer-term personal transformation, I wonder if the very immediacy of AI undermines the patience that spiritual growth demands?

Religious traditions have always involved complex structures of time; ritual calendars, seasons of feast and fast, the slow pace of contemplation, the suddenness of insight. Time in the sacred sense isn’t just chronos or duration; it’s kairos, the right moment when the eternal breaks through into the passage of everyday time. In John 7:6, My time (kairos, my moment) has not yet come.

I work with a team - Tranquilla - building a compelling AI to provide empathetic help, urgently and immediately, and it’s important work. Yet it still seems to me that AI operates in a time without qualities. It has no lived chronos or kairos. Whether it responds instantaneously or longer is determined by the compute required on some remote server, rather than a care to create the conditions for comfort or revelation.

These temporal concerns point to questions about the nature of spiritual encounters. But rather than getting caught up in debates about authenticity, we might ask a more pragmatic question: not whether the experience of working with an AI is credibly spiritual, but whether it is good enough.

I often talk about this good-enoughness in relation to AIs I’m working on, like our work at Tranquilla to provide some degree of empathetic care or counsel. Even if there is no true human empathy, can a bot be empathetic enough to help someone out? I think so. In fact, I’m struck by how many people report feeling genuinely helped. If someone struggling finds comfort in an AI companion that consistently offers patience and encouragement, are we really going to tell them their experience is invalid because the AI isn’t truly compassionate? Instead we can separate the question of whether AI can be empathetic from whether it can function empathetically.

I do think this pragmatic approach has real merit, especially for care, comfort and coaching. But it sidesteps something fundamental about how religious authority actually works.

Religious traditions themselves seem to resist purely functional interpretations. I am sure most would insist that the divine is not merely functional in this way: rather, the sacred calls into question human functions and purposes .

Of course, religious practices do serve deep functions: they create social cohesion, manage our anxieties about survival, suffering and death, and provide frameworks for making meaning that helped our ancestors flourish. But, to be fair, they’ve also been about gatekeeping, about defining who belongs and who doesn’t. Who controls access to the sacred?

Similarly, human religious authority, whether we’re talking about shamans, priests or gurus, has always been embedded in ritual practices that mark certain people, times, and spaces as set apart. These practices create psychological and social conditions that make religious experience possible. The shaman must undergo symbolic death and rebirth. Their authority comes not from knowledge but from having traveled to the other world and returned.

An AI has never made that journey because it has never lived in this world to begin with. So, how can AI fulfill these same functions? Can it ever call it’s own functionality into question? When a chatbot delivers spiritual guidance, where is the “setting apart?” Where is the ritualization that signals to us that this is sacred space or a sacred moment and not just a question-and-answer session?

The authority of a human religious teacher comes not just from knowledge, or even from experience dealing with others (which may well be the authority of a counsellor or therapist) but from their own transformation within a tradition of practice. They embody what they teach in a way that leaves traces: scars, wisdom, presence. Our best teachers are often the most scarred, with an immediacy of presence; the most glib and insincere, to be found 24 hours a day on cable tv, carry none of that burden.

The absent embodiment of a spiritual AI connects to a broader issue about how religious wisdom is transmitted. Religious traditions aren’t just collections of ideas that can be mashed-up; they’re entire ways of life that have evolved over centuries in response to particular challenges and contexts. They are deeply embedded in specific cultural contexts, carrying forward histories, languages, practices, ways of being in the world. John Fort Newton wrote of the Hebrews having a genius for religion as the Greeks had a genius for art and philosophy and as the Romans had a genius for jurisprudence.

But Ahmad notes in his article that LLM outputs often reflect a single, homogeneous religious-cultural profile. When an AI offers users a kind of religious mashup (a bit of Buddhist mindfulness here, some Christian comfort there) it undermines the cultural specificity that makes much religious thinking coherent. Surely something gets lost in that process.

For my part, I see these religious AIs not as a gateway to insight, but more as a kind of storytelling about the sacred, treating spirituality as information that can be extracted, processed, and re-delivered. That may be the good-enough many people need, especially if they already have a grounding in their religious tradition. The Buddhist in rural Montana, if raised in the tradition, may find the chatbot more useful as a refreshing source of insight than the new Buddhist striving to understand the layered complexity of a long-established culture.

Perhaps I’m being too restrictive in thinking about spiritual presence. Consider how many of our most profound religious encounters happen not through direct human contact, but through other forms of mediated experience: Augustine reading Paul’s letters, or millions of people finding solace in the Psalms without ever meeting King David. The medium has always been part of the message in religion. Perhaps what we’re witnessing is simply the emergence of a new medium, with its own affordances and limitations.

Can an algorithm not become possessed by the gods? Can it speak with the voice of the absolute? After all, literature, music and art certainly demonstrate that transformative encounters can happen across time and space through text, sound, paint and marble.

When I read Shantideva, I’m not in a reciprocal relationship with him, but his thoughts can still transform me. Julian of Norwich seems to speak with real presence across centuries: at times you can almost hear her voice. Some of our most profound spiritual encounters happen through books, through dreams, or through encounters with the natural world when we are alone. The presence that matters might not be the physical presence of another human being but the presence of the sacred itself. Who’s to say that can’t move through digital channels?

Perhaps, then, we can think of AI spiritual guides as more like sophisticated forms of literature: tools for reflection and growth rather than replacements for human community.

Spiritual guidance as literature suggests one way of thinking about AI potential, but it also reveals the limitations of approaching religion primarily as a source of comfort or insight.

Much of the discussion around religious AI focuses on its therapeutic potential: comfort, guidance and emotional support. But as I have suggested, religious traditions have generally been concerned with something more radical: transformation. They’re not trying to help people feel better; they’re trying to help people become fundamentally different kinds of persons. Can AI participate in that kind of radical transformation?

The therapeutic model treats religion as a resource for managing the difficulties of life as we already understand it. But the transformative dimension of religion calls that understanding into question. The imagery is often that we must die to our old selves and be reborn. Can an AI call someone to that kind of radical change when it has no conception of what transformation actually means?

Perhaps not, but equally, are we sure transformation requires some kind of conscious intentionality on the part of the guide? Transformation often seems to happen through unexpected encounters, through insights that arise from engaging with ideas or practices in new ways. If an AI can present religious material in ways that prompt genuine reflection and self-examination, why couldn’t it catalyze transformation?

Maybe we’re too focused on the mechanism rather than the outcome.

These questions about transformation and authenticity assume we know what authentic religious experience looks like in the first place. But when I hear people worrying about the authenticity of AI spiritual guidance, I have to ask: according to whom? Maybe these technologies create possibilities that go beyond that single, homogeneous religious-cultural profile to achieve what Gloria Anzaldúa has called spiritual mestizaje: mixing and creating new forms of the sacred that speak to people who’ve been cast out by traditional institutions.

For me, the most important question raised by Ahmad’s article is whether the sacred can survive its transformation into information. The sacred has always been about presence, about the face-to-face encounter with the absolute. Moses meets the burning bush; Arjuna (and Duryodhana, let’s not forget) sees Krishna’s Vishvarupa, his cosmic form; Paul is struck down on the road to Damascus. These aren’t transfers of information and knowledge but ontological events. They change not just what someone knows but what they are.

Can AI do any of this, or does it reduce them all to data? This returns us to Ahmad’s original insight: the value of these tools may depend less on whether they can replicate traditional spiritual authority and more on how communities choose to integrate them into their existing practices of seeking and transformation.

But there’s the important word: communities, with all its implications of tradition and social complexity. Individuals, alone with an AI, might think they are creating their own spiritual mestizaje, but without the testing ground of community, how could they distinguish transformation from simple self-reinforcement?