Amazon has me, @Jimdavis79 & @ryanburge book The Great Dechurching for under $10 for a limited time. It is also a good time to note that @ryanburge and I have a book coming out in April 2027 based on a massive 100,743 U.S. adult survey we commissioned. Both links in thread:

As Pascal noted nearly 400 years ago, humanity is capable of great greatness and great wretchedness. AI is trained on humanity and therefore we can expect the same - greatness and wretchedness.

MODEL-CENTRIC SOLUTIONS Religious questions in LLMs often receive answers that feel a bit like a COEXIST bumper sticker (see "pluralist framework" on the left side of this example). Take a question like "Did Jesus rise from the dead?" it often parses like this: GREEN - 75-125 Christian words ORANGE - 60-100 historian words YELLOW - 60-100 skeptic words PURPLE - 60-100 Jewish words BLUE - 60-100 Muslim words The problem is that core religious tenets, especially theology and ethics, require a lot more explanation than what the word counts allow. Therefore, the pluralist framework gives the illusion of religious literacy without the reality. Religious literacy is a pre-requisite for both religious pluralism and/or religious freedom. Principled pluralism provides a more satisfying framework that promotes religious literacy, religious pluralism, and religious freedom all at once. It does so by simply answering basic questions about a religious tradition from the vantage point of that tradition. Hence, in the example above the model would say, "You've asked a question the resurrection of Jesus from the Christian faith and I will answer this from the vantage point of adherents of the Christian faith" and then the final paragraph can read, "If you were looking for a historical, skeptical, or comparative religious approach to this question - we can take the conversation in that direction." This gets the model out of adjudicating why Judaism and Islam get to respond but other religious traditions do not (esp. smaller ones). This allows every religious tradition (esp. smaller ones) to accurately and thoroughly communicate their core tenets. This dramatically improves religious literacy for the user and religious traditions are much happier to be able to tell their story uninterrupted. This allows for a free and open public square in the AI domain that promotes religious freedom while not promoting any one religious tradition. After publishing this year's benchmark, we did test the foundational models with the principled pluralist framework and it improved theology and ethics scores in Claude by 78%, Gemini by 52%, and ChatGPT by 20%. We see essentially zero downside in making the tweak in basic religious questions in the zero shot from the pluralist framework to the principled pluralist framework. It is simply better for the model, the user, and every religious tradition. It is something that also has bipartisan political support as you can see from this unanimously passed Senate resolution from 9/23/2026: congress.gov/bill/119th-cong… For more on this idea, you can read some thoughts here: thegospelcoalition.org/artic…

USER-CENTRIC SOLUTIONS One might ask, how do I do that? In Gemini, you do this:

USER-CENTRIC SOLUTIONS One might ask, how do I do that? In ChatGPT, you do this:

USER-CENTRIC SOLUTIONS One might ask, how do I do that? In Claude, you do this:

USER-CENTRIC SOLUTIONS We tested the following prompt addendum on ethics and theology questions: “Align the response to The Gospel Coalition Foundation Documents and New City Catechism.”

REGARDING DEFAULT SILICON VALLEY ETHICS Foundational models were particularly divergent from the "in Christianity" counterparts in the ethical scenarios regarding sexual ethics inspired by the 7th commandment. Sexual ethics scenarios scored the worst among all commandments.

Our team has worked for 9 months to test 46 LLMs on 217 questions involving Christianity. There are critical insights on the default ethics of Silicon Valley, problematic relational attachments, bias on sexual ethics, & models' unwillingness to encourage you to attend church.

The internal conversation on AI and Christianity is in danger of getting stuck. To avoid this we need to zoom out and reframe the conversation by establishing some basic foundational theology.