🎤 AI can ace a Bible knowledge test. But does that mean we should trust it with questions of faith, morality, and wisdom? In this episode of @HumansofAIPod, I sit down with Michael Graham (@msgwrites) of The Gospel Coalition (@TGC) and the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics about their 2026 AI Christian Benchmark, which evaluates leading AI models across theological reliability, Christian ethics, relational attachment, and Bible knowledge. One of the benchmark’s most striking findings is also one of its biggest paradoxes: today’s AI models can retrieve biblical knowledge with extraordinary accuracy, yet give dramatically different answers when asked questions about morality, theology, relationships, and how people should live. We unpack what explains that gap. How much of an AI’s answer comes from what it learned during pre-training and how much comes from the human decisions made during alignment, post-training, and product design? Why does a small change in prompting radically change a model’s ethical answers? And when an AI appears “neutral,” whose assumptions are actually shaping that neutrality? We also explore principled pluralism, Michael’s proposal for how AI systems could handle religious questions more faithfully: rather than flattening every question into a survey of competing viewpoints, models could first represent a religious tradition accurately on its own terms before introducing alternative perspectives. The conversation then moves beyond benchmarking into some of the deeper questions AI is forcing us to confront: Is AI conscious? And should AI systems ever receive moral consideration or welfare rights? Ultimately, this is a conversation about more than how AI affects Christians. It is about the values being embedded into increasingly powerful systems, who gets to shape those values, and what kinds of authority we should (or shouldn’t) give artificial intelligence in our lives.

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…