The Barna Faith and Culture Report

02 | Andy Crouch on the Future of AI, Faith & Spiritual Formation

• Barna Group • Season 1 • Episode 2

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In this episode, David Kinnaman and Ashley Lalonde  sit down with Andy Crouch to explore new Barna data on AI adoption among Christians and pastors, and what it reveals about the future of faith and culture. Together, they unpack the rise of “easy everywhere” technology, the growing influence of AI in Bible study and why human formation still requires something technology can’t provide.

You’ll also hear why practices like silence, solitude and focused attention matter more than ever—and how the Church can resist digital distraction while forming people for depth, resilience and real connection.

SPEAKER_00

Welcome to the Barna Faith and Culture Report. My name is Ashley Laland, and I'm here with David Kinneman, and we're so excited to dive into the stats with you. Today's episode we talk about AI and spiritual formation with a super exciting guest you may have heard of, Andy Crouch. We can't wait to dive in with you. This is the Faith and Culture Report. Shape technology for good so leaders like you and I have the tools we can actually trust. Barna's teamed up with Glue for our State of the Church research initiative, and we've put together a free resource for you. Head to Barna.com slash 10trends to download the 10 Trends Shaping Faith, Culture, and the Future of the Church report for free. Link is in the show notes. David, so excited to be back with you. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_02

I'm doing pretty good.

SPEAKER_00

Are you excited to talk to Andy Crouch today? I know y'all are close.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah. He is uh not only super interesting to listen to as an interview, he is also a really good friend uh to me and to my family. So we've been we've been friends for a long time and we've had the chance uh to to work on you know some fun projects through Barna, but um, he is just uh an absolute gem of a human being and such a great friend to me and my kids.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, I'd love to hear that. I mean, those ministry relationships that are deeper than just oh, you know, two thought leaders, but really getting to know your family. It makes it special.

SPEAKER_02

I always love that phrase thought leader. It's like we lead the way in thinking thoughts. But um Andy for sure does that. I just happen to have some data. And uh sure. So I'm a thought leader with data.

SPEAKER_00

Right, he's humble too, folks.

SPEAKER_02

Andy, Andy's an actual thought leader. But um, no, he's such a good guy. He's been friends to my kids and you know, through all the thick and thin that we've been through. So such a such a neat guy.

SPEAKER_00

That's awesome. Okay, well, before we get into our one number for today, if it's your first time joining us, we will tell you the one number you cannot leave today's episode without remembering. But before we get into that, David, what's some good news you've heard?

SPEAKER_02

Well, I think uh it was pretty fun this last week and my son and uh my nephew, Zach and Grant, came and visited. And um, whenever, whenever the they're in their early 20s, and there is a preponderance of meat that is ingested.

SPEAKER_00

Oh my goodness. Preponderance of meat.

SPEAKER_02

There's so much chicken, beef, um salmon. I mean, it was ever every single kind. Uh you know, for those who are listening, we were recording this here in our podcast in Fort Worth, Texas, and we would have uh sort of team lunches, and so the boys, these young men, uh Grant and Zach would join us. If there was any leftovers, there was no leftovers by the time they were done. So finish it off. I think Grant estimated he ate more than 30 slices. I think it was probably 40 or 50 slices of the beef and the salmon and the chicken.

SPEAKER_00

So my goodness. That's some good news. That is good news. How about you? I'll say I've I've got similar good news. My husband was a D1 football player, and so I am grateful to have someone who cleans out the fridge every week. But but in reality, I'll say my mother-in-law is coming to town. So I'm based in New York City, born and raised New Yorker, and we are going to see every brilliant thing on Broadway, which is a new play by Daniel Radcliffe, or not by Daniel Radcliffe. He's starring in it. So our man Harry Potter and many other things, very talented award-winning actor. It is a one-man show, and it is based off the concept of a man who wrote a long list of every good and beautiful thing to encourage his mom, who was severely depressed. This is not autobiographical for Daniel, but it is based off of that. And the idea being that even once she passed away, he needed that list for himself. And I just love this sort of redemptive concept of where can we look at the good and beautiful things in our lives? And they can be really subtle and minor things like having meat to eat today. That's that's a good and beautiful thing if you're a meat eater, which we both are here, and clearly uh your son and your nephew are as well. Um, but to just little things like the first sip of coffee in the morning or that plant outside your window that you love looking at. We often just take for granted those little joys. And that's part of God's design is the fact that we can even experience pleasure and joy and wonder with the simplest things in life. So I can't wait to see that. My mother-in-law is also awesome. She is a doctor, a mechanical engineer, a professor. She's now retired, but she's just a powerhouse woman.

SPEAKER_02

This is your mother-in-law? Yeah. Wow. And you guys have come from a long list of achievers. I love this.

SPEAKER_00

Uh, I guess.

SPEAKER_02

I have a follow-up on the Daniel Radcliffe thing. I've always wondered this. Um, so for someone like Elijah Wood or Daniel Radcliffe, I mean, how lucky are they or unlucky are they that they are cast in this sort of like absolute cultural icon kind of role? So, you know, you're we've introduced you a bit, and uh not only are you a senior research fellow here at Barna, but you're also an actress. So um, how would you feel about being cast in one of these kind of like you can't ever escape that kind of role? What would you think?

SPEAKER_00

I mean, mixed bag. If you love the role, oh my gosh, dream come true. If you are so-so on the role, I'll say I won't name the title, but there was a very popular sort of culturally iconic show. I was up for the main role in it, you know, in final conversations, you know, talking about contracts. They ended up going in a different direction, aka casting world, that means we didn't pick you. Yeah. Um, but I look back and I was in college when this was happening. I look back and I'm grateful that that particular job didn't work out because I do think I would have gotten pigeonholed into that particular kind of show and role. I think Daniel's been a great example of someone, he's done a lot of Broadway over the last few years, of someone who's broken out of and developed his own career where, yeah, of course, we all know him as Harry Potter, whether you were allowed to watch Harry Potter or not, you know, we've got a Christian audience here, but we all know him in that role. But I've now gotten to see him on stage in New York, and we've got tons of mutual friends, and you know, he's just much more than just the Harry Potter guy. And so for myself, you know, there's a dream in it because if you're in a really successful franchise, you know, everyone knows you as that. And it's probably super lucrative. And, you know, it might skyrocket you to fame, which is not why I'm in the industry. Sure. But there's also the fear of getting a bit pigeonholed. And if it's not your dream job and you get pigeonholed into it, oof, that's a creative nightmare.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, no kidding. Well, that's super interesting. Well, we're here at the Barn of Faith and Culture Report where you're gonna be learning about some faith, but we're also here to learn about uh cultural icons like Daniel Radcliffe and uh actresses who audition and once in a while they're turned down.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Oh, yeah, more than once in a while. But I'm grateful for the successes I've had. Well, with that, thanks for joining y'all. And we're about to get into the stats, which is hopefully why you showed up. So, David, what's our one number for today?

SPEAKER_02

49.

SPEAKER_00

49. Okay, say more.

SPEAKER_02

All right, 49%. That is the percent of practicing Christians who use AI, not just in general, but to help with personal growth and understanding. So, half of all practicing Christians in our society today say they're using AI to help them with their personal growth and understanding. And, you know, what this is an important moment for the church to recognize that, you know, AI is part of our society. It actually has been in the background of a lot of our technological tools in ways that we didn't understand it. Now AI and artificial intelligence becomes a household world word in the last couple of years. But technology, what a powerful force. Um, we talked about it in previous episodes technology, entertainment, design, these are persuasive forces. Uh, the church is a discipling people in that context. Uh, so we can't wait for you to hear from Andy Crouch to give us some perspective on this. But that number, 49, is the number of the episode.

SPEAKER_00

Man, and it's so interesting too, because uh we ask the question of, oh, you know, could AI ever replace church and pastors? And in a lot of ways, I mean, there's plenty of people who identify as Christians and are not part of churches, and we've talked a bit about that already. Um, but I don't think at the end of the day that something that does not bear the image of God nor can be filled with the spirit can ever really come from that soul-to-soul connection, the soul-to-soul encouragement, comfort, and sort of a prophetic voice. I just don't think AI can be that prophetic voice. And I also think it's a really powerful tool. I mean, we also know that 41% of pastors report that AI has helped them with Bible comprehension and study in the last few months. That number rises for just your average practicing Christian. So, I mean, pastors are pulling from AI as a form of study. Yeah. Isn't that wild?

SPEAKER_02

It is. I mean, if you think about technology as standing on the shoulders of the previous iterations, some of my friends who are in technology help helped me to think about it's it's just like a supercharged version of Google search. And some of the technology behind AI is not as magical as we imagine. Now, again, I'm not a technologist, but I do think that these tools enable our lives to be easier, and there's a reason why they work, and there's a reason why, uh, like another friend of mine says that you know AI is is really just based on probability statistics, like what are the combinations of answers, and it's it's got a level of fluency, but sometimes we equate fluency to authority.

SPEAKER_00

Yes.

SPEAKER_02

And so this is an important distinction that we can kind of think about. But, you know, just because AI is fluent in rec recombining words to help us make sense of something, it's like a more powerful form of search. It's also not authoritative, and I sometimes think we miss that point. And um, so yeah, we can't wait to get into this interview with Andy to give us some perspective on technology and how to live faithfully in that. Um, so anyway, we can't can't wait to jump into that.

SPEAKER_00

All right. Well, for anyone who's unfamiliar with Andy, first of all, what are you doing? Second of all, let me tell you a bit about him. Andy Crouch is a leading Christian thinker on faith, culture, and technology. He serves as the partner for theology and culture at Praxis, where he helps advance redemptive entrepreneurship. He's a best-selling author of several influential books, including The Life We're Looking for and The Techwise Family, a book that Barnov was honored to partner with him on. Both of those have helped shape the conversation around technology, human flourishing, and spiritual formation. A former executive editor at Christianity Today and longtime voice in the broader church, Andy brings a thoughtful and deeply grounded perspective to questions of AI, discipleship, and what it means to remain human in a technological age. Let's welcome Andy.

SPEAKER_02

Well, I'm sitting down now with Andy, and we're just so glad to have this conversation with you about uh all that you're uh seeing and experiencing and some of your thinking now about technology and uh wherever our conversation will head. But thanks so much for joining the Faith and Culture Report.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you, David. Very glad to be here.

SPEAKER_02

Uh well, we've been friends for many years, and it's always a pleasure to be able to talk with you uh today. So, Andy, our one number for today, uh, which is a fun little feature of the Faith and Culture Report, the one stat that we're focusing on in this episode is 49. 49% of practicing Christians report that AI has helped them with personal growth and self-understanding in the last three months. What do you make of it?

SPEAKER_01

Uh I'm a little surprised it's not higher. How many use it? Uh is it uh didn't have 51% used it? Uh I I think lots of people are finding these chatbots uh the the first thing they turn to uh on lots on lots of topics, including personal ones. So I'm I'm not surprised it's uh I I just wonder as a percentage of users it may actually be higher.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, no, I think as a percentage of users, it's pretty it's pretty high, but it's um it's reflecting the kind of all invasive species of artificial intelligence, how it's integrating into so much of our lives. Uh talk a little bit about what your what your we haven't we have not talked about this um for a number of months, about your kind of thoughts on technology. Obviously, you're the author of The Techwise Family alongside Varna. Um and uh just just zoom out and talk uh talk with us about how you're thinking about this new kind of emerging technology.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Well, the the dream of technology, which I actually coined this phrase for the book, The Techwise Family, is easy everywhere. That's kind of what we've what we've been chasing since the dawn of the scientific era, which is really what unlocked for us the ability to do the kinds of things in the world we've always wanted to do. We've always wanted life to be easy, it just wasn't easy. And um uh as we started to figure out some of these basic things, physics and electricity, magnetism, and in the 20th century computation, information, uh we were able to start realizing this dream that our life would not have to be so hard. And it started with physical labor, machines replaced human labor, then it went to cognitive labor. Um you know, computers did things that did especially like mathematical type things that were very hard or very tedious for human beings to do. Um so we now have uh and we've been made, I I think I'll add, we've made the experience of interacting with our devices easier and easier. So uh that whether that's your automobile, which the first generation of automobiles, you had to get out and crank it to start it, then they had automatic starters, then you had to turn really hard to steer it and push really hard on the brakes because those were those were manual, not uh hydraulically assisted. We fixed that. Um and now you get in, and in some cars you tell it where you want to go, and it pretty much goes there, and you keep a light hand on the wheel to pretend that you're driving. So this this trajectory of easy everywhere is like what technology wants, and and it's the dominant thing we've asked of technology. And in the world of computers, within my uh and your lifetime, um, computers were initially very hard to use. Then we got these beautiful graphical interfaces. So it was no longer typing into a command line. Uh, but you still had to sit at a screen, you still had to know where to click, kind of how each program worked. There was a certain amount of what we would call computer literacy. Well, with the advent of large language models, uh the computers have become literate in us. So rather than us having to get to know how to use them, they have learned how to work for us using natural language. And so it's suddenly becomes so much easier to get what whatever you want uh from a computer. And the number of things the LLM can give you is more than you've ever been able to get from a computer. So it's not at all surprising that people are turning to them um, you know, for some practical things, but also for a lot of things that just uh two years ago you would have Googled it uh or maybe gone on some some kind of social media or kind of discussion site like Reddit. Well, they've hoovered up all that, they've vacuumed it all up, they've they represent it in beautiful conversational, personal sounding responses, and it's just the next wave of easy everywhere. So it's great, David. I have no critiques to offer. I'm just so happy our lives are getting easier and easier.

SPEAKER_02

That sounds like the Andy we know and love. No, no cautions here. Full speed ahead.

SPEAKER_01

Oh yeah, full speed ahead. I mean, why not? Why not? Get rid of this hard thing called life. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

So uh talk to us. Uh, I remember the early days of the pandemic, we had you on the podcast, uh, Kerry Newhoff and I, and we talked about some of the the possible futures of the pandemic, and you had some great takes that it would last longer and it would be more uh all-encompassing, and uh it was going to reset some fundamental things, which I think has turned out to be true. In fact, we're seeing now some uh you know, obviously remote work, um, is one one long tail effect of the pandemic, um, even some spiritual.

SPEAKER_01

Well, can I jump in and say what I think is so relevant to AI? Uh is the pandemic got all of us used to it like it was a a step change or like an order of magnitude change of getting used to what I would call parasocial relationships or in a sense more broadly virtual relationships. So that is, we took all of our relating that we so we already were, lots of us were on social media, and there was this whole thing called social media, right, which was one channel through which you interacted with people, initially people you knew, things like Facebook were designed initially to connect you to your friends. But what took a total step change in the pandemic was first of all, all those uh quote unquote real life relationships went way more totally online, and we became used to mediating them in a way that we were not doing to the same extent before the pandemic. And then the other thing that changed was the rise of what I would call the parasocial. So the parasocial is uh a sensation or an experience of having a relationship with uh an entity on the other end that's not actually someone you know. Now it could be a celebrity, it could be an influencer, it could also be a bot, it could be like it, but it doesn't really matter because you're relating to them the same way you do to your friends through chat interfaces. Um not long from now, AI will be very, very fluent. It's already up to very low late or down to very low latency with this kind of conversation. Um, and we got totally used to all of all of our relationships being primarily done that way for a while during the pandemic, and to the idea that uh you're kind of well, the new generation of social media, most of the people whose faces you see and whose content you interact with you've never met, and you'll never meet, but you're having amazingly uh kind of intimate interactions with them, by the way. Also the rise of this unbelievably successful thing called OnlyFans, which like took garden variety pornography and added a parasocial layer to it and and is just unbelievably successful and is making a living for you know hundreds of thousands of uh creators who are selling really a simulation of relationship alongside of uh images of themselves. So all this took off. I mean, this is all directly downstream of the pandemic. And then for a certain generation, all they ever really knew as they came of age socially was this thing, uh, that that that cohort who kind of were 13 to 15 years old, let's say, in 2020 through 2022. So yeah, sorry, you were you maybe were setting us up for something else, but I just wanted to flag like the the plausibility of chatbots and our desire to turn to them for things we used to turn to people for, that is so uh deeply uh was so deeply accelerated by the dynamics of living through COVID.

SPEAKER_02

So interesting. And I think that then uh sets us up for a really interesting age of sort of uh Jesus and AI and sort of uh the godlike powers of technology, um, which we'll get to. But um yeah, so the pandemic, you had some predictions um that that I think help for many of us frame you know what we might be um up against and in for. And so uh maybe maybe walk us through how you think the next uh you know three years or so might might play out and what we should do to be be prepared. Like what are some probable futures that we might need to be prepared for for AI?

SPEAKER_01

Well, they are they're only probable. I mean, the uh the the future is scenarios, not uh a linear path. And I I'm not a uh I'm not per se a prophet. Every once in a while something prophetic comes out of my mouth, maybe, but I I don't have any like inside.

SPEAKER_02

You work for a nonprofit, so sort of the same.

SPEAKER_01

Well, I so let me start with the most uh dramatic, actually, that maybe is what people are least thinking about, which is if we have the same breakthroughs in robotics that we've had in language. Uh now I don't think you said three years. I don't know that in three years all that's going to get to kind of a commercial mass market. But you might we all might be surprised in three years at how good um robots have become at navigating our kind of shared world. Right now, robots are extensively deployed in very controlled environments like warehouses and factories where they're doing very well, quote, quote unquote, doing very well for their owners. Um but they you don't want them in a restaurant, you don't want them in your home, you don't want them folding your laundry. Um, but they're getting close to solving that, and many people believe. Now, some people I talk to in robotics say no, no, it's 20 years away. And there's this joke in computers uh and in many fields of technology, they're like such and such a technology is 20 years away and always will be. So we don't know this for sure. But I do think we have to be prepared for um yeah, for physical uh uh intelligent uh-ish uh agents uh that that uh some people at least will be like, oh, I'd love to have one of those in my home. It'll do kind of all kinds of things for me. And we'll do it in a fairly interactive way, the way LLMs do with language. So that's one scenario. Uh not saying it'll happen, but I think it it could. Uh I think I've updated to be more inclined to think it will happen in some form than I thought a couple years ago. Um but the other, I mean, the main thing I would say is um I just think most for most teenagers in three to five years their best friend will be uh an LL. Uh the the the the entity they'll probably think of it as a person that they most entrust their lives to will uh will be uh mediated uh through a screen or whatever device uh you want to communicate with it with. Um I mean I think this is already happening, but I think it's going to become the the the the front line of responding to the incredibly wrenching transition that is adolescence will be uh chatbots.

SPEAKER_02

Um I'd I'd love to that's already happening in a lot of ways already.

SPEAKER_01

It's it's already happening. Um and I don't know uh other things that are likely coming um I mean the other thing is I do probably expect I this is the kind of thing that in one sense like pandemics you can predict it perfectly fine it's just that uh predicting it doesn't stop it from happening and doesn't help you to know exactly when it's going to happen. Uh I would expect there's going to be if I can invoke ancient history here a 9-11 type event uh uh facilitated by AI that is some major calamity uh in our shared public life that is traceable whether I don't necessarily mean AI will do it to us, though that is one scenario. But but somehow with AI meaningfully like without AI it wouldn't have happened. I think we're gonna see thousands of lives lost to something um that we blame AI for, you know, credibly blame AI for so I think there's going to be some level of disaster uh it I mean 9-11 was a really big deal for the United States and the world and only 3,000 people died. That's a tiny tiny number of people um but it was big enough to really register and to really shape the future of of so many things, right? Yeah so I would anticipate a similar thing for AI. And and that's actually something that makes it very hard to do the the other kinds of scenarios because the backlash the subsequent regulation um depending on what the scale of the actual event is uh and I mean there's so many different scenarios within that one and it's kind of a a singularity beyond which we can't see because you really can't predict when these kind of cataclysms happen um how the culture how our politics how our economics are going to respond. And uh you know uh Frank Herbert's Dune is predicated on a society that um that kind of reached one of these crisis moments and in that moment uh rose up and and decided no kind of thinking machine would be allowed and they got rid of them all. Uh now I don't think that's likely to happen to us but I could imagine actually 10 to 20 years from now we're less dependent on and intertwined with these things than we are today because they just be come to be seen as so dangerous that we can't trust them. So that's another really interesting scenario.

SPEAKER_02

Yep. Yep. It's so interesting you talk about uh Dune and a a theme I've had for a decade at least uh is the notion that we need to teach uh kind of a theology of dystopian fiction um uh more broadly I think our our our uh our churches should be uh not just places of preaching but of teaching and of learning and that um younger generations are learning deep sort of they're going down rabbit holes of content uh through through um the miracle of technology and the the the different ways that it curates and and sort of senses our questions as we as we um as we probe it and uh it it in that regard is a kind of a learning machine but I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about what that might look like. I mean just the notion that this becomes such a um the Project Hail Mary the best uh the you know the the um commercial blockbuster of 2026 so far um and the kind of doomsday scenarios that have been uh broadcast across our our pages and screens for for you know 50 plus years uh or more or more even going back to George Orwell and you know the 1984 and other kinds of things so talk a little about the rise of dystopian fiction as a kind of prediction market uh for technology and what it might mean for us as we try to navigate living in that in that reality well it's so interesting because of course the question is like where is the utopian fiction so there used to be utopian fiction widely read uh excitedly read um and now it's it's i i guess i'm sure there's so some out there somewhere i mean there's every kind of thing in the world being published but is it getting any traction is it being made into movies uh no it's not not in the way it was in the 19th century so so one really interesting question is like why are all the extrapolations of our most imaginative people the kinds of people who write these novels heading in such um you know varieties of dire directions and i i i think uh i mean i i think it's because um uh well you know I said I'm not a prophet but artists are prophets uh whether they think of themselves that way or not they they are attuned to spiritual realities i there you find very few artists serious artists especially who don't what whatever they think about traditional faith they there are not many of them who are just like mechanistic atheists very few they they themselves know when they sit down to write something happens that puts them in touch with some spiritual truth and the spiritual truth of the pre-modern world uh especially I could say the like late pre-modern world the 19th century right right before we unlock all these like cheat codes to the universe electromagnetism and so forth um you know is the world's really hard and so the prophets the writers um like Francis Bellmy and um gosh what's his name who wrote the book Utopia I don't think that was Bellmy that was somebody else but um uh they actually imagine the world getting easier and they kind of extrapolate that I think our prophets now are seeing that this promise of easy everywhere is a a certain kind of mirage um they are tapping into our already existing discontent with what the technology we currently have and they're essentially warning us this thing that you trust to simplify your life uh though even to say that I it's just less it's it's harder to say that with a straight face today than it was when the iPhone came out like the you know uh I I think even just looking in the last like 20 years the iPhone was announced I think in 2007 released in 2008 or circ circa then um and you go back and watch Steve Jobs announcing it and there is this sense of religious millennial ecstasy in the room like this is going to be amazing right and no one feels that way about AI.

SPEAKER_01

I mean I'm sure you all have done the research and others have as well at how resistant the ordinary people are to this uh even as we're all using it you know um so the the dystopians are are summoning uh a kind of spiritual insight however they would understand it this is how I understand it that says this thing you're chasing of eliminating the friction of being human is going to act back on you and the things you care about the people you care about the world you care about in ways that are going to be very damaging which I have in spite of my joke at the beginning I actually think this is potentially a disaster but frankly it was already a disaster I mean all the trends um that you know Jonathan Haidt has helped to summarize and so forth were in play before the pandemic and um and there's just uh a great forgetting of how to be human happening right now. Um and AI is just catching up to us at a very weak and vulnerable moment in our social and political and cultural life and offering to make our lives easier and we almost always take that bargain at first and it rarely I just don't think we're gonna look back and say this simplified our lives.

SPEAKER_02

Right.

SPEAKER_00

Quick interlude here just to say that today's episode is brought to you by Glue. If you're not yet familiar with them Glue is a technology platform built specifically for the faith ecosystem serving more than 1400 faith ministry and nonprofit leaders and connecting over 4500 churches, parachurch ministries and nonprofits committed to human flourishing their mission is to shape technology as a force for good. So leaders like you and me have the tools we need to actually scale our impact. This partnership is deeply personal to us. Barna has teamed up with Glue in an ongoing state of the church research initiative and if you've been tracking with our work new data is dropping monthly exploring everything from church attendance trends to discipleship to cultural relevance. And as a thank you to our listeners we've made a free resource available to you today together with Glue called 10 Trends Shaping Faith, Culture and the Future of the Church. Download it at Barna.com slash 10 trends or grab the link in the show notes. Now let's get back to the interview.

SPEAKER_02

You're listening to Andy Crouch here on the Faith and Culture Report and we're talking about AI and uh what could possibly go wrong. That's the theme. So um I would love to hear you talk a little bit about um how you envision um you know maybe how you're using it or how you think uh a workplace or a church, what are some practices we might put in place to uh sort of put technology in its proper place.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah so I I uh my rubric for technology all all of it not just the latest stuff is that it's really good for productivity it usually is first deployed for productivity that is to scale up human effort at lower marginal unit cost that is to make it cheaper to produce the next widget than the one before and to therefore to allow you to scale um often really good things. So I I think productivity is a good thing and I think the technology is really good at scaling good things. Now it scales bad things too but um but it's it's super useful for that. So then the second thing it's really good for uh in certain domains is protection. Um so uh this is very broadly the the technology of medicine which protects us from so many prevents so many diseases we once were subject to especially in the form of things like vaccines and uh and so forth but also can cure and heal and remedy so many things that used to uh shorten and um what's the opposite of sweeten human lives uh burden human human lives um and so technology is fantastic for that so where do we use it uh how do I use it myself I use it when um there's a task that I need to scale up in order to get to the next unit of creative work that I need to do or in order either to do that or to um get something that I've created out into the world in the best way. So for example I'm working with with my daughter on a very relevant project here a kind of digital rule of life we're hoping to release this uh in 2026 toward the end of 2026 kind of a vision of how to live your life in a world full of all this stuff um and I just asked Claude to take the transcript which was done by AI of an hour long conversation with her and turn it into a readable conversation you know when you talk you kind of go all over the place I was like Claude clean this up for me and it did and uh I haven't actually looked at it I gave it that test like five minutes before we started talking it was working as it finished as we started and when I when I finish this interview I'll go back and I'll have this beautiful readable thought provoking summary that helps us do the next creative step. So that kind of you know summarizing um synthesizing are what these large language models are fabulous for. I gave it my tax returns uh you know about a hundred pages in PDF form. I was like just look these over like a CPA would and it did it gave me I know a little bit about tax and personal like personal income tax and I got back a CPA level uh response. So in these areas they're kind of technical and productive it's great and I assume it will end up having good protective uh functions as well the place technology is not good is formative places that is where we are trying to become different people uh better people uh people more like who we know we can be on our good days and I would say the three primary formative environments for human beings are the home, the school and if they are a person of faith or in a community of faith, the church or the religious community. So home, school and church are the three places where you are given a series ideally in the context in each place of deep love for you of challenging experiences that are not easy to make sense of and not infrequently involve quite a bit of difficulty and pain or at least delayed gratification at the at the very least that shape you into the kind of person who has something to offer to the world and other people that starts in your home it happens in our culture through education and it happens for us who join the family of God in the the church the the family of God kind of present in the world and in those environments easy is counterformative and we all honestly know that the greatest growth in our lives came from some of the hardest things. Now some of the hardest things are so random and terrible that if technology could have prevented them we would have many medical things for example but even those we when we honestly look at how we navigated or how our families navigated really tough things and you and I have both experienced this in our own lives in different ways um we have to admit a lot of growth came from that too and in any case the function of a healthy home a healthy school and a healthy church is to give you a supportive environment for the difficult things without making them easy. Yeah in that sense David I don't see any place for it um like I know 49% of people are consulting and find finding it helpful I I do not think it's the best thing to consult uh for I mean for for tactical things I mean I asked it about my rowing training program I it was helpful I didn't need to ask a person that's fine but there's three things I said this in a conversation with J Kim a while ago and so forgive those who might have heard that forgive me but there's three things we really face in life and it's fear shame and guilt. Fear is something terrible is going to happen and I hate to say it but something terrible will happen to almost all of us and has already happened to many of us. Shame I I am not worthy to be loved and I hate to say it but in some ways you're not and there are shameful things we all hold and bear and have had inflicted upon us that are so hard to disclose and then guilt I've done some things terribly wrong that I could have chosen otherwise and hate to say it it's kind of true. And what you need to hear in those conditions which are at the root of every problem you think you have is for fear you're not alone not necessarily that it's not going to happen but you will not be alone when that terrible thing happens. For shame I see you and I love you anyway and you are accepted in spite of things that may have caused you shame and for guilt you're right you are wrong but you are forgiven and it's forgotten and it's been wiped off the slate and to the ends of the earth and you know beyond. And no machine no system can credibly tell you any of those things. Now they will all generate those words if you prompt them but only a person can tell you that and everything that you think is a problem you'd like help for comes down to hearing some combination of you're not alone you're accepted in spite of shamefulness and you're forgiven in spite of guilt. And if we get used to accepting the kind of surface level technical solutions the AIs offer us, oh well you know what I recommend is a gratitude journal. I mean any AI can recommend that. Sure. That does not address the problem. And it gets us into the habit of having conversations that don't address the real problem and can't because they're they're a large language model not a person let alone God so uh that's more than you asked for in that response but there it is. That's how I see it. So beautiful and um it seems to me that um you know as I uh survey uh the the pulp the population and think about um the the lives that we're we're leading and building this idea of a uh heard someone say this recently friction maxing that the church should be a place where you're actually helping people to develop the tools to manage the friction of life not to uh to to help easy everywhere yeah yeah yeah uh you don't take a forklift to the gym you know uh it's not my original phrase but I use it a lot because it's so good like a forklift can lift way more weight than you can yeah so why not bring a forklift to the gym we all we all know right because we know the gym is a formative environment um what we've forgotten is that our homes are formative environments first and foremost our churches and our schools that's what they're for and so you don't bring a forklift to those places but that means that all these easy affordances are at best distractions and at worst malformative that is they're actually training us to think life is meant to be easy um and that that ends in more tears not fewer tears and less productive tears.

SPEAKER_02

I think for those of us that work in uh in uh Christian organizations churches many listeners will be uh pastors christian leaders parents um this notion of of helping um to navigate this moment I mean what a great moment that we get to be alive in I mean what a privilege to see some of these changes I feel like it's like a a cheat code for a social researcher because every day is like you know for 30 years it was a lot of like normal pretty much like just one one degree different but since the pandemic everything is like wow this work matters in such a different way because people's attitudes and perspectives are changing so fundamentally and as as you pointed out technology actually has disconnected us from what we might be able to learn from our previous generation uh because they didn't they never had to grapple with quite the same technological environment that we have. So one thing that's been uh interesting to me the last couple of weeks, I'd love to hear your reaction to this um I heard a friend of ours Bobby Greenwald talk about the challenge of going to AI for wisdom in that it's basically just a bunch of probabilities that to spit back language to us that is understandable about the probability of answering a question in a reasonable way. And he had a great line that we equate fluency with authority. And that's oh that's so good not the case right and so um since I talked to him um I was thinking about the same root word of authority is author. So you don't have authority unless there is an author um sort of an intelligence behind the answer. And so um we even see in scripture that Jesus is the author of our faith. We have a creator uh so for those of us who are believers there's a real sense in which we're living in a um an authored reality um as compared to uh a phrase uh that a friend of mine uh uh Dr. Frey used called a constructed reality so there is there is truth to the fact that we humans make we have a uh create creation mandate we're uh we're designed in the image of God to go create and make things and so we do construct on top of the the reality of creation and the rest but um you know it's it's more than just a social construction of reality that's just part of the truth. The truth is that we're living as I see it in an authored reality. And uh I've been I've been start I've been starting to think about uh Paul's speech in Athens in Acts 17 as uh his to to that culture in that day uh his speech about you have these man-made gods these constructed realities but I tell you now we right have a God who made us and in him we live and move you have an author and you can live without excuse before but now we have seen a man uh raised from the dead so the the argument for an author of reality. So I've been thinking a little bit how we might help in our homes, schools and churches uh to think about that notion of, you know, it's not wrong to construct reality. The AI is constructing a certain set of words that we recognize as fluent to our language but we have to be very careful about thinking about what authorship means and what what it means for us to sort of trust a deeper story. So again using these tools well but thinking through kind of the the the way we can help tap into a deeper a deeper story uh God's story you know you're a masterpiece created in Christ Jesus to do good works It's been prepared for you in advance. Your story has been authored long before you were even alive. Psalm 139. So I'd love for you to think a little about what are some practices? Maybe the question would be you can respond to that if you like. But also as you think about some of these great, you've you've I think helped so many of us these last number of years, think about our families and technology and power. What are some ways we could help, you know, really begin? Um, you know, like Jonathan Hayde has no those no phones in our bedrooms, no phone, no social media before 16, you know, no phones in our in our classrooms, you know, more play. Those are just such concrete ideas. What are some concrete ways that uh listeners could take take take home some of these insights?

SPEAKER_01

Well, I'll give you um I'll give you two thoughts, uh two, two pairs of ideas. Um well, uh I'll give you two trains of thought that I'm thinking about right now. Um one is super recent, like 24 hours old. Um, and you tell me if it works. I'll be the second one. The first one is is what I know uh works, and very paradoxically, it's uh learning the praxis of silence and solitude. Uh this is the universal recommendation of the people who have gone the furthest in the Christian life. They're like, you gotta learn silence and solitude. And silence is not about an absence of sound per se, it's neither offering nor requiring communication. Uh, that is, when I'm silent, with let's say you and I are actually together, and we could do it in a virtual medium like this, but it's really weird uh in the digital. But in in person, it's quite natural if you know someone well. You're you're together, but you are not. I'm not trying to get anything anything across to you per se, and I'm not insisting that you answer back. This is something LLMs do not do. When the LLM is not answering you very fluently, it's doing nothing. Uh it or it's it's off devoting its computing power to some other person. It's not with you, it's not present with you, it's not silent, it's just it's absent. And then you summon it into being by issuing this prompt and kind of you know activating it. Um and I will just say the weird thing about God, unlike your LLM, is God is strangely unfluent for someone who is the author of life. That is very often when I sit with God, even wanting communication. That is, I pray something very specific. This happened to me this morning. A very hard thing happened to a friend yesterday. I was out on a walk. I was like, God, I'd like to talk to you about this thing. And I was very direct and quite angry with God, as we are allowed to be, in on behalf of my friend. And God did not fluently respond to me. On the other side of my lament, which is what I was very consciously offering to God, was was silence. Now, does that mean God's absent? I don't believe that is what it means. It's just that God is not summonable the way that that uh other spirits are and the way that our LLMs are. So learning the gift of not there's a time to speak to God, but there's a time to actually practice silence and with each other also. And I would say uh, so to be slightly more practical, in all the settings you mentioned, home, school, and church, we need to create environments, and they often are moving environments. That is, we're going somewhere where you fall into silence with another person without falling out of presence. And this happens on a hike. This can happen on a long drive if everybody doesn't have all their ear ear pods in their ears. Um, and it's actually a space out of which eventually deeper communication emerges. And in a way, what I'm holding out hope for, having had this kind of lament and then silence this morning, what does it mean for me to be a Christian? It's trusting that in the right way at the right time, I will know that God is responding to my complaint and my prayer. And we and this is how great education works. You look at a text together for a while if you're doing an English class, and and you get to a point where you're conf teacher and student ideally are perplexed by something. And rather than going to the LLM or Google and be like, please tell me what this means, you just let it be confusing for a while. And on the other side of that is deeper communication. So for the sake of time, solitude is just another dimension of that. Um, it's this it's being comfortable being alone without being lonely. And I will just say everything in our digital landscape is training us to not want to ever have either of these things. And you will never have to have silence again in your life, and you'll never have to feel alone again in your life. The chat will always be summonable, right? But all maturity and home church and school are the places we get to like practice it, all of us, not just the young ones, but everybody, um, is where we learn how to be present without um uh without having to fix everything. And and so I actually think it's solitude, silent, and silence and presence. It's learning real presence with each other. The second idea, and you asked for concrete. I'm sorry, I'm terrible at concrete, so somebody else has to make the stuff concrete. But I have been thinking about what the digital is, it's made up of zeros and ones. And here's my latest, truly latest thought. And I don't know if this will get into the like rich rule of life that we do or what, but I actually think a healthy life is zero and one. So zero is the silence and solitude, it's having rhythms of rest. It's why you want your phone in bed before uh somewhere else than your bedroom, so it's not always on. You've got a night of zero, you know, night is like the zero of your body, even though a lot of things are happening near neurologically and so forth while you're asleep, but you're dead to the world, you're not making things happen, you're trusting yourself to God and the others in your life as you sleep through the night. Um, and then you wake, and now you're up to do something. And the one is do one thing at a time. The digital is training us to multitask, even in some ways. You know, I set Claude working on that thing, and there's this thing called token anxiety now in Silicon Valley to where like you need to be spending tokens all the time. Like while you're sleeping, you want your agents working. I predict that is going to turn out to be very counterproductive, uh, even as productive as it feels. And I think the one thing is learning like I if I'm answering email, that's all I'm doing. I'm not like checking social and listening to a podcast and you know, whatever. If I'm talking with you, I'm just talking with you if we're on a Zoom call or something. So when we're using technology, resisting the multitasking uh temptation, which we all in our heart of hearts know, and also studies have clearly demonstrated no one can actually multitask productively. And I think if we had more zero and one in our life and less like zero point three, like I'm sort of 30% here, but I'm 70% somewhere else. Yeah, I think we'd find we have everything we need for life and godliness, you know, if you want to put it that way. And uh and for the fruitfulness that and the masterpiece that our lives are made for. And when I look at Jesus, I think he had this amazing rhythm of zero and one in his life. Um and and he was able to be fully present in the thing he was doing, and he was also able to choose to go be alone with his father. So that's my latest kind of template.

SPEAKER_02

Andy, you're uh one of the most original thinkers uh I've ever had the privilege of talking to you, and I always appreciate uh our conversation. So thanks so much for joining us on the Faith and Culture Report. Truly a pleasure. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00

Well, that was an awesome interview. Thanks so much, David. Andy, wow. So grateful for you. Well, we can't wait to dive into some more stats with you. We are releasing new episodes every other week. So if you learned something new, please leave us a review. Reviews are actually the number one way that people find out about this show. Subscribe to the Barn of Faith and Culture Report wherever you listen to podcasts and share it with a friend. Do you know someone who needs to hear this, who would be encouraged, who would be challenged, who would learn something new? And of course, a quick final thank you to our partner Glue for sponsoring today's episode. Glue is on mission to shape technology for good, giving leaders the tools they can trust and rely on to amplify their impact. So, big thank you to you all for listening. And don't forget to grab your free download at Barna.comslash 10trends. We'll see you next time on the Barna Faith and Culture Report.