Let me describe a conversation that has happened millions of times and almost never gone well.
A person of faith is talking with someone they care about — a colleague, a sibling, an old friend — who they know is struggling. They want to say something about what they believe. About what has held them together in their own worst moments. About the possibility that there is something beyond the grinding machinery of cause and effect, and that it is not indifferent to this particular person's pain.
Instead, they say nothing. Or they say something clumsy that closes the door. Or they manage a few sentences and watch the other person's eyes go polite and distant. They drive home feeling like a failure.
Key facts
- 01AI can serve as a "translator" for faith conversations by helping believers find language that resonates with people from different backgrounds, worldviews, or levels of skepticism.
- 02The episode describes using ChatGPT to anticipate objections or questions before a conversation — preparation that makes the actual encounter less anxious and more genuine.
- 03The gospel's call to action — not just reflection — runs throughout the episode; AI is positioned as a tool for equipping people to actually have conversations they've been avoiding.
The problem in that car, almost without exception, is not a lack of belief. It is a failure of translation.
“The failure of most faith conversations is not insufficient information. It is the moment when one person realizes the other isn't actually listening.”— Jaeden Schafer
The Christian tradition makes enormous, specific, consequential claims about reality. To someone inside it, those claims are the most natural thing in the world. To someone outside it — someone who grew up without it, or was hurt by it, or has thought seriously about it and found it wanting — the language of faith can sound like it's coming from a different planet. Not hostile. Just untranslatable.
Apostle Paul knew this. He wrote explicitly about becoming "all things to all people." He wrote in Greek to Gentile audiences who had no framework for Jewish Scripture. He found the points of contact. He translated. The content of what he was saying didn't change. The form changed constantly.
Most people in church today were never taught to do this. They were taught what they believe. They were not taught how to carry it across a gap.
Here is where AI is actually useful, and I want to be precise about how. Before a conversation I am nervous about, I sometimes spend twenty minutes with ChatGPT — not to figure out what I believe, but to take the other person's perspective seriously enough to understand it. If my friend is a scientist who thinks faith is epistemically weak, I ask the model to articulate that position as charitably as it can. Not to give me a rebuttal. To make sure I genuinely understand the argument I am likely to encounter, so I can meet it rather than talk past it.
This is preparation as a form of respect. It is doing the work of actually thinking about the person you're going to be with, rather than rehearsing your own talking points.
The second thing AI is useful for is finding language. If you tell a model something about a person — their background, their current situation, what they're wrestling with — and ask how you might speak about faith in a way that is likely to connect rather than alienate, it will often surface framings you wouldn't have found on your own. Not because the model is wise, but because it has encountered an enormous range of human expression and can match register in ways that are genuinely helpful.
None of this is a substitute for the actual conversation. The conversation is where everything happens or doesn't happen, and the conversation depends on you showing up present, honest, and genuinely interested in the other person rather than in completing your theological errand. No amount of preparation changes that.
What preparation changes is the anxiety. When I know I've taken the other person's position seriously, when I've found some language that might actually land, I am less likely to freeze or overcorrect or say something that makes the whole thing worse. I am more likely to listen. And listening, it turns out, is almost always the most persuasive thing you can do.
The conversations Christians avoid having — the ones that feel too risky, too likely to go badly, too capable of damaging a relationship that matters — are rarely avoided because the stakes are too high. They are avoided because the speaker feels unequipped. That is a solvable problem. AI is one tool among several for solving it.
The courage required to actually open your mouth is still yours.
Jaeden Schafer is the host of AI in Faith, a podcast about artificial intelligence, faith, and the future of human purpose.
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