Not long ago, the idea of an artificial intelligence serving as a chaplain would have sounded like the premise of a strange science-fiction story. Yet the question is no longer hypothetical. People are already turning to artificial intelligence in moments once reserved for pastors, chaplains, spiritual directors, and trusted friends.
In a striking her essay for The Christian Century, “My Artificial Chaplains,” Danielle Hansen describes turning to artificial intelligence during a period of physical vulnerability and spiritual questioning. What makes the story interesting is not simply that AI could answer theological questions. That is hardly surprising anymore. Large language models can summarize Augustine, explain the Book of Job, offer interpretations of suffering, and generate a prayer appropriate for almost any conceivable circumstance.
What is more significant is that the author experienced these interactions as something resembling spiritual care. That possibility should command the attention of hospital chaplains. Patients do not enter hospitals carrying only diseased bodies. They arrive with questions. Why is this happening to me? Is God punishing me? What happens if I die? Should I keep fighting? How do I tell my children? Will God forgive me? Where is God now?
Increasingly, a patient does not have to wait for a chaplain to arrive to ask such questions. A smartphone is already beside the hospital bed:
- “ChatGPT, why would God let this happen?”
- “Help me understand why I am dying.”
- “Write a prayer for my family.”
- “Does God forgive me?”
Within seconds, words appear. Sometimes they may even be beautiful words. This raises an uncomfortable question for those of us interested in spiritual care: if artificial intelligence can produce compassionate theological language, write prayers, explain religious traditions, and respond patiently at any hour of the night, what exactly is distinctive about the human chaplain?
Perhaps the answer begins with a deceptively simple distinction. Artificial intelligence can write a prayer. But writing a prayer and praying with someone are not the same thing.
The Difference Between Producing Prayer and Praying
Ask a contemporary AI system to write a prayer for a dying patient and it will likely produce something entirely appropriate:
God of mercy, be near to your beloved child in this moment. Bring peace where there is fear, comfort where there is pain, and surround this family with your presence.
There may be nothing wrong with those words. Indeed, they might be better composed than the spontaneous prayer of a nervous chaplain standing beside a hospital bed at three in the morning. But the theological question is not whether the words are good.
The question is: Who is praying? This distinction matters because prayer is not simply a particular arrangement of religious language. Prayer is an act. More specifically, prayer is a relational act undertaken by persons. When I pray with a patient, something is happening that cannot be reduced to the semantic content of the sentences I speak. I am at the room, often at the bedside, and at the behest of other loved ones. I may have watched a spouse struggle to find words. I may have heard a daughter ask whether her father can still hear her. I may have sat through a silence that lasted much longer than anyone expected.
And then, perhaps, someone asks: “Chaplain, would you pray?” The prayer that follows emerges from that encounter. It is not simply generated content. It is response.
This is one reason hospital chaplaincy provides such an important lens through which to think about artificial intelligence. AI ethics frequently focuses on intelligence: Can machines reason? Can they make moral decisions? Can they demonstrate empathy? Can they provide appropriate responses?
Chaplaincy introduces another category: Presence. There is something peculiar about entering a hospital room. Before entering, the chaplain usually knows very little. I might know a name or room number. Sometimes I am lucky to know religious preferences and directions through a short referral: “Patient requesting prayer.”
Then the door opens. Suddenly the abstract category of “patient” disappears. There is a person. There may be photographs taped to the wall. Flowers dying in a vase. A spouse sleeping awkwardly in a chair. A television playing silently. Medical equipment humming in the background. There may be anger, laughter, and silence.
Good chaplaincy begins by paying attention to these things. That is important because patients rarely ask only the question contained in their words. A patient may ask:
“Do you think God heals people?”
But perhaps the deeper question is:
“Am I allowed to hope?”
Another may ask:
“Why would God do this?”
But perhaps what they need is not a theological explanation of theodicy. Perhaps they need permission to be angry and, maybe, someone to be angry at.
A patient may say:
“I know everything happens for a reason.”
And the most important pastoral response may be not to affirm or correct the bad theology but simply to notice the tears forming while they say it. Human beings communicate through more than language. So many things use language in a hospital room: bodies, silence, tears, the grip of a blanket, a look between spouses, and even the room itself.
Artificial intelligence receives a prompt.
A chaplain enters a world.
That distinction matters.
The Temptation of Artificial Compassion
AI systems are becoming remarkably skilled at reproducing the language we associate with empathy. They can recognize expressions of fear, grief, loneliness, and uncertainty and respond with words that sound appropriately compassionate. In many cases, those responses may even be comforting. Yet there is still an important difference between producing the language of compassion and being compassionate. Compassion is not merely the ability to identify or provide predictive the right thing to say in response to suffering. It involves being drawn into another person’s suffering in such a way that the encounter makes a claim upon us.
This is part of what gives human care its moral significance. When a chaplain enters the room of someone who is dying, that encounter cannot be fully controlled or predicted. The patient’s story may unsettle the chaplain. A family’s grief may linger long after the visit is over. A question asked at the bedside may expose the limits of the chaplain’s own theology or leave them without a satisfying answer. The chaplain is vulnerable to the encounter because another person’s suffering can genuinely affect them. They may leave the room differently than they entered it. Artificial intelligence cannot be vulnerable in this same way. A chatbot may tell a frightened patient, “I am here with you,” but the words raise a deeper question about what presence means. There is no embodied other who has entered the room, taken on the burden of the moment, or become personally implicated in what is happening.
That does not make the comfort someone receives from an AI system unreal. A patient awake and frightened at two in the morning may find genuine reassurance in a thoughtful response or an AI-generated prayer. That experience should not be dismissed simply because it has been technologically mediated. Still, comfort and relationship are not identical. A system may successfully create the experience of being responded to without participating in the mutual vulnerability that ordinarily characterizes human relationships of care. This distinction becomes especially important when we begin thinking about prayer.
Some of the most meaningful prayers in hospital rooms are powerful precisely because they are more than the words being spoken. A prayer may emerge while a chaplain holds the hand of a frightened patient or stands beside a family gathered around someone who is dying. Psalm 23 may be spoken slowly in a room where everyone already knows the words yet hearing them together gives those familiar words a new weight. At other times, the chaplain’s own voice may tremble while praying because the suffering in the room has affected them too. In these moments, prayer is not simply religious language delivered into a situation. It is an embodied response to a particular person, in a particular place, at a particular moment of vulnerability.
Christian theology has especially strong resources for understanding why this matters. Human beings are not simply minds exchanging information but embodied creatures who encounter one another through presence. The Christian doctrine of the incarnation presses this claim even further. Christianity does not proclaim that God responds to human suffering merely by sending better information about God. It proclaims that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” God comes near. The incarnation therefore offers an important theological framework for thinking about artificial intelligence and spiritual care because it suggests that presence is not incidental to care. It is part of what makes care what it is. The question, then, is not whether artificial intelligence can produce Christian language, because clearly it can. The more important question is whether the work of spiritual care can ever be reduced to language alone.
Recognizing this distinction does not require rejecting artificial intelligence or denying that it might have legitimate uses in spiritual care. AI could help a chaplain locate resources from an unfamiliar religious tradition or help a patient find language for feelings they have struggled to express. A family might use it to locate a meaningful passage of Scripture or to begin a difficult conversation about death, grief, or hope. Someone who feels isolated may even find real comfort in an AI-generated prayer. Religious life has always been mediated through technologies of one kind or another, from books and prayer beads to recorded worship and phones that allow chaplains to pray with families across great distances. Technology and authentic spiritual practice are therefore not necessarily opposed.
The more difficult ethical question is whether we begin confusing the medium with the relationship itself. An AI-generated prayer may help someone pray, but that does not necessarily mean the AI is itself praying. An AI response may help someone feel less alone, but feeling accompanied is not always the same thing as another person being present. As artificial intelligence becomes more conversational, emotionally responsive, and personalized, these distinctions will become increasingly difficult to see. That is precisely why they will become increasingly important.
Perhaps one unexpected contribution of artificial intelligence is that it forces chaplains to clarify what they do for a living. If the primary work of chaplaincy were simply providing religious information, artificial intelligence could already perform much of that task quickly and efficiently. If the work were merely producing theologically appropriate prayers or comforting words, AI systems will continue to become increasingly capable competitors. But none of these tasks, taken by themselves, captures the heart of spiritual care.
However, the vocation of the chaplain is found more deeply in the willingness to enter another person’s world and remain there without needing to immediately solve what cannot be solved. Chaplaincy involves attention to the person in front of us, a willingness to listen beyond the obvious question, and the capacity to stay present when words become inadequate. It means bearing witness to suffering rather than simply generating a response to it. Prayer emerges from that encounter rather than standing apart from it.
The hospital of the future will almost certainly contain increasingly sophisticated technologies. Algorithms may predict clinical deterioration before it becomes visible to clinicians, artificial intelligence may summarize medical records and help patients interpret complex information, and conversational systems may become remarkably adept at anticipating what frightened or grieving people need to hear. Yet there will still be moments when all of that information reaches its limit. Someone will still sit frightened beside a hospital bed and ask a question that is not really a request for information at all: “Will you stay with me?”
Perhaps that question gets closer than anything else to what artificial intelligence reveals about chaplaincy. A machine may become extraordinarily good at knowing how to answer. The chaplain can pull up a chair.
Views and opinions expressed by authors and editors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of AI and Faith or any of its leadership.
