Good morning and welcome to Denison Forum's daily article podcast.

It's Wednesday, September 17, 2025.

I'm Connor Jones, co-hosts of the Culture Brief Podcasts here at Denison Forum, filling in for Chris Elkins,

and narrating

today's daily article authored by our co-founder and CEO, Dr. Jim Denison.

This New York Times headline caught my eye. Finding God in the App Store, millions are

turning to chatbots for guidance from on high. Lauren Jackson, the writer for a new religion and spirituality Times newsletter titled Believing,

reports, on religious apps, tens of millions of people are confessing to spiritual chatbots

their secrets, their petty vanities and deepest worries, gluttonous urges, and darkest impulses.

Trained on religious texts, the bots are like on-call priest, imams, or rabbis,

offering comfort and direction at any time.

On some platforms, they even purport to channel God.

Jackson notes that a Christian app called Bible Chat has more than 30 million downloads.

Hello, a Catholic app, beat Netflix, Instagram, and TikTok for the number one spot in the

app store at one point last year. Some see these apps as ways into faith, but others warn that they

tell us what we want to hear, rather than providing the accountability only a person

and community can foster. At the very least, the popularity of spiritual chatbots reveals the

underlying and undying popularity of spirituality itself. In a sense, this should be unsurprising,

even in our highly secularized culture. The secularization thesis, popular in

academic circles, claims that as societies progress, religion loses its authority and social life

and governance. America has certainly seen such a religious decline in recent decades, due in large

part to clergy abuse crises, religious engagement in partisan politics, and divisive cultural issues.

...