(3,200 words, about 17 minute read, but it’s a response to a 90 minute podcast.)
Mega-popular Christian leadership coach Carey Nieuwhof is releasing a new book: AI and the Future Church. As part of his launch, he’s running a series of promotional podcasts.
Nieuwhof posted one such conversation with Gloo CTO Pat Gelsinger on September 8, 2026. The episode was one of the most deceptive and harmful ninety minutes of advice about how Christian leaders should respond to artificial intelligence that I’ve heard. But they will reach hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of Christian leaders, and shape the direction of many evangelical churches.
Nearly every sentence spoken by Pat Gelsinger was either false, unfounded, misleading, self-serving, or echoed Big Tech’s false prophesies about AI’s future impact. But it would take 20,000 words to reply to every sentence, and nobody wants to read that.
So this will be a quicker summary. If there’s enough interest, I may post more details in a future article.
I believe Nieuwhof to be a good-hearted Christian leader who really wants to help. But unfortunately, he’s doing much more harm than good, especially through his friendship with Gelsinger. Christian leaders who follow Gelsinger’s advice will be leading their congregations onto a path of destruction, not to the “faith and flourishing” that Gelsinger promises.
Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing?
Because Gelsinger is so influential in his powerful position as CTO of Gloo, the largest “Christian AI” company in the world, his predictions carry weight in the eyes of many. He’s filling a prophetic role. But since he shares so many falsehoods, baseless assertions, terrible ideas, and self-serving predictions, I can’t help but look to Jesus’ warning:
Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. (Matthew 7:15-16)
Is Gelsinger a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing?
Gloo is a $500M company, according to Gelsinger in this episode. That’s a huge faith-based organization, one large enough to be the lone diamond sponsor of the 2026 National Religious Broadcaster’s Convention. Gloo owned Christian media at that conference. Their AI-boosting propaganda filled dozens of talks and permeated nearly every side conversation.
Gelsinger (who I have written about before) grounds his AI-optimism in the long discredited Tool Trope: that AI is a neutral tool that can be used for good or evil. As I’ve said many times, the Tool Trope is a destructive lie, one that justifies the harmful adoption of nearly every technology Big Tech creates. Gelsinger is my main representative of the Tool Trope in chapter 2 of my new book, because he so clearly and recklessly bases his ideas on this zombie-like cultural creed.
But no, GenAI is not neutral. It’s not the printing press. GenAI is specifically designed to form an undeserved trust relationship, and long-term dependency. It uses the same manipulative techniques as social media, only with far worse outcomes. Big Tech designed it to exploit our behavioral psychology and neuroscience to form habits and addictions.
Supposedly making GenAI more ethical or values-aligned does nothing to its fundamental architecture. Saying, as Gelsinger does, that Gloo makes chatbots an “average of twenty percent more values-aligned” is just a way to entice people to trust his untrustworthy chatbot more than others. They still aren’t intelligent, they don’t reason, and they don’t know anything—not the meaning of a single word. His chatbots are still always confident but often wrong, so “values alignment” isn’t going to fix that. It’s just going to make unsuspecting Christians more likely to become dependent on something that will rob them of vital God-given abilities like critical thinking, discernment, wisdom, and creativity.
The Wolf Confesses
Here’s where the Gelsinger reveals himself to be the wolf in sheep’s clothing that Jesus warned us about. Nieuwhof asks him, “What contribution do you think Christian AI companies like Gloo can make to the moment we’re in right now in shaping technology for good?” Gelsinger replies,
Well, one is we got to get Gloo bigger, right? You know, we got to make it bigger, and have more capacity to do things as well. […] We really got to come together and we hope that Gloo is part of that unifying force to create technology at scale. […] Yeah. You know, get big, get visible, you know, have capacity, have scale. (1:17:52)
This is key. Everything Gelsinger says here is to lead you to trust Gloo, just like everything Altman or Amodei or Musk says is in self-serving pursuit of world domination. This means that we must be extremely skeptical of claims made by Gelsinger about what AI is, what it can and should do, and what the impact of AI will be in the future. Because whether he’s being “optimistic” and saying how wonderful everything will be if Gloo grows, or whether he is stoking fears over whether your church’s giving will decline in the supposed AI jobs apocalypse, either way, he is still selling Gloo.
So if you listen or re-listen to this episode, ask yourself whether anything Gelsinger said would hurt his business. Ask yourself whether he recommended anything that would lead to reduce our use of GenAI. What objectivity, what discernment, what trust should we have in someone who is growing a company with the same strategies and for the same ends as the transhumanist Big AI companies are?
More Negligent than Prophetic
Before I step through a few of Gelsinger’s most harmful quotes, I want to point out that what’s missing from this episode is at least as troubling as what is present.
Gelsinger’s prophesies of AI’s impact on the future are grounded in unsupported assertions about AI capabilities. He just accepts Big Tech’s hype-filled talking points and repeats them with a faint Christian glaze over the top. All of Big Tech’s claims are baldly self-serving. Gelsinger follows suit, hoping to cash in on today’s gold rush by being a supposedly ethical “voice at the table.”
What’s missing from the hype around all AI will supposedly do to help the church or impact the job market are any insights about GenAI’s predatory design. Here’s a list of some of the neglected subjects:
- They neglect to mention that GenAI is built on a foundation of dehumanizing lies, which lead people to trust it when they should reject it. Nieuwhof and Gelsinger apparently accept the lies that GenAI is intelligent and may become “generally” or even “super” intelligent. But it never will be. The only way machines appear intelligent is by reducing the definition of human intelligence, by degrading the image of God, and by treating humans as machines.
- They neglect the real human harms caused by forming a dependency on GenAI: the real loss of vital God-given gifts of critical thinking, discernment, wisdom, and creativity. The real deskilling that is already showing up in those who depend on GenAI.
- They neglect how people who are dependent on GenAI are discipled by it, formed into people who are easily led astray into non-biblical ways of thinking and living. The lack of even a hint of care about the destruction of Christian discipleship by AI is deeply concerning.
- They neglect the transhumanist worldview that inspires everything Big Tech is building. Their anti-Christian transhumanism is built-in to today’s chatbots. And it is built-in to Gloo’s chatbots too.
- They neglect to mention the real idolatry built in to today’s chatbots. GenAI fills all the roles that idols filled in Bible times. Because Big AI leaders believe they are creating god, it makes sense that they’d be making what the Bible calls idols, and therefore, whoever trusts them risks idolatry.
These real harms of GenAI are not hyper-doomer apocalyptic ravings about the destruction of humanity sometime in the future. These are how GenAI is harming real Christians around the world right now. The fact that Gelsinger and Nieuwhof don’t discuss even one of these harms makes their conversation worse than empty and hollow.
Here’s a taste of the harmful and misleading things Gelsinger says, like the wolf said to Little Red Riding Hood. (I know I’m mixing wolf/clothing metaphors here, but I think it still works.)
“Oh, Grandma, What Big Ears You Have!”
All the better to hear Big Tech’s dehumanizing lies, and to pass them off to you as truth.
Gelsinger believes and promotes Big Tech’s dehumanizing lies: That AI is intelligent, it understands, it reasons, and it will learn and grow and recursively become better on its own. None of these things are true.
Gelsinger’s rhapsody on AI “agents,” where he treats them like a member of his staff, is a fundamentally dehumanizing posture. He talks about having agents working together to generate all kinds of content, anthropomorphizing them, asking the audience to believe that they are going to replace human workers because they are just as good or better because they’re faster, more “productive.”
I can say, here’s a research project that I would like done on my behalf. Go search whatever websites you need. When you’re finished, turn it into this report. When you’re done writing the report, please post-edit it for me. When you’re done post-editing it for me, post it on these websites, and create the 1 minute, the 10-minute, and the 1 hour version of that. Please translate it into these 10 languages for me, and then go search for the best places to post those 10 languages. (13:17)
But this disregards the fact that GenAI content is not reliable, and never will be. The misleadingly-named “agents” have no understanding of the meaning of a single word. And the way they write is becoming annoying to the point of rejection, ruining entire corners of the internet. “Slop” was Miriam-Webster’s 2025 word of the year precisely because AI generated content is so bad. So if people take Gelsinger’s advice, they’ll be creating content that nobody wants to consume, because it’s just not good, right, or true.
But the problem is that as people become more dependent on chatbots, they lose their ability to discern, and the “cognitive surrender” is so great, that they can no longer recognize what is good, right, or true. Losing these God-given abilities is exactly counter to the purpose of Christian discipleship, and for just that reason, we should reject what Gelsinger is trying to sell us.
By treating AI “agents” like staff, he’s treating his staff like machines. He’s disrespecting them by equating machine behavior with human intelligence. He’s accepting the materialistic worldview of Big Tech that doesn’t see humanity as made in God’s image, but as brains on a stick, machines made of meat. And we’re none of those things.
Gelsinger promotes Big Tech’s transhumanism with quotes like this:
But we do have to say how does [AI] enhance God’s creation? And that’s what every pastor I think needs to be saying. How does this become something I am in my church, in my community, and my people saying, “How do I enhance humanity, right, and bring me closer to God as a result of this tool?” (1:16:59)
Altman, Musk, and Amodei want to “enhance” humanity too. They want to build a post-human species, where we either merge with AI, or make AI conscious and upload our consciousness into the machine. This forms a transhumanist eschatology that is a fake, deceptive, inferior, materialist alternative to the Christian hope.
There’s nothing about GenAI that will bring me closer to God. Everything about it is designed to replace my relationship with God. It’s to be the top-of-mind answer to every question, the solution to every problem. It’s built on Big AI’s commandment: “Seek first the kingdom of Silicon Valley (including Gloo).” If you regularly use AI, think of how often it becomes the first thing you think of, before you pray to the one true God, before you ask another knowledgeable human.
All chatbots, including Gloo’s, are designed to fill the role of an idol, offering power, abundance, and pleasure on our terms, and on our schedule. Just sacrifice your minds and hearts and children, and you’ll receive the power and abundance of productivity and efficiency like you’ve never had.
Will GenAI draw you closer to God? Not the God and father of Christ. But might it draw you closer to the god Altman, Musk, and Amodei want to build? Definitely.
“But, Grandma, What Big Eyes You Have!”
All the better to see ways we can sell our AI services around the world, and to repackage them as Christlike ways to get closer to God.
Enhance Education?
Gelsinger goes into another meditation on “Christlike” ways to use GenAI to enhance humanity. The first is the destructive lie that AI can enhance education:
And we’re going to take that technology and enable every child living in poverty today to receive a proper education, with agents that are able to essentially learn their learning modalities to increase teacher productivity and you know, the number one thing to eliminate extreme poverty: education. (1:27:31)
This is the same language of universal salvation preached by Big Tech leaders. But experts in the destructive nature of education technology are already pushing back. Dr. Jared Horvath says AI is, “tools we didn’t need to solve problems we didn’t have.” His book, The Digital Delusion, is required reading for anyone before they speak a word about using AI for education. And my friend Andrew McDiarmid affirmed this in his recently published article, “How Much Should Students Use AI? Preferably Not at All.”
Education is decimated by AI because students form dependencies on the false relationship, the content is and can never be made trustworthy (no matter how “values-aligned” Gelsinger can supposedly make it).
Cultural commentator Charles Hugh Smith (no relation) just affirmed this in his article, “We Can’t Automate Learning, We Can Only Automate Dependence on AI.” This quote is one that any Christian needs to wrestle with before subjecting any child or teen to GenAI for education:
There are a number of things we already know about AI: one is that we can’t automate learning, we can only automate dependence on AI. This can be expanded to: we can’t automate learning how to think independently, we can only automate the helplessness of being dependent on AI.
So students are led to trust the fundamentally untrustworthy chatbot. And then, through the McLuhanian process of extend, amputate, and numb, they lose their ability to think for themselves, to discern, and to create, because those skills require the hard work of learning to read deeply from trustworthy (non-AI) experts, to discern truth from error, and to create for themselves. The struggle required to learn and grow in wisdom and discernment is shunted by education technology, and especially by GenAI.
So Gelsinger’s salvation by using his AI for education is a Trojan horse that will actually destroy education. He asks, “What could be more Christlike?” I ask, “What could be more millstone-deserving?”
Helpful Surveillance?
Another “Christlike” human enhancement embraces Big Tech’s desire for us all to wear constant surveillance tech so that every word we or anyone speaks around us will be fed into AI data models, for our “good,” of course:
Imagine that my hearing aids are connected to my glasses in the future and as I’m aging I’m now getting prompts to keep my neurological understanding. “That’s [your] daughter. You last saw her here.” Social disengagement accelerates the decline of neurological diseases, right? So if I keep you socially engaged by modest prompts and there’s very solid evidence that I increase quality of life and aging, right? (1:28:01)
Think of the level of trust required to let a machine record every word you say, monitor your entire life, and then advise you through your hearing aids, like a customized, machine-generated falsification of the Holy Spirit. This is dehumanizing and destructive on every level. And the evidence that this dependency helps mental abilities is lacking. These technologies are more likely to cause further mental declines.
“But, Grandma, What a Terrible Big Mouth You Have!”
All the better to scare you with Big Tech propaganda so you’ll be willing to sacrifice any God-given gift in order to gain the promised power, abundance, and pleasure from using AI the way we say you should.
Gelsinger uses Big Tech’s classic Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) to push Christians into using his GenAI in every aspect of life. Unfortunately, Nieuwhof nods along with these unsupported assertions:
Fundamentally this is a powerful technology, and if I’m using AI and you’re not, I win, you lose, right? If I’m a chemist, and I’m using AI for my chemistry models, I’m going to create better chemistry than you. I’m going to put your company out of business. If I’m using in my finance systems, I’m going to win. You’re going to lose. If I’m using it for my material science, I win, you lose. If I’m using it for my cyber systems, I win, you lose. (32:23)
He goes on, repeating the “I win, you lose” mantra several more times. And he claims that the losses we face if we don’t embrace his AI are catastrophic, even existential, to our finances, our families, our churches. We lose. Join him, buy his products, or lose: those are our only options.
But notice none of these examples are grounded in anything other than the self-serving hype of all the other companies who sell AI services. Gelsinger must make us believe the only way we win is to buy his products. It’s only for him to win big profits that we must use AI.
We have no data that shows AI doing any of these things. In fact, many early studies show that work quality is harmed, that people are less productive, that GenAI is always confident but often wrong outputs lead people to confirmation bias instead of truth.
In fact, it may be that using AI is a hindrance to innovation and creativity. It destroys the very foundation of institutional cohesion that leads to an environment where great discoveries and activities can happen.
As a Christian putting my hope in God and not in Silicon Valley, who is trusting that God made humans with unique gifts, and that our trust in AI desecrates God gifts, I make a different claim—one supported by Scripture and by observing how GenAI is harming people right now: If you don’t use GenAI, you will win. If you don’t become dependent on AI, don’t lose your skills to AI, don’t give over your ability to think for yourself, to understand what is true, then you will win, in all the ways that really matter.
A Plea to Carey Nieuwhof
To Carey Nieuwhof, I’d say with the apostle Paul, “Do not be deceived: ‘Bad company ruins good morals’” (1 Corinthians 15:33). Pat Gelsinger has led you astray. You’ve done a ton of research into AI. But you seem to have based your conclusions in the worldview of Big Tech rather than the Bible. Please, for the good of your audience and the churches they represent, reconsider your posture. I’d love to help you do that.