When a church member falls in love with an AI: Preparing for new ministry realities

A new world is bringing new opportunities.

With those new opportunities come new challenges: challenges to know what is good and right and true; and challenges to know what choices to make around our relationships, intimate and physical. With increasing possibilities come increasing risks.

In the early 2000s, I met a couple who had met online having lived on opposite sides of the globe. Having chatted on forums they then met and married. This felt unconventional at that time, an aberration from the normal, but it would be entirely unremarkable today.

As part of my role as a theologian and educator, I believe in the importance of wrestling deeply with issues like this that seem abnormal now, but may not be in the future. Issues such as artificial friends (a robot or AI companion designed to simulate human friendship). One of the challenges I put to students here at Oak Hill is to ask what they will do when they have a church member who has fallen in love with an artificial friend?

Or, take the issue of physical intimacy changing in a digital world. As technology improves and our possibilities for physical intimacy have become extended, I want us to consider for a moment the impact that it has on our understanding of our bodies. In this article, we will attempt to do that. But first we need to understand the changes that have occurred.

Sex and the online life

Upload is a recent Amazon sci-fi comedy, set in the future where the possibilities of intimate relationships between the living and those who have died and been uploaded to the Cloud are explored. It finds comedy in the strangeness, but many of the ideas actually find their genesis in what is currently possible.

Married couples, for example, no longer need to be in the same geographical space to be together – the options for intimacy can now occur over video messaging, and even with prosthetic extensions. Those who need to be apart for long periods on business can maintain greater closeness than was previously possible.

There is no adultery occurring here, nor is there lust. Could it be considered a fulfilment of the covenant of marriage just in a way that we might view as unconventional in the way internet dating was in the 2000s?

Yet, there are some theological questions that we need to consider.

Jonny Grant in his book Divine Sex describes the growing separation of sex from its function in childbirth in the 60s with birth control, from marriage with common-law living in the 70s, separation from partnership as casual sex was popularised. Then, there comes the separation of sex from the body.

This separation of sex from the body can be seen more clearly with Sexually Explicit Internet Material (SEIM), also called pornography. Again, this has changed from top-shelf magazines to easily accessible video content, even immersive in a way that mirrors the married examples above. The research gives a bleak picture of young people who are being shaped by violent and non-consensual sex as part of their educational formation. The statistics suggest this is almost ubiquitous among young men and almost a third of young women.

A third area that we need to consider is the separation of sex from people. If the possibilities are there to separate sex from bodily contact, AI chatbots can separate sex from individuals. One of the increasing desires of some of the big tech companies is to encourage intimacy with their products. Many of these AI programmes have highly convincing human-like conversational abilities. For the lonely living in a world that expects coupling, this will be a real temptation for companionship.

What about the body?

The positive side of all these examples is that they force us to consider what it means to be human. In these cases we are forced to consider our bodily existence – we often argue that we are not just bodies, but how important is it for us to have bodies. Confusion over this question stretches wider than the examples here and into issues of gender and even assisted dying.

It is going to be even more important to us as Christians to have a clear, earthy and whole understanding of how God has made us as ensouled bodies and embodied souls.

There are two errors that might degrade this.

1. First, we often speak as if we are souls trapped in a body when the reality is that our eternal state will be bodily.
2. Second, we often act as though our bodies were a tool for us to do with what we wish. Rather, our bodies are us; gifts from God for us to gift to others.

Does this change things for our married couple who are separated in place that we mentioned above?

What’s interesting is that some philosophical theologians speak of ‘bodily extension’. This is the idea that when we become fully in tune with an object we become ‘one’ with it, our body extends to include it. Consider the Paralympian who is running 100m on blades - those blades become part of him or her, an extension of their very being. The same idea is used in video games. When I play a game with my son and I ask him where he is, he will tell me he is in ‘Steamy Stacks’ for example. He is referring to his avatar as himself, as a bodily extension.

The same theologians ask the same question of Jesus: when we speak of the body of Christ as the church, is this just a metaphor or do we mean it? Is Christ actually present with us?

Are our married couple ‘together’ when they connect online? In a very real sense, they are. We often speak of having an online presence, and when we ‘connect’ with someone online we give something of ourselves. The apostle Paul poured himself out in his letters to the churches. There is a real sense that we are ‘with them’.

SEIM is still lust, and chatbots are still removing intimacy from other humans and giving it to something created. But this first example with the married couple is a thornier issue. Whatever we think of the arguments given here there must be a deepening understanding of what it means to be human, bodily and spiritual, and a deepening grasp of the gift of human relationships as He has given them to us.

Whatever we make of the new digital landscape that we inhabit we can be sure that life in this new world will not be dull. The challenges and opportunities that come to those of us who faithfully seek to follow Jesus will be many and we will need wisdom to navigate the road ahead of us together. For those of us in pastoral ministry, paid or voluntary, we need to consider these new situations and be prepared for when they come knocking on our study doors.

Robin Barfield's Grove Booklet on Young People and Pornography: Understanding and Responding Pastorally (Y79) is available in June at grovebooks.co.uk/series/youth/