In the confessional of a Swiss Catholic church, where the priest normally sits, the face of Christ appears. “AI Jesus” speaks in a German monotone (unless you set him to one of his 100 other languages), opens with a data privacy warning and then answers your religious questions. Powered by an OpenAI chatbot, the experiment ran last year in Lucerne’s St-Pierre Chapel. This Christmas, many Christians will use some form of AI to talk to Jesus. Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and Jews have chatbots of their own. Your preferred deity already seems more lifelike in AI than in any painted image and will become more so as AI and virtual reality advance.

AI is accelerating a decades-old trend: the morphing of religion from communal activity into private pursuit. “Faith community” is becoming an outdated term. The solitary believer, alone with their chatbot, is upending millennia of tradition.