Why I Made a Film About AI Jesus

I was in Chicago when someone asked me: "Did you see this news story about a church in Switzerland that has built an AI Jesus?"

I started to laugh—like doubled over hysterically laugh—because immediately I thought that if a European church were going to build an AI Jesus, they might pick my husband Brennan’s face to do it.

It’s not a stretch. Once, we went to see our friend and comedian Leah Rudick (the internet knows her as her alter ego Wealthy Woman) at the Laughing Skull in Atlanta. One of the early comics ribbed my husband for looking like a youth pastor, and to be fair, they're not wrong. Gentle face, clean cut, wide smile, plays the acoustic guitar.

I started to double down on the idea, beyond my inside joke with my husband that he looks like what many people imagine Jesus to look like. Nevermind that the modern image of Jesus was most likely an image of Michaelangelo’s boyfriend and has nothing to do with the Palestinian man that all the books are actually written about.

As an actor, Brennan has had to sign contracts which license his “voice image and likeness in perpetuity on all platforms now and to be invented in the future.” So, what if that meant his image has already been fed to AI (certainly, it has.) What if Brennan’s image was scraped by AI companies as an avatar for a digital Jesus? What could that mean, for both his life and Christians everywhere?

We wrote the script in one day. We assembled the team, raised funding through my company Seed&Spark, and shot a comedy.

In our film Mr. Jesus, the character Chris is a struggling actor whose face gets stolen to create a Gen AI Jesus app. It’s the brainchild of a failed startup bro we call Steven Muskee, who sees megachurches as the perfect go-to-market strategy for a surveillance tool disguised as a Jesus confessional – and it’s immediately popular. Chris wakes up one morning to discover dozens of people camped out in front of his sister's house where he is staying.

About six months into developing the film, we realized this project could open up a chance to tackle all the ways in which AI was circling around us and our cultural institutions and social lives. The Silicon Valley oligarchs who are building AI speak of it as if it were God, and its naysayers as if they are anti-christs. Do they want AI to replace human connection? I’m seeing prominent artists’ (like Studio Ghibli’s) work stolen, grieving families begging the internet not to make AI videos of their deceased loved ones (Robin Williams), teens committing crimes or suicide because an AI encouraged them, and acts of war escalating because it’s impossible to tell which videos are evidence and which are fake.

The way AI is being positioned as God and used in churches is really terrifying to me, even as a “non-believer”, in the traditional sense, anyway. Artificial Intelligence is being sold as the answer to all our problems, as possessing infinite wisdom, and eventually, according to Sam Altman himself, likely to “sort of lead to the end of the world.”

I am not religious, but I do deeply understand the importance of faith communities. Of being together in a place, sharing a purpose.

There is a long history of predatory televangelism; the modern church has quickly become units of digital content - Youtube, merchandise, celebrity, streaming subscriptions - and so many scandals. The last few years have seen major investments in "faith tech.” Apps like Gloo, which markets itself as a platform for churches, is essentially a data brokerage harvesting congregant information for political and commercial targeting.

But those stories often outshine what faith communities also provide: churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples have always run food pantries, emergency funds, childcare, eldercare. This is the original social safety net, and it operates outside the market, as one of the last lines of protection folks have from capitalism and fascism.

Faith communities are one of the few places where multi-generational, cross-class relationships still exist organically. Presence is the product. When you are in your community, you are supported and connected. You are more likely to protect your neighbor. It's much harder to scare you or sow division. Many religious traditions have explicit teachings about usury, greed, care for the poor, and communal obligation. These create friction against purely extractive economic logic.

A congregation that deliberates together, supports each other materially, and shares a moral vocabulary is harder to manipulate, harder to monetize, and harder to radicalize via algorithmic feed. And I believe that presents us an opportunity to engage faith communities about technology in ways that may not have been relevant or possible in the past.

In advance of any of our traditional film festivals or screenings, we have started offering private screenings of Mr. Jesus to faith communities, that we can facilitate ourselves or with a discussion guide designed with the help of divinity school education expert Kristina Lizardy-Hajbi. We held our first one at Virginia Highlands Church UCC at the invitation of Pastor Matt Laney.

Something I have come to learn about Pastor Matt is that he believes deeply that there are lots of different ways to be in community with the divine, and that he sees that for some people theater is church, or film screenings are church, music can be church. He offers the church basement - which has a sweet stage and a lot of folding chairs - to non-profit theater companies, budding artists, and even to a crew of mostly atheist filmmakers who want to engage community conversation.

We gathered about 75 people in the basement on a Friday night in February for the very first private screening of the film - specifically for the folks who worked on the film and for members of Pastor Matt’s congregation. With great relief, people laughed at all the places we hoped they would, and even some we didn’t expect. After the screening, everyone turned their chairs inward, like the Quaker meetings of my youth, and Pastor Matt opened the conversation.

What I could never have anticipated was how immediately people opened up. The first person who spoke said the film — which does have a bit of a cliffhanger ending — felt more like a TV pilot; they could see the expansive world ahead. And everyone had big questions and ideas about what could happen for these characters, seamlessly projecting themselves forward, expressing their hopes and desires for what could be.

They also shared intimate stories of harm caused by the churches they grew up in, or by technologies they'd been using without critically examining them. They talked about how much they loved the experience of watching and talking together. Presence was as much a part of the experience as the film itself. That night, everyone in the room became a storyteller of the future. The entire reason I tell stories at all is to invite people to see that they, too, have agency and capacity to shape the world they imagine.

Mr. Jesus is our way of ribbing some behemoth cultural institutions: Hollywood, capitalist megachurches, the AI industrial complex. And it’s an invitation: if we can laugh together, we know we share some of the same context. It's a powerful place from which to start conversations, even about the things that scare us.