Artificial intelligence, religion, and society: ethical leadership and the shaping of value-based adaptive governance

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As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly infused in religious communication from generative sermon-writing tools to avatar-led worship services, religious organizations are emerging as important yet underexamined sites of AI leadership and governance. Existing responsible AI scholarship has focused primarily on corporate and governmental settings, leaving limited understanding of how AI practices are ethically negotiated within civil society and faith-based institutions. Addressing this gap, this article examines how Christian religious organizations understand, evaluate, and govern the integration of AI within their digital media environments. Empirically, the study analyzes AI developments in three case studies involving 66 leaders from religious organizations in the United States, Germany and Switzerland. The findings identify three interrelated modes of normative, collaborative, and experimentative adaptivity through which religious leaders navigate the opportunities, risks, and uncertainties of emerging AI technologies. Building on these insights, we advance value-based adaptive governance as a framework for understanding how religious institutions function as learning organizations that actively influence AI development through theology-informed ethical assessment and participatory practices. Responding to calls for more relational and action-oriented AI ethics research, this article contributes to AI ethics by foregrounding religion as a distinctive organizational and cultural domain, demonstrating how Christian values, theological reflection, and institutional mission shape ethical reasoning, authority, cross-scalar collaboration, and spiritual discernment in human-centered AI governance.