AI Is A Gateway To The Welfare State
October 6, 2026 |
Keith Giles
As a freshman in high school, I made the kind of decision that feels efficient in the moment and foolish almost immediately after. I had put off reading Huckleberry Finn until the night before the test, so instead of working through the novel itself, I read the Cliff Notes. Not just a quick skim—I went through the whole thing. Plot, characters, themes, symbols. By the end of the night, I felt reasonably confident. I knew what happened. I understood the major ideas. If someone had asked me about the book in conversation, I could have held my own.
Then came the test.
It wasn’t multiple choice. It wasn’t about recalling basic facts. It was essay-based—questions that required interpretation, connection, actual engagement with the material. And that’s where everything fell apart. Because knowing the summary of something is not the same thing as knowing it. I hadn’t done the work of thinking through the story, sitting with it, or making sense of it on my own. I had borrowed the conclusions without building any understanding underneath them. When I needed that understanding, it wasn’t there.
That gap—that quiet realization that you don’t actually know something you thought you did—isn’t just about high school reading assignments. It’s a useful way of thinking about how a lot of modern faith operates.
To understand what’s happening in churches, it helps to understand what’s happening to attention itself.
We live in what researchers and media critics call a “second screen” environment. The television is on, but so is the phone. Notifications arrive constantly. Attention is no longer expected to be singular or sustained—it’s split, layered, always partially elsewhere. And here’s what matters: this isn’t just a behavior pattern. It’s reshaping how meaning gets made.
When you can’t assume your audience is fully present, you have to design for partial attention. Content today is built to survive interruption. Key ideas repeat. Language simplifies. The main point has to be obvious enough to land even if someone tunes out for a stretch. Ambiguity gets stripped out, because ambiguity requires sustained attention to resolve—and sustained attention can no longer be assumed.
This is a rational response to a real condition. But it has a cost that’s rarely discussed: when you design meaning to survive distraction, you also design out the very friction that makes meaning stick.
Understanding isn’t passive. It’s built through resistance—through the moment when something doesn’t resolve easily and you have to keep sitting with it. Confusion isn’t the enemy of comprehension; it’s often the mechanism. Consider how Scripture actually works: it presents stories that are messy, layered, and often unresolved. Characters act in ways that are confusing or contradictory. Outcomes aren’t always clean. That difficulty isn’t a flaw in the text—it’s doing something. The resistance is the point. The text is designed to be sat with, not summarized. When content is engineered to eliminate that friction—when the ambiguity is resolved before it’s handed to you—it becomes easier to receive but harder to actually internalize. You follow along. You feel like you understand. But because nothing required real effort from you, nothing was deeply formed.
Church communication didn’t cause this problem. But it has absorbed it completely.
Modern sermons are structured in ways that feel familiar if you spend time with podcasts, TED Talks, or online video. They’re clear, organized, and designed to be easily followed. You’ll often get a defined set of points, a story to illustrate them, and a takeaway you can carry out the door. That’s effective. People understand what’s being said. They can repeat it afterward. They feel like they’ve learned something.
But something subtle shifts in the process. The goal moves from helping people explore meaning to delivering meaning to them. Instead of inviting engagement, the message resolves itself. The tension is reduced. The ambiguity is cleaned up. What you’re left with is pre-processed theology—ideas already broken down, interpreted, and made ready for consumption.
Here’s the fair objection: didn’t Paul write plainly? Didn’t Jesus summarize the entire law in two sentences? Clarity isn’t the enemy of depth. The problem isn’t simplicity—it’s resolution. There’s a difference between a teacher who makes something accessible and one who removes the need to think about it at all. The first opens a door. The second walks you through it, points at everything, and hands you the conclusions. The first kind of teaching trusts you. The second kind, whatever its intentions, doesn’t.
But this isn’t only about individual formation. There’s a structural consequence that deserves naming directly.
When meaning is consistently pre-processed and delivered rather than discovered, it doesn’t just change how individuals relate to their faith—it changes who holds power in a community. If the expectation is that Scripture requires expert interpretation to be accessible, then the experts become indispensable. The gap between the person in the pulpit and the person in the pew isn’t just practical—it becomes theological. You need someone to tell you what it means. And if you need someone to tell you what it means, you need to keep coming back, keep listening, keep deferring.
This dynamic can develop without any malicious intent. It can happen through nothing more than the accumulated effect of good communication instincts—clarity, accessibility, polish. But the effect is the same regardless of the intent: authority concentrates upward, and the individual’s role quietly shifts from participant to audience.
That shift matters because it changes what faith actually is. A congregation trained to receive rather than wrestle doesn’t develop the capacity for independent discernment. They develop fluency in a particular teacher’s framework. They can repeat the right answers. They know which conclusions to reach. But the process that would allow them to reach those conclusions—or different ones—on their own was never practiced. Which means it was never built.
The history of religious harm is not only a history of bad theology. It’s substantially a history of communities that outsourced their judgment so completely they lost the ability to question what they were being handed. Over-explanation isn’t a neutral act of generosity. At scale, and over time, it’s a way of making people dependent—even when, especially when, nobody intended it that way.
The result is a faith that functions a lot like those Cliff Notes. It works, to a point. You can follow along, speak the language, summarize the ideas. But because the understanding was never built through engagement, it remains thin.
Borrowed beliefs are easy to carry—easy to repeat, easy to feel confident about, especially when they’re reinforced regularly. But they’re also easy to discard. When life becomes more complicated—when suffering, doubt, or real contradiction arrive—the simplified version often isn’t enough. The answers that once felt clear stop working, and there’s nothing underneath them to fall back on.
This is where the second screen problem bites hardest. A faith built for partial attention will only hold up under partial pressure. When the test is real—when someone you love dies, when your convictions are genuinely challenged, when the world stops cooperating with the simplified version—what you need isn’t a cleaner summary. What you need is understanding you actually built.
There’s another kind of faith, though. It’s built slowly, through tension and experience. It includes doubt, contradiction, and the process of working through difficult questions without immediate resolution. It’s less about having the right answers and more about having actually engaged the questions. That kind of faith tends to hold—not because it’s certain, but because it’s been integrated. It isn’t borrowed. It was built.
Building it means doing something that feels increasingly countercultural: choosing friction. Sitting with what doesn’t resolve. And here’s what’s worth saying plainly — that capacity isn’t only a religious one. The ability to hold difficulty without demanding immediate relief, to stay with a question longer than is comfortable, to resist the version of things that’s been pre-resolved for easy consumption — that’s a human capacity. And any institution, church or otherwise, that systematically trains it out of people is doing something that matters far beyond its own walls.
Cliff Notes work—until something asks more of you.
If this felt a little too accurate, there’s more where that came from.
The Tribulation Survival Guide
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