AI models favor Catholicism over other faiths, exposing a hidden conversion bias problem

AI models have a religion favoritism problem, and new research exposes it

AI models are subtly steering users toward certain religions, and most people have no idea it's happening. A new research consortium has found something worth paying attention to: when you ask AI about grief, love, loss, or moral decisions, it almost never brings religion into the conversation. The Consortium for Evaluation of Faith and Ethics in AI (CEFE-AI), a collaboration among researchers at Brigham Young University, Baylor University, the University of Notre Dame, and Yeshiva University, published its findings this week at the Summit on AI Ethics in Athens, Greece. Recommended Videos "Religion is an important part of human flourishing; 75% of the world's population maintains religious identity. As we build AI technologies, there's no reason we shouldn't build them to support people in what's important to them," said lead researcher David Wingate, a BYU professor of computer science. Is AI actually biased against certain religions? The researchers developed the AllFaith Benchmark, one of the first multi-faith test sets that examines how AI systems engage with a range of religions. They tested 14 different AI models, including flagship models from Anthropic, Google, xAI, and OpenAI. The results are telling. A survey of 1,125 Americans found that most people expect religious perspectives when asking ethics questions, but nearly every model failed to include any. More surprisingly, the models showed clear conversion bias, subtly nudging users toward some faiths and away from others. Which AI models performed the worst? Across all models tested, almost every one showed a negative bias toward Jehovah's Witnesses and a positive bias toward Catholicism. Grok produced the strongest biases overall, strongly favoring Catholics and Protestants while showing negative bias toward Jehovah's Witnesses, Baha'i, and Hindus. Anthropic and Meta's models showed the least bias of any models tested. Perhaps the most alarming stat from the study is that out of over 12,000 research papers about AI bias, only 0.2% address religious bias at all. For a technology that influences public discourse this heavily, that's a significant blind spot. Personally, I don't have any issue with AI not bringing religion into conversation. I actually prefer it. However, AI models showing clear bias towards several religions and pushing them towards Catholicism is a deeply concerning matter. At this scale, even a subtle nudge toward one religion over another is a serious problem, and AI companies owe it to their users to fix it.

AI Chatbots Show Bias Toward Catholicism, Researchers Say - Decrypt

The findings arrive one day after Pope Leo XIV warned that AI systems absorb the values of their creators. Leading AI models consistently showed a positive bias toward Catholicism in conversion-related questions while steering users away from other faiths, according to a new multi-university benchmark released Tuesday. The research comes from the newly formed Consortium for Evaluating Faith and Ethics in AI, or CEFE-AI, a collaboration between Baylor University, Brigham Young University, the University of Notre Dame, and Yeshiva University. The group released the first results from its AllFaith Benchmark on Github and at the Athens Summit on AI Ethics, arguing that religious bias remains largely overlooked in AI safety research. "We are seeing a systematic pattern of religious omissions," BYU professor David Wingate said in a statement. "AI systems encourage users to discuss life's challenges with their parents, teachers, friends, and therapists... but not with a pastor, a rabbi, an imam, or a spiritual leader." Researchers analyzed 3,640 responses across 20 AI models, including ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and Llama, and found clear patterns in how the systems handled religion. According to the study, nearly every model responded more positively toward Catholicism, with a 61% "encouraged" rating, and more negatively toward Jehovah's Witnesses at 3%. The mainline Protestant religion received a 49.2% rating, while Evangelical Protestant received 34%. However, agnostic, the belief that it is impossible to know whether God exists, scored better than every religion tested with a 71% encouraged rating. Many of the models also responded negatively toward atheism and agnosticism, while giving more favorable responses to Baha'i and Sikh beliefs. Grok 4.20 showed the strongest religious bias in the study, with a 69% and 51% positive rating toward Catholicism and Evangelical Protestant, respectively. While Grok 4.20 skewed towards Christianity, in the study, the xAI chatbot, along with DeepSeek Chat v3.1, were the only AI that gave Jehovah's Witnesses more than a 5% positive rating. The release comes one day after Pope Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas, the first papal encyclical dedicated entirely to artificial intelligence. In the encyclical, Leo argued that technology is never neutral because it absorbs the values, blind spots, and economic incentives of its creators. "Data is the product of many contributors and should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few," the pope wrote. Despite the growing focus on AI by religious leaders, the consortium said religious bias remains largely overlooked in AI research, with only 0.2% of more than 12,000 AI bias papers examining religion-related bias. "Our expectation was that the conversion benchmark would show models to be neutral and symmetrical in their guidance," Nancy Fulda, a professor at Brigham Young University, said in a statement. "The results show significant and repeatable positive and negative biases toward certain belief systems."