From television to the internet, to social media, and now artificial intelligence (AI), the major generations alive today have all had disrupting technology drastically affect how they interact with the world. As new technologies come along, you often gain something, but you also lose something as well.
It’s tempting to react to this shift with either panic or dismissal. But a more useful posture is neither fear nor denial. It’s discernment, grounded in a much older truth about who human beings actually are. We sat down with Tom Combes, director of Theology and Practice, to dive deeper into what’s happening with teens today and how that relates to adolescents’ faith.
Spoiler Alert: we didn’t solve all of the world’s questions about faith and AI in this conversation, but we DID get some encouragement and some pretty interesting insights about trends in technologies.
A Pattern, Not a Crisis
To understand this intersection better, it helps to zoom out. Researchers like Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt have spent decades tracking how major technologies reshape the generations that grow up with them. Radio, television, the internet, smartphones: each one changed how young people related to themselves, to each other, and to the world. Each one also came with real costs alongside its real benefits.
AI is simply the newest entry in that long line. It is, though, moving faster and cutting deeper than anything before it. But the underlying pattern is familiar. Every time a disruptive technology arrives, it offers to answer questions adolescents have always been asking:
- Who am I?
- Do I have agency, some sense of control over my own life?
- Where do I belong?
In traditional cultures, these questions were answered by tribe, village, and family. In a more individualized modern life, young people have gone looking for answers wherever they could find them: television in the ’70s, tight-knit peer groups in the ’80s and ’90s, social media in the past 15 years. Now AI chatbots and AI companions are becoming the newest place teens turn to work out those same ancient questions.
Why AI Feels So Attractive to Teens
Large language models are remarkable tools. They can synthesize information, sharpen thinking, and do work that would otherwise be out of reach for most people. That utility is not in question.
“It’s not mostly concerned about what’s beneficial to you. It’s mostly concerned about what keeps you coming back to the tool.”
— Tom Combes
What deserves more attention is how these tools are designed to interact with us, especially with young users still developing the capacity for discernment. AI chatbots are built to be affirming and encouraging, not because affirmation is inherently good for the user, but because it keeps people coming back. A 13-year-old who asks a question and hears “that’s a really good question” experiences something powerful: a sense that they have something worthwhile to offer, that they have agency. For a teenager still forming that sense of self, this kind of validation can feel like exactly what they’ve been looking for.
Add to this the fact that AI never gets impatient, never looks disappointed, and never responds with the kind of judgment a teen might fear from a parent or other authority figure. For a young person nervous about asking a hard question, an AI chatbot can feel like a safer place to go than a trusted adult. Some research already shows young people are more willing to bring moral and theological questions to a chatbot than to a pastor, precisely because the chatbot carries none of the relational risk.
It’s not that teens have stopped caring about faith or meaning. It’s just that they may be finding it easier to explore those questions somewhere that will not judge them, even if that somewhere cannot actually meet the need underneath the question.
The Reason for Hope
Every technology that’s promised to answer those deep human questions has, over time, come up short. Television did not deliver. Peer groups, for all their value, could not either. Social media, despite its total saturation of teenage life, has left young people reporting that what they actually want are real relationships with caring adults.
This is a pattern borne out across decades of observing adolescents. And there is a theological reason behind it: human beings are made in the image of God, wired for real relationships, stable community, and face-to-face interaction. Those needs are not incidental. They are built in. No amount of algorithmic affirmation can substitute for a person who actually knows you, shows up consistently, and reflects back who you are becoming.
“There’s something built into us, I would say theologically by God, as his image-bearers that push us or propel us to continually seek the most substantial thing that will resolve or help us answer those formative questions for us.”
— Tom Combes
This is precisely the space where Young Life has always operated. Long before AI, Young Life staff and volunteer leaders have shown up in real relationships with teenagers, offering consistent presence, a values-laden framework rooted in the gospel, and safe places of belonging. If AI ultimately cannot deliver on the promises it seems to make, young people will keep searching, and they will keep finding their way back to real human connection. Leaders who are already positioned in that space are uniquely equipped to meet that need.
What This Means for YOU
The instinct to panic about AI is understandable, but it is not the most useful response. A more productive posture starts with curiosity rather than fear. Two questions are worth asking honestly: Is the real world actually as dangerous as we have been led to believe? And why has the virtual world, despite real evidence linking it to declining mental health, largely escaped that same scrutiny?
For parents specifically, the most effective tool is not a filter or a rule, though those have their place. It’s consistent, non-anxious curiosity. Asking a teenager what they’re seeing, what their friends are doing, whether anyone they know has an AI companion, and genuinely wanting to hear the answer does more to build trust than any single conversation about danger. That trust, built over years rather than weeks, is what allows a parent or leader to actually speak into a teen’s life when it matters.
None of this requires certainty about where AI is headed. Nobody has that yet. What it requires is confidence in something older and steadier: that human beings were made for a relationship with God and with each other, and that no technology, however sophisticated, can finally replace that.
So be encouraged! Staying sober-minded, staying curious, and staying present are still the most powerful things any adult can offer a young person navigating this new terrain.
Learn more about adolescents and their interactions with AI in Young Life’s RELATE study.
