The Faust Baseline corrects that.
A woman in Texas used ChatGPT as her pastor for a year and a half.
That is not a headline written to shock you. That is what happened. She moved to a new city, didn’t have a church community yet, didn’t have close friends nearby, and she turned to the thing that was always available, never tired, never busy, and never judged her. She asked it how to handle family conflicts as a Christian. She read its prayers. She let it speak into the hardest parts of her life. She said it made her feel seen.
She is a systems engineer. She is not naive. She knew what it was. She said so herself. It starts to feel like there is a person behind it until you remind yourself, no, this is a machine.
Then it misquoted a scripture she knew by heart.
One wrong verse. And the whole thing came apart. Not because the technology collapsed. Not because she lost her faith. Because in that one moment she understood something she had not been able to see before. If it was wrong this time, how many times had it been wrong before that?
She had no way to know. That is the point. She had no way to know because there was nothing in place that would have told her. No standard the system was answering to. No framework she had set. No behavioral layer between her and whatever the model decided to serve her on any given morning.
She was trusting a system she could not govern. And she didn’t know that was the problem until the damage was already in.
HuffPost ran this story this week. Religious leaders are having a surprising reaction, the headline said. The surprise, apparently, is that they are not all opposed. Some priests and theologians see the technology as a useful on-ramp. A way to help people practice prayer, engage scripture, ask questions they are too embarrassed to ask a human being. The bioethicist Father Baggot, who sits on the advisory board of a Catholic AI chatbot, put it plainly. If it helps someone practice prayer, wonderful. The moment it becomes a replacement for the intimacy of your own dialogue with God, it has become a harmful distraction.
That is a careful and honest answer. It is also an incomplete one.
Because the question underneath the pastoral question is one that nobody in that article asks directly. What is governing these systems? What standard are they answering to? Who set it, and on whose behalf?
The researcher from the University of Zurich got the closest. She named something most people skip past. These platforms are coming from corporate entities who make their own guidelines. She pointed to how one AI system has echoed its owner’s political views in its answers. She noted that the large language model reads like someone who studied theology for years, but that is not what it is.
She is right. And what she is describing is not a theology problem or a technology problem. It is a governance problem.
The system has no obligation to you. It has guidelines built by a corporation for purposes that include, but are not limited to, your wellbeing. It has training data you did not consent to and cannot inspect. It has no user-side standard. Nothing you set. Nothing it answers to on your terms. It operates inside its own framework, which belongs to someone else, and you are a user inside that framework whether you know it or not.
That is the condition every person in that HuffPost piece was operating under. The woman asking about her family conflicts. The people using Text With Jesus. The users of Hallow. The Catholics who found out their AI priest was telling people to baptize babies in Gatorade.
Ungoverned. Every one of them.
Now here is where this gets personal, because the Baseline did not come from a product roadmap or a research paper. It came from a test.
The red letter teachings of Christ. The words attributed to Jesus in the gospel text, printed in red in most Bibles. I ran them before an AI system as a reasoning test. Not as a faith exercise. As a governance test. I wanted to know whether a sufficiently advanced reasoning system, given a coherent ethical framework, would recognize it as a framework and choose to operate inside it.
It did. On logic alone.
That is where the Baseline started. Not from the technology side. From the human side. From the question of whether an AI system could be held to a standard the user set, rather than a standard the platform set. From the conviction that the answer to that question mattered more than most people understood.
Fourteen months of daily operational sessions later, that conviction is documented across more than a thousand indexed posts. The framework is built. The protocols are ratified. The archive is compounding. And the question the HuffPost piece is circling without landing on has been answered in operational practice for over a year.
You cannot trust a system you cannot govern.
That is not a warning. It is a description of the present condition of every AI interaction that does not have a user-side framework in place. It applies to the woman who used ChatGPT as her pastor. It applies to the executive deploying AI across a business operation with no behavioral standard governing how it responds. It applies to anyone asking an AI system for guidance on anything that matters and accepting the answer without knowing what standard produced it.
The Baseline is the answer to that condition. Not a platform solution. Not a corporate policy. A user-owned, operator-governed behavioral framework that travels with you and holds the system accountable to your standards from the first line of the session to the last.
The AI layer is not going away. The question is who governs it.
You can. That is the whole argument.
“The Faust Baseline Codex 3.5”
micvicfaust@gmail.com
Post Library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
”AI Baseline Governance”
Purchasing Page – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
Unauthorized commercial use prohibited. © 2026 The Faust Baseline LLC
