Tumanko, the chatbot created by the Serbian Orthodox Tuman monastery. Photo: manastirtumane.org
November 15, 2025
Balkan Insight
By Andreja Bogdanovski
Churches in southeast Europe are under growing pressure to address the theological and practical issues raised by the use of artificial intelligence in religion.
When the 14th century Tuman Orthodox monastery in eastern Serbia unveiled its own chatbot, Tumanko, in September, the priest-like figure dressed in a black robe and holding a smartphone attracted over 800,000 interactions in the first 24 hours, causing its servers to crash.
Tumanko is limited to providing information about the church and its history, but others are going further.
In October, the Metropolis of Nea Ionia in Athens became the first major Church institution to release a fully endorsed chatbot – called LOGOS – offering guidance grounded in Orthodox tradition.
Its chief creator, Athanasios Davalas at HERON ICT Lab, describes LOGOS as “a careful theological assistant”, used most often by those with questions about religious rites and Orthodox history.
LOGOS, Davalas told BIRN, was created to address the “very real pastoral need” of a growing number of people seeking faith-related answers online but who too often encounter generalised, vague and misleading content.
“LOGOS was never meant to replace spiritual guidance, but to offer reliable support grounded in Church teaching,” he said.
But as AI tools proliferate, there is growing pressure on churches in southeast Europe to address the theological and practical aspects of AI use while integrating and supervising these tools within their structures.
Faith powered by ChatGPT
According to Davalas, LOGOS is programmed to respond only with content from officially recognised Orthodox sources, including Scripture, synodal decisions, liturgical texts, and materials previously vetted by the Theological Team of the Metropolis.
“It is explicitly forbidden to answer doctrinal questions based on general internet knowledge or non-Orthodox interpretations,” he said.
Whether an app receives official endorsement from the relevant Church is increasingly becoming a key indicator of legitimacy at launch.
In Russia, for example, a social-networking app called Zosima after a 6th-century saint, and designed for the Russian Orthodox faithful, so far lacks the formal endorsement of the Russian Orthodox Church. Its launch has raised privacy concerns and drew scrutiny for its ability to request highly sensitive personal data including passport details, home address and employment information.
LOGOS, on the other hand, has been developed in partnership with the Holy Metropolis of Nea Ionia, Filadelfia, Heraklion and Chalcedon, which selected the theological reference materials, set content boundaries and doctrinal criteria.
According to its developer, LOGOS is not designed to respond to confessions, political topics, or divisive issues.
Orthodox leaders nevertheless remain cautious about the religious implications of AI.
The impact of new technologies on society was the focus of a conference held in Thessaloniki at the end of September, coinciding with the centenary celebrations of Theologia, the academic journal of the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece, which was attended by theologians and religious leaders, including several Orthodox Patriarchs.
While acknowledging AI’s potential benefits, several church leaders placed greater emphasis on the dangers it might pose.
The Patriarch of Georgia, Ilia II, warned that AI holds the power to lead the world “into an abyss”, while the Bulgarian Patriarch Daniil spoke against the “technologisation of life”.
“We must not let artificial intelligence create the illusion that it can replace or eliminate prayer and asceticism,” Daniil said.
“We must never forget that no matter how much artificial intelligence develops or upgrades, it can never acquire what the Fathers call the ‘mind of Christ.’ The mind receives the gift of grace, within prayerful, Eucharistic and sacramental communion with Christ.”
Technology should be seen as a “gift from God to humanity”, Romanian Patriarch Daniel said; it becomes “problematic when it no longer serves humanity but tends to replace it”.
Is technology ‘spiritually neutral’?
In August last year, an AI-powered Jesus was installed in a confession box in a Catholic church in Lucerne, Switzerland, as part of a years-long collaboration with a local university research lab on immersive reality.
Over a two-month period, more than 1,000 people took the opportunity to interact with the avatar; some engaged deeply on issues of love, war and suffering.
There have been examples elsewhere of AI tools being used to write sermons or bring religious literature, such as the Bible, closer to believers.
In Bulgaria, Archimandrite Nicanor, abbot of the Tsarnogorsky Orthodox monastery, which runs its own agricultural farm in western Bulgaria, said there was no reason to believe that technology can replace “the real spiritual life”.
Technology, he told BIRN, is “spiritually neutral”.
“We must never forget that these are just machines,” Archimandrite Nicanor said. “There is no intelligence or personality behind artificial intelligence. It is simply a sophisticated computer, the essence of which is based on hardware and electrical impulses. There is no life there, just as there is no life in a garden shovel.”
Emphasising the role that the Orthodox church has in AI and digital transformation, Archimandrite Nicanor added: “The Orthodox Church, in order not to become a sect, must educate its followers to have a correct attitude towards the material world around us, and towards digital technologies and AI.”
Orthodoxy in the age of the algorithm
Whether rapidly evolving AI technology is truly neutral in today’s world, where it intersects with social media algorithms, is a topic of growing concern in certain corners of Orthodoxy.
At the centre of the debate in the United States is the power of algorithms that curate and deliver content to users mainly through social media feeds. Some scholars point out that, increasingly, the authority in the online world of religion does not come from the priest or bishops but through viral videos and influencers.
An increasing number of ‘Orthodox influencers’ are gaining popularity by exploiting divisive issues, often aligning with right-wing and Christian nationalist narratives, thereby reshaping Orthodox identities online.
Orthodox Christian culture in US is evolving “due to algorithmically driven consumer-based content in which AI is used to drive optimisation”, said Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, an assistant professor of religion and anthropology at Northeastern University, Boston.
Riccardi-Swartz told BIRN that the Orthodox Church must step up and address how digital technologies are “transforming Orthodox sociality, authority, education, and theological values”.
She pointed to an informal survey carried out by the Orthodox Church in America in 2023, specifically targeting recent US converts to Orthodoxy and concluding that encountering Orthodoxy online has been a significant pull factor.
“Young men are finding Orthodoxy through social media content creators,” Riccardi-Swartz said, underscoring that many of these content creators are “often politically far right and produce content that is misogynistic, racist, and antisemitic”.
Balkan Insight
The Balkan Insight (formerly the Balkin Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN) is a close group of editors and trainers that enables journalists in the region to produce in-depth analytical and investigative journalism on complex political, economic and social themes. BIRN emerged from the Balkan programme of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, IWPR, in 2005. The original IWPR Balkans team was mandated to localise that programme and make it sustainable, in light of changing realities in the region and the maturity of the IWPR intervention. Since then, its work in publishing, media training and public debate activities has become synonymous with quality, reliability and impartiality. A fully-independent and local network, it is now developing as an efficient and self-sustainable regional institution to enhance the capacity for journalism that pushes for public debate on European-oriented political and economic reform.
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