Here AI Am to Worship?

As artificial intelligence-generated songs and musicians multiply across streaming platforms, Contemporary Christian music audiences and creators are reckoning with the technology’s meaning for the booming genre, the opaque industry, and the very heart of Christian music.

In November 2025, Christianity Today reported on Solomon Ray—an AI-generated artist who boasts 499,000 listeners on Spotify. But Ray is not the only CCM AI artist garnering thousands of listeners. Minimal artist descriptions, quick release schedules, no contact methods, no website, and no tours or physical appearances are all indicators of potential AI-generated artists, and CCM has no shortage. Smaller accounts still have thousands of monthly listeners, including the likes of Jaxon Maverick Phoenix at over 39,000, The River Sons at 59,000, and Glory in the Ruins at 68,000.

Their music is nothing elaborate and draws firmly from the CCM tradition: “I’ve read the words, I know they’re true but some days they feel far from view / I’m still holding on to what you said, even when the lies scream loud instead,” are some lyrics to “Faith Over Fear,” by The River Sons. The band’s page description is equally vague.

“The River Sons is a country project focused on faith, family, and life’s simple moments,” the description reads.

But it’s unclear whose life is inspiring those “simple moments.” The River Sons has no human names associated with its songs besides Matthias Staal Knudsen, who is credited on some of their tracks. Some of The River Sons’ songs are published by JLY Records. A Facebook profile for a Matthias Staal Knudsen lists him as working at JLY Records, and a linked YouTube channel identifies him as an American immigrant from Denmark. A “Matthias Knudsen” has his own Spotify profile with one CCM song in English. Knudsen has scattered credits on several other projects with AI qualities, including Jericho Flame and other non-religious ones like Drift Cove. Sojourners did not hear back from a direct message to Knudsen’s social media account.

The ‘Walmartification’ of Christian art

The generic, easily memorable lyrics and chord structures might find a home more easily in modern CCM’s current landscape. Evangelical worship music and similar sounds are becoming increasingly popular among Christian audiences. Leah Payne, professor of religious history at Portland Seminary, author of God Gave Rock and Roll To You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music, said this has as much to do with the business of CCM as it does the theology.

“The business of Christian music does what all businesses do in a capitalist economy. They homogenize. They’re standardizing the content,” she said. “You don’t need AI for that. And then it cannibalizes itself. It’s basically the ‘Walmartification’ of Christian art.”

Even an entirely secular AI music creator might be tempted to generate Christian music, which has recently enjoyed another meteoric rise into usually non-religious billboards. But Payne said it wouldn’t be fair to assume that every AI-generated CCM artist is created by a cynic seeking a quick buck.

“The communities that produce a lot of worship and contemporary Christian music, they’re the types of Christians that have always been eager to experiment with new technology,” Payne said. “One of the first women to own a radio station was a Pentecostal revivalist named Aimee Semple McPherson in the 1920s. That type of music is produced by communities that have always seen the potential in the marketplace and in mass media.”

Jaxon Maverick Phoenix’s Facebook profile states, “I’m Jaxon MAVERICK Phoenix and I love JESUS. Using the latest tech, we are bringing you new never heard before Christian Songs. On this channel, We’re about giving all Praise, Honor, and Glory to Jesus and using tech to do it all!”

Using tech, especially generative AI, to give praise, honor, and glory to God is unsurprisingly a theologically contested idea. Noreen Herzfeld, scholar of technology and religion, said AI-generated Christian music is likely to obscure authentic communication between musician and listener.

“Christian music is ideally communicating something about the musician’s faith, their spiritual journey,” Herzfeld said. “And AI either is producing something that is not grounded in that, or if it’s used as a tool, it’s adding an extra layer of mediation between the listener and the artist.”

Discerning without knowledge

To even discern theology, though, CCM listeners must confront a more immediate question: How are they supposed to know if the artist they are listening to is AI? In late January, Spotify began removing its blue “verified” checkmark from artist pages, saying it “came to suggest more than the checkmark was designed to represent.” In its place, an artist’s about page will now say the artist is a “Registered Artist.”

“This update reflects what the checkmark has always represented: that an artist’s profile is claimed and actively managed in Spotify for Artists.”

Still, songs from the AI artists appear on public playlists like “Jesus Country,” “Cowboy Worship,” and “2026 Christian,” alongside real artists—with no indication they are made with generative AI. Though the AI-generated bands have little presence outside streaming services, their songs are being heard and shared by real listeners.

In response to a request for comment, Spotify directed Sojourners to a Sept. 25 blog post detailing the company’s plan to roll out AI protections for artists, songwriters, and producers who use their platform, including AI disclosures for music “with industry-standard credits,” and declined to comment on whether the information would rely on self-disclosure on the part of the artists.

In the meantime, the new suffusion of AI into the CCM genre leaves artists and listeners to grapple with what they value about the craft and the art.

Flamy Grant, the Christian musician and drag artist who has served as a worship leader, said that for her, music is a spiritual practice that can’t be outsourced to AI.

“To me, that [spiritual practice] is where I have found health and happiness and wholeness,” Grant said. “It’s in taking this flesh bag that I walk around in, and [asking], what do I do with it? … Am I using these hands and this voice and these vocal cords to make something, to create spaces that feel safe for people to be authentic, to cry, or to laugh, or to just experience emotions that we sometimes would rather shove down and avoid?”

That Christian music as a genre used to be based on content rather than style was what made it unique, she said.

“We had big ska bands in the ’90s, we had singer-songwriters doing really intimate folky stuff. We had heavy metal and R&B and just all of it, and then something happened around the turn of the century where labels started to recognize that there was this market for worship music, and all of my favorite bands started putting out worship albums,” she said.

Stephen Mason, guitarist for CCM band Jars of Clay, remembers this industry shift toward worship music well.

“Nuance doesn’t sell,” he said. “For us, we just felt lost in what was moving forward and what was valued in the industry and what our place was going to be in it.”

Jars of Clay’s label pushed them to do a worship album, Mason said, and when they finally relented, the band “did our best to undermine what they were asking in a way that only artists will do.”

“To ourselves, we were like, ‘Screw that. We’ll call it a worship album, but we’ll just do an album about community,’” Mason said.

For Mason, his fear is that AI-generated artists will be welcomed by CCM executives whose bottom line is often money. AI-generated art doesn’t come out of an embodied experience, Mason said, which puts it at odds with creating truly spiritual, prophetic experiences.

“It will poke at the things that the heart desperately wants,” he said. “But it will do it in a way that is so disingenuous to the human experience that at the end of the day, it will be a cold comfort.”

“The communities that produce a lot of worship and contemporary Christian music, they’re the types of Christians that have always been eager to experiment with new technology.”—Leah Payne, historian and author of God Gave Rock and Roll To You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music