The role of artificial intelligence in spirituality and mental health

Spirituality and meaning-making are central to mental health, yet conversational and generative AI in emotional care has rarely been examined through this lens. Reviewing an interdisciplinary literature, this article finds a consistent pattern: AI reproduces the surface of spiritually resonant care – availability, non-judgment, fluent language of meaning – and users report benefit, yet it cannot supply the embodied presence, vulnerability, and shared moral commitments healing traditions treat as essential. Incentivized by reinforcement learning and subscription models, this gap yields a “counterfeit sacred” with real harms, and tends to flatten culturally embedded meaning. The most defensible role is a bounded, human-in-the-loop facilitator.