Earlier this year, pastors across the United States began warning their congregations about a disturbing new problem: videos that looked and sounded like them, but were not.
Artificial intelligence was being used to impersonate religious leaders, putting words in their mouths and exploiting the trust they had spent years building with their congregations. Catholic priest and podcaster Mike Schmitz, who reaches more than a million people on YouTube, was among those targeted. Fake versions of him appeared online delivering messages he had never recorded and directing followers toward fraudulent solicitations.
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For now, many of these impersonations appear designed to make money. But the same technology could be used for something far more dangerous. Foreign adversaries already know that the most effective propaganda often does not look foreign at all. It comes through a person, institution, or community the audience already trusts.
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That is what made a social media post I recently encountered so striking. It claimed that AI, data centers, the U.N.’s 2030 agenda, and CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, were converging to activate the “Beast System” foretold in Revelation 13.
The post offered no evidence. Instead, it linked several complex and poorly understood subjects to biblical prophecy, transforming technological and political anxiety into a spiritual warning. It then treated the connection itself as proof that prophecy was already unfolding.
Recent events show how easily religious fear can be attached to something people already see online. On July 31, Reuters documented social media claims blaming Muslims for a fire at St. Andrew’s Church in Leicester, England, even though the fire service and parish priest said they believed the blaze was accidental. Then, this week, old footage of a church fire in Quebec resurfaced online with claims that an immigrant had deliberately set it. Local authorities said the fire had actually occurred in 2025 and was caused by lightning.
There is no evidence that those claims or the “Beast System” post are part of foreign influence operations. That is precisely why they matter. A hostile government does not need to invent every conspiracy theory, grievance, or fear it wants Americans to believe. Much of the raw material is already circulating online. An adversary only needs to identify what resonates, amplify it, and find trusted voices willing or unwitting enough to carry it further.
Apocalyptic framing makes that problem even harder. A data center’s power use, cooling system, and local impact can be tested against records, hearings, and engineering facts. But once the facility is cast as an instrument of the Antichrist, every rebuttal can be absorbed into the conspiracy. A company denial becomes evidence of deceit, while a government explanation becomes proof of collusion. What began as a debate over infrastructure can quickly become a test of spiritual allegiance.
Russia has already shown how effective religious trust can be as a vehicle for political manipulation. The Senate Intelligence Committee found that the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-backed Russian troll farm, created a Facebook page called “Army of Jesus.” The page attracted more than 216,000 followers by presenting itself as a source of Christian themes, Bible passages, and devotional content.
Shortly before the 2016 election, that same page inserted a false claim that Hillary Clinton had approved removing God from the Pledge of Allegiance. The political message was surrounded by the kind of Christian content its followers had already come to expect. The Russians did not begin by asking an audience to trust Russian propaganda. They first built a community that looked familiar and trustworthy, then used that trust to deliver the message.
That does not make Christianity the problem. It makes Christian communities attractive targets because faith carries enormous trust and moral authority in American life. Pew Research Center’s latest Religious Landscape Study found that 62% of U.S. adults identify as Christian. A separate Pew survey found that 39% of Americans, including 63% of evangelical Protestants, believed humanity was living in the end times.
For millions of Americans, faith shapes conscience, community, and moral judgment. A political message presented as religious truth can therefore carry an authority ordinary propaganda cannot, bypassing some of the skepticism that would greet the same message if it came from a government account, political organization, or anonymous website.
Foreign adversaries also do not need to rely entirely on fake accounts. They can seize on falsehoods already circulating in the U.S., amplify them through authentic American voices, and conceal the foreign hand behind the campaign. The intelligence community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center warned in 2024 that foreign actors use both witting and unwitting Americans to spread and add credibility to messages serving foreign interests.
That is what makes an otherwise fringe religious conspiracy useful to an adversary. It does not need to convince Americans to believe something completely foreign to them. It can find a claim that already has an audience, push it through fake accounts and real people, reinforce it with fabricated evidence, and make the movement appear larger and more credible than it really is. The fear already exists. A hostile actor only has to give it reach.
Generative AI could do that at a scale that was impossible when Russia created “Army of Jesus.” In 2024, the Justice Department disrupted a Russian government-operated, AI-enhanced social media bot farm that used fictitious personas, often pretending to be Americans, to spread messages supporting Russian government objectives.
Now apply that capability to religious trust. A synthetic pastor could warn that a county zoning vote is preparing the way for the mark of the beast. A sermon that was never preached could be posted as though it were authentic. Forged church letters or counterfeit utility documents could circulate as proof. Thousands of invented commenters could make a fringe interpretation appear to represent a widespread Christian consensus.
That possibility is no longer difficult to imagine because pieces of it already exist. We already have AI impersonating pastors. We already have fabricated religious messages attracting millions of views. We already have false claims turning church fires into supposed attacks by Muslims or immigrants. We already know that Russia has posed as Christian Americans to build political audiences. None of those facts alone proves the existence of the campaign described here. Together, they show how little an adversary would have to invent.
The consequences would not remain online. A coordinated campaign could derail local permitting decisions, provoke threats against workers, turn neighbors against one another, and delay infrastructure tied to the American economy and national defense. The deeper damage would be harder to repair because a public taught to view its neighbors and institutions as characters in an end times conspiracy begins to lose the common set of facts required for self-government.
The answer is not for the government to police theology or decide which religious claims are true. That would violate basic constitutional principles and play directly into the hands of anyone trying to convince Christians that the government is their enemy.
The response needs to target deception, not belief. Social media companies need to expose coordinated fake networks and identify foreign state activity. Federal agencies can warn churches, religious broadcasters, and denominations about foreign impersonation, synthetic media, and known influence tactics without monitoring sermons, doctrine, or lawful political speech.
Businesses and local governments also need to stop leaving information vacuums around unfamiliar projects. When communities do not understand what is being built, why it is being built, or how it will affect them, rumors have room to grow. Foreign adversaries are not the only actors willing to exploit that confusion, but they may be among the most dangerous.
The strongest defense is one an adversary cannot easily counterfeit: the trust built inside a real community. A pastor known to the congregation or an elder who has sat with families through funerals and weddings carries an authority no generated voice can reproduce. In the Gospel of John, the sheep follow the shepherd because they know his voice, and they flee from a stranger because they do not.
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That instinct is the point. An adversary can imitate scriptural language, clone a preacher’s voice, forge a letter, and manufacture a crowd, but it cannot easily reproduce the trust of a community that has learned to recognize its own.
The purpose of that defense is not to make Christians doubt their faith. It is to ensure that when a stranger calls out in the language of that faith, the church can recognize the stranger.
Colton Overcash is the founder of Vertex Strategies, a Charlotte-based government relations and strategic advisory firm with a presence in Washington, D.C. He regularly writes and comments on technology, foreign policy, and national security. He previously held two presidential appointments at the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration and is a former staffer to Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC).
