In late 2025, two songs by “Christian artist” Solomon Ray — “Find Your Rest” and “Goodbye Temptation” — topped Billboard’s gospel digital song sales chart and iTunes’ Christian music songs chart, reaching the No. 1 and No. 2 spots.
Christians across the globe deeply resonate with Ray’s Southern revival style and emotive, biblically solid lyrics. In just a matter of weeks, Ray’s music has amassed hundreds of thousands of monthly Spotify listeners, millions of streams, and significant YouTube views.
There’s only one problem: Solomon Ray isn’t a real person. It’s an AI generation.
Despite their popularity, Ray’s songs have sparked intense ethical and theological debate in the Christian music community — drawing criticism from artists like Forrest Frank over issues of authenticity, the absence of the Holy Spirit, and whether AI can truly convey genuine faith or soul in worship music.
On this episode of “Strange Encounters,” Rick Burgess addresses the controversy.
Rick acknowledges that while there’s certainly room to disagree on this issue, “something about it in my spirit … doesn’t seem right.”
“The first thing that we have to consider,” he says, “is that Solomon Ray has no soul; he has no spirit; he isn’t real. The pictures we see of him are not real. They’re like watching an animation of someone.”
Even though Rick gives credit where it’s due — “they’re good songs,” he admits — he nonetheless feels that Christians who engage with this music are flirting with something sinister.
Many proponents of Ray’s music, however, argue that because the songs were allegedly written by Christopher “Topher” Townsend, the conservative Christian hip-hop artist who created Solomon Ray, it shouldn’t matter who — or what — sings the lyrics. AI, they contend, is simply the next “evolutionary step in music.”
But Rick disagrees.
“It may be true [that AI is the next evolutionary step in music], but there’s something that’s also kind of dishonest about it,” he says, “because when you read [the] Spotify profile, Solomon Ray is a ‘Mississippi-made soul singer carrying a Southern soul revival into the present.’”
“No, he’s not,” he says bluntly.
“We’re starting to blur the lines of reality and truth.”
Rick quotes popular Christian music artist Forrest Frank, who echoed these concerns when he said, “At minimum, AI does not have the Holy Spirit inside of it. So I think that it’s really weird to be opening up your spirit to something that has no spirit.”
If artificial intelligence and Christendom continue to intersect — and they almost certainly will — Rick is concerned about what else our spirits will be subjected to.
“How many sermons are we going to start hearing that no longer feature[] a man of God sitting down with the word of God, praying for the Holy Spirit to inspire him for his next message, as opposed to getting down to the computer, saying, ‘Here’s what I need to speak on Sunday. Crank me out a sermon’?” he wonders.
He cites a recent book by Pastor Todd Korpi titled “AI Goes to Church: Pastoral Wisdom for Artificial Intelligence”: “The biggest threat to creation at the hands of AI is in how it continues to feed our appetite for consumption and progress. AI-generated music is faster, easier to produce than a studio album that requires real musicians, songwriters, audio engineers, the relational part of making music. … AI might continue this trend of disconnection and preference for the convenience of a disembodied interaction that has shaped the last decade.”
Rick agrees with Korpi’s warning. When it comes to AI music, “we’re dealing with something that’s disembodied. That feels demonic to me,” he says.
“The adversary and his demons love to manipulate scripture,” he reminds us, referring to the fall of Adam and Eve in the garden and Satan’s temptation of Jesus in the wilderness.
“The apostle Paul warned Timothy that these days were coming — that people would begin to look for pastors — and I would say musicians and singers — that tickle their ears and satisfy their desires, as opposed to being rebuked by scripture, to being convicted, to being drawn into the holiness of God for praise and worship,” says Rick.
“I’m just concerned that disembodied AI-generated messages and music may not bring me into the awe-ness of God and how awesome He is because it’s those spirit-inspired things about God that always bring me into worship … and it just seems like if I want to manipulate scripture and manipulate theology, AI sure does give me an easy path in.”
To hear more of Rick’s analysis, watch the full episode above.
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