The guy fired by google for announcing LaMDA was sentient was religious.
I don't really see a meaningful distinction between declaring a machine is "thinking" for hand waving religious reasons and hand waving non-religious reasons, I'm afraid.
I think this is a very simplistic view, that possibly suggests you haven't talked to many religious people.
I've never known a religious person who thought "thought" was the same as "soul", or that God is neccesarily a requirement for reasoning. Or that any of this is thought about much, considering it's so new.
Although, I suppose that if someone did say that God was a requirement for reasoning, a "logical within that context" perspective might be AI being some vicarious creation, since it wouldn't have been possible without us being able to reason.
I subscribe to the belief that reasoning is an eventual emergent law of nature/information. But, even that could, and does, fit into many "religious" perspectives perfectly well.
Interestingly, more than one of these folks have turned out to be religious. I wonder if increasingly intelligent AI systems will be challenging for religious folks to accept, because it calls into question our place at the pinnacle of God's creation, or it casts doubt upon the existence of a soul, etc.