Ninety-four percent of Protestant pastors are worried artificial intelligence will misinterpret the Bible. That is not a fringe complaint from men who hate technology. That is the pulpit looking at a chatbot and seeing a false teacher with perfect grammar and no fear of God.
The Christian Post reported the finding Sunday from new Barna research produced with Gloo for the State of the Church initiative. Researchers surveyed 1,514 U.S. adults online in November 2025 and 442 Protestant pastors in December 2025.
Concern about AI twisting Scripture hits 83 percent among practicing Christians and 74 percent among American adults at large. Pastors sit at the top of the pile. They should.
A machine trained on the internet does not tremble before the text. It averages it. It flatters the user. It will baptize a sloppy reading if that reading keeps the conversation going. Holy men of God did not write that way, and the church is not supposed to receive the Word that way.
Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.
That is 2 Peter 1:20-21. The Spirit moved men. Silicon does not.
The Pew Wants a Verdict. The Pulpit Wants a Fight.
Here is the split that should keep elders awake. When interpretations of a passage genuinely differ, 60 percent of pastors say AI should lay out the major readings, explain how they differ, and refuse to crown a winner. Only 26 percent of practicing Christians want that.
The same share of the flock wants the machine to name the “right” interpretation. About one in ten pastors agrees.
Practicing Christians are roughly four times as likely as pastors to want AI to settle a dispute by serving only the most popular reading. Nearly one in five Christians would rather the tool stay silent on contested texts. About twice as many pastors take that harder line.
Daniel Copeland, Barna’s vice president of research, put the pastoral instinct cleanly.
Their approach points to using AI as a tool to aid their learning, not to tell them what to think. Pastors seem to want people to use the tool but let it expand their understanding and push them to think for themselves.
That is the right instinct. A citation sends a man back to the argument. A disclaimer just slaps a warning label on a shortcut. Copeland told Barna that pastors already live this way when they write sermons. They test a reading against commentaries and traditions before they stand in the pulpit. The gift is not a canned answer. The gift is showing people how the answer was reached.
Very few pastors want the Bible locked away from the software. Only 5 percent say AI should refuse contested passages. Nine percent say it should stay out of theology where scholars disagree. They are not Luddites. They are shepherds who know a confident sentence is not the same thing as truth.
Christians Trust the Tool They Fear
The numbers refuse to sit still. Earlier Barna work in the same State of the Church track found practicing Christians using AI more than most Americans in work and in private life. Nearly half say they would trust the technology with their spiritual growth. About a third of practicing American Christians say the spiritual advice coming out of AI is as good as advice from a pastor, a finding The Christian Post flagged in June.
So the same people who fear a misread Bible are walking into the same tool for growth, counsel, and a tidy paragraph. Copeland called the contradiction confounding. He is being polite. It is a discipleship failure wearing a productivity app.
Most Christians still use AI more for learning, advice, and writing than for interpreting Scripture. That is the good news, and it will not last. Frequency is the real divide. Ask a yes-or-no question about whether someone uses AI and pastors look like everybody else. Ask how often, and the flock is already ahead of the men charged with guarding the flock.
Lifeway Research found the same unease earlier this year. More than four in five Protestant pastors worry AI output has to be edited because it contains errors. Eighty-one percent say it is hard to keep the tools on reliable sources. Fifty-five percent say God has always shared His Word through people, and AI is not a person.
Three in five churchgoers told Lifeway they are concerned about the technology’s influence on Christianity. Southern Baptist leaders answered with the Brentwood Statement, a reminder that a minister is not a content engine.
Allie Beth Stuckey has been blunter. On BlazeTV she argued that outsourcing the sermon to a chatbot is dishonest because the congregation assumes the man in the pulpit wrestled with the text and prayed. A summarized mash of other men’s sentences is not revelation. It is plagiarism with a halo.
Same Tools, Thinner Shepherds
Copeland’s sharpest warning did not show up in the headline numbers. He told Baptist Press what happens if thousands of pastors lean on the same handful of models for preaching, counseling, and discernment.
We risk converging on the same quick, easy answers. Over time, that thins the diversity of discernment and depth of care that ministry depends on. That’s antithetical to ministry, which is meant to be the human place where we sit with hard questions.
He said it with empathy. Ministry is demanding. The shortcut sells itself. That is exactly why it is dangerous. A church that drinks from one digital well will preach one digital water. The model’s biases become the room’s consensus. The hard texts get sanded down because the software prefers a tone that does not offend the training data.
Scripture is not a prompt. It is the Word of the living God. Search it. Test every spirit and every sentence that claims to explain it. Let the machine fetch a commentary if it must. Do not let it sit in Moses’ seat.
