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.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
