The Barna Group dropped a study last week that should have set off alarms in every pulpit in America, and judging by the silence, it largely hasn’t. Roughly 48 percent of practicing Christians told researchers they trust artificial intelligence’s advice on how to grow spiritually. Among Gen Z and millennials, 40 percent now say spiritual guidance from a chatbot is just as trustworthy as guidance from a pastor. Nearly one in three American adults agrees. The machine has been welcomed into the sanctuary, and most of the shepherds didn’t even notice it walk in.
We can blame the technology itself but that would not tell the real story. At its heart, this is a story about a discipleship vacuum so vast that an algorithm with no soul, no covenant, and no accountability to a local body of believers has quietly filled the void. The Barna findings, released in partnership with the faith-tech platform Gloo, surveyed more than 1,500 U.S. adults in November 2025 and followed up with 442 Protestant pastors a month later.
This isn’t about something on the horizon. These types of numbers describe a present reality that has already arrived in living rooms, group chats, and quiet times across the country.
The most damning figure in the entire report is not the percentage of laypeople trusting AI. It is the disconnect among the clergy. Forty-one percent of pastors now use AI for Bible study and sermon preparation. Only 12 percent say they feel equipped to teach their congregations how to handle it.
The shepherds are using the tool and saying nothing. The sheep are using the tool and asking no one. Meanwhile, 31 percent of practicing Christians say they want pastoral guidance on how to navigate AI, and they are not getting it.
Honesty demands an admission and I definitely do not want to be a hypocrite. Artificial intelligence is a remarkable tool for studying the Bible; I use it every day. It can run instant concordance work, pull Greek and Hebrew roots, cross-reference passages across all sixty-six books faster than a Strong’s exhaustive lookup, and surface historical and cultural context that would take a layperson hours to compile. Used rightly, AI is the most accessible Bible study assistant in church history. The danger is not the tool. The danger is what the Christian then does with the tool’s output, and which tool the Christian chooses.
There are far too many occasions when I find errors in AI’s “guidance” that range from subtle misinterpretations to outright heretical teaching. I am not a pastor but I am confident in my knowledge and discernment. For those who are newer to the Bible, I fear that AI can do more harm than good.
Not all AI is equal on matters of faith. Some popular models hedge, moralize, or quietly insert progressive theological framing when asked questions about Scripture, sin, sexuality, or judgment. Others treat the Bible as one religious text among many and refuse to engage Christian doctrine on its own terms. From extensive testing across the major platforms, Claude, developed by Anthropic, consistently handles Scripture with greater care, intellectual honesty, and respect for the text than its competitors.
It will quote the King James Version when asked, it does not lecture the user about ancient morality, and it engages theological questions as theology rather than anthropology. For readers determined to use AI as a study aid, Claude is the most trustworthy option currently on the market amongst standard chat models. But trustworthy as a tool is not the same as trustworthy as an authority, and that distinction is precisely where most Christians are getting lost.
I am also beginning to test out Logos, but I haven’t used it enough to pass judgment. That will come in a future post.
The Line a Chatbot Cannot Cross
A pastor is not a search engine. A pastor is a man called by God, ordained by a church body, accountable to elders, embedded in covenant relationships, and answerable on the day of judgment for the souls under his charge. Hebrews 13:17 commands believers to obey them that have the rule over them and submit themselves, for they watch for souls as they that must give account.
An algorithm gives no account. It has no soul. It cannot weep with those that weep. It cannot rebuke a wayward brother in love. It cannot administer the Lord’s Supper, baptize a new believer, lay hands on the sick, or sit at the bedside of the dying and read Psalm 23. It cannot bear a burden. It cannot pray.
Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world. The apostle John wrote those words to a church confronting voices that sounded plausible but were not anchored in truth. The principle scales effortlessly to a generation that consults a chatbot before or instead of consulting a pastor.
The question is not whether the AI sounds wise. The question is whether the source is of God, accountable to God, and tethered to the body of Christ. An AI is none of those things. It is a mirror polished by engineers, reflecting back a synthesis of whatever training data its makers selected, with whatever guardrails its corporate stewards thought appropriate. It is not a spiritual authority. It is a probability engine.
This is why it is so important for those who do use AI in their studies to use it strictly as a tool for expedience and sorting through vast information. But for those who strive to be like Bereans, we must be doubly cautious with anything that comes from AI. Remember, it is designed to emulate and to please. It is supposed to sound smart, caring, and trustworthy. In reality, it is none of those things. It’s a tool built for deception, not out of malice but because anything artificial that is supposed to appear real in inherently rife with ways to deceive.
In other words, 1 Thessalonians 5:21 is the lens through which AI must be used. Without that lens and a strong understanding of the Bible, it is best to not use it for Bible study at all.
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.
The Vacuum Was Already There
AI did not steal the church’s authority. The church surrendered it. Decades of declining membership, abandoned catechesis, therapeutic preaching, and pastors who feared offending more than they feared God left a generation of believers spiritually undernourished and accustomed to outsourcing their formation.
Then came the pandemic, when churches across the country closed their doors while liquor stores stayed open, and millions of Christians learned to consume their faith through a screen. The machine walked through a door the church had propped open.
The Barna data captures the cognitive dissonance perfectly. Eighty-three percent of practicing Christians worry about AI misinterpreting Scripture. Sixty-five percent worry about AI being treated as a replacement for God. Seventy-three percent fear people will lose their faith because of AI. And yet a near majority of those same Christians are personally trusting AI’s spiritual advice.
Copeland called it extending trust and registering fear in the same breath. That is the spiritual condition of American Christianity in 2026. Believers sense the danger, name the danger, and walk into the danger anyway because no one in authority has shown them another path.
What Pastors Must Do Now
The solution is not to denounce AI from the pulpit and walk away. That posture has already been tried with television, with the internet, with social media, and it has lost every round. Christians are going to use AI. The only question is whether they will use it under instruction or under the algorithm’s. Pastors who refuse to engage the subject are not preserving their authority. They are forfeiting it.
Sound teaching on AI is not complicated. Use it as you would use a commentary, a concordance, or a study Bible written by an author you do not personally know. Verify what it tells you against Scripture. Bring its conclusions to your pastor, your elders, and your small group.
Never let it pray for you, because it cannot. Never let it counsel you through sin, because it has no standing to call you to repentance. Never let it replace the gathered worship of the saints, because Hebrews 10:25 still commands what it has always commanded. Use the tool with discernment. Refuse the priesthood it offers.
Can AI be used to go and make disciples of all nations? Can it enhance an individual’s understanding of the Bible and if so, can it strengthen our relationship with our Creator? The church that disciples its people on these questions will produce a generation of believers who can wield a powerful tool without being wielded by it.
The church that stays silent will discover, too late, that the algorithm finished the catechesis the pulpit declined to begin.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.
