Recently, I wrote about the spiritual turpitude involved in using artificial intelligence for religious practice. This blossoming practice, I argued, is akin to heresy because it ignores the root premise of religious practice: 

Church leaders and religious texts, the wellspring of religious authority and spiritual comfort, provide divine assistance precisely because they are human. The transmission of these divine teachings maintains their divinity because they are passed from man to man. A human may lead another’s soul astray through false teachings; AI will, because any teachings it provides are false by their very nature.

Though the AI revolution has come upon us with remarkable speed, I did not anticipate that its use in religious ceremonies would be taken seriously by the community at large. That was before I discovered Sermonly, an AI-powered sermon-generating service launched earlier this year. 

Offered by Tithe.ly, a digital platform that provides both church-goers and workers tools needed to run their institutions, Sermonly markets itself as a “valuable tool” for religious officials to use in their spiritual shepherding. In an April blogpost, the people who run the site extolled the supposed virtues of writing sermons with AI. According to them, these tools will make writing sermons more efficient. The chatbot will help us find new perspectives. The AI can even, its proponents claim, help pastors and priests discover new meaning in their texts: 

AI technology can also assist pastors in interpreting biblical texts by analyzing language patterns, historical context, and cultural nuances. By using AI tools to analyze scriptures, pastors can uncover hidden meanings, patterns, and relationships that might have been difficult to discern through traditional research methods. This enhanced understanding of the Bible can lead to richer and more impactful sermons.

Of course, such a professional service doesn’t come free. But it does come cheap. A subscription to these tools runs you $120 for the entire year if you pay upfront. You read that correctly: For the low price of $10 a month, you, too, can commit digital heresy. What a steal!

In my initial essay, I did not directly address religious officials. Here, I will. The assertions made by this website, and the implications of using this service, run completely counter to the nature of those professions. The work religious officials do in writing their sermons is what gives the sermons life. Preaching is not like other worldly jobs where efficiency is the highest priority. If you truly believe that the job these people do are sacred – if you believe that the words they speak and the actions they perform affect their congregants’ souls – then how quickly a sermon can be written or what “hidden meanings” a computer might find is not only irrelevant but actively harmful. 

The position that religious officials hold is sacred. Artificial intelligence is not. To outsource those positions to a line of code is a dereliction of duty; to pay for the dishonor of doing so amounts to sacrilege. I closed my initial piece by saying we should not be so arrogant as to think God can be digitized. More than anyone else, pastors, priests, and spiritual shepherds of all stripes should take care to remember that.