The Rt Revd Martyn Snow, the handsome and up-to-date Bishop of Leicester, has decided that it’s OK, even admirable, for clergy to use AI to write their sermons. Bishop Snow was on the radio over the weekend, proud to share with listeners that in his diocese of Leicester, they’ve even had an AI expert come to give pointers to the priests. No more painful head-scratching on a Saturday afternoon for the lucky clerics of Leicester. ChatGPT will sort it. Just plug in a Bible verse and a few well-crafted prompts, and you’re off to the cricket, or to Pride, whichever way you swing.
It’s one of those many times I wish Michael Wharton was still alive and writing. Wharton, under the pseudonym ‘Peter Simple’, wrote the Way of the World column for the Daily Telegraph throughout the last half of the 20th century, in which he detailed the adventures of a cast of satirical characters he’d cooked up. One of his finest was Dr Spacely-Trellis, the ‘go-ahead’ Bishop of Bevindon, and author of God the Humanist. Like Snow, Spacely-Trellis would have rushed to embrace AI and considered it a great win for the C of E PR. I can see clearly in my mind’s eye the book Spacely-Trellis and Snow would co-author: Claude, the fifth Evangelist. So modern!
The Bishop of Leicester has decided that it’s OK, even admirable, for clergy to use AI to write sermons
Nice Sarah Mullally, the Archbishop of Canterbury, treads more warily around AI than Bishop Snow. Last Friday she led a debate about AI’s impact on humanity in the House of Lords in which she was passionate about the importance of doing something, though, hard as I tried, I couldn’t quite make out what. The current regulation, she said, is ‘wholly inadequate’ to prevent harm, and we must prevent AI being used in degrading ways – like porn, fake news, making celebs naked. She echoed the Pope’s call for AI to be ‘designed, built, regulated and used to serve our glorious humanity and not to diminish it’.
I wish I could somehow get it across to Snow and Mullally, even the Pope, exactly what’s wrong with this approach, and how wholly inadequate it is in itself. They think AI is a neutral force, a tool, but it’s not. It has a snaky character all of its own. AI may be invaluable in all manner of ways; I hope it solves vital scientific problems, but the Church should stay away. It’s not some sort of magical oracle that can be used for good or ill. Think of it as more like Tolkien’s ring.
I can’t tell you how many AI specialist sermon generators there are out there already, and how much Golemish special pleading. ‘It’s fine if you just use it to generate ideas for sermons’; ‘God doesn’t mind as long as you do it prayerfully…’ It’s like listening to a roomful of students trying to justify using ChatGPT. But it’s very hard to use AI in any significant way to write a sermon while still serving glorious humanity.
A priest’s job is to sit there racking his brains for our sake, trying to explain the Gospel via his own particular understanding. To use AI means that he doesn’t care. And what would be the point? We could all generate sermons using AI. We could listen to them at home, in the sonorous style of, say, Sir Ian McKellen. A priest who uses AI is just indicating that he can’t be bothered. And doesn’t it also demonstrate a lack of faith? You can’t turn to both God and Claude for inspiration. Pick a team.
You may well have already heard an AI sermon, said Snow cheerfully. I think I’ll walk out if I do. And we all know the voice. AIleaves an alien slug trail over all the prose it touches. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok: they all have the same distinctive way of writing and reasoning: short declarative sentences, contrasts and cliché. By its own estimation (thank you, Gemini), ‘AI-generated text is highly polished but often psychologically hollow. It summarises rather than observes, relying on predictable, repetitive patterns rather than authentic human experience.’
It’s the little phrases, the pattern: not this, but that. There’s an intrinsic absence of humour and of humility.
And we can all sense when it’s being used, even if just on the periphery of our awareness. We’re drowning in it actually. AI voice is rising around us, sliding into emails and adverts; into speeches, even into messages from friends. It’s like those micro-plastic particles now found in every distant tundra and rainforest. You are what you read. It gets inside your mind. ‘This matters,’ I said in an argument with my husband the other day, and fell silent with dread.
Because AI isn’t just a tool, it creates its own logic and has its own momentum. If a sermon has been researched or augmented by AI, there’s a natural next thought: why not let the AI just finish the job? It’ll save time for a priest to do even worthier things.
And if it’s written by AI then why not let AI deliver the sermon too? There are avatars now doing all sorts. AI singers topping the charts. Avatar priests would mean no more of this exhausting driving from parish to dwindling parish. Simultaneous avatar delivery. That’s the AI way: a whole legion of go-ahead Snows speaking in unison across the Midlands. And after that, who in fact needs an actual parish?
The irony of any C of E flirtation with AI in sermons or otherwise is that although Snow and co may think of it as progressive, it’s exactly the opposite of what their latest and youngest members want.
If there’s a surge in church attendance amongst the young, it is in part because they have had enough of the dismal screen life they were brought up on. The algorithm has made them lonely and unhappy and what they need most from the Church is a clean break from AI.
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