A Quarter of Pastors Let AI Write Their Sermons: Christian Miller on The Honesty Crisis

Confession: I just wrote a rather significant check for my oldest's first year of college, so when Christian Miller told me that assigning a take-home paper to a 300-person intro class is "living in a fantasy world," I felt it in my wallet. Christian is a moral philosopher at Wake Forest (go Deacs), and his new book, The Honesty Crisis, starts from a strange fact. In study after study, honesty is the trait we value most in other people. And yet philosophers managed about three articles on it in fifty years.

So we got nerdy. Honesty is not just "don't lie" (misleading, BS-ing, self-deception, and telling a stranger in the elevator about your bathroom habits all make the list). A crisis is what you get when dishonesty becomes more tempting and easier to get away with at the same time. Then we went to church. Clergy honesty ratings have dropped from over 60% to 32%, and a quarter of pastors now admit to letting AI write their sermons. Christian's line is clear: if the congregation doesn't know, it's plagiarism. I pushed back with Moses, pseudo-Paul, reprinted Wesley sermons, and my own notebook-to-transcript workflow, and he handed me a distinction I'm keeping: get help with the form, own the substance. There are chapters on politics, deepfakes, porn and more, so go get the book

You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube

Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and directed The Honesty Project, one of the largest research initiatives ever undertaken on honesty. He is also the author of The Character Gap. The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World is out now from Oxford University Press.

UPCOMING ONLINE ADVENT CLASS: Tear Open the Heavens: Advent for Indifferent Strangers

Most of us are running faster just to stay in place, and the one season that asks us to wait gets swallowed by the busiest month of the year. Meanwhile, the neighbors have changed: fewer people argue with the church, and more have simply never heard the story. This Advent, Andy Root and Tripp Fuller take up Isaiah’s prayer, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,” and ask what it means to pray it now. One lectionary text a week, timed to land before Sunday, with Taylor, Rosa, Han, Bonhoeffer, Luther, and Schleiermacher brought into the conversation. For pastors who need sermon fuel, readers who want to go deeper, and anyone who never learned the words.Pre-reco