I’m proud that The Gospel Coalition has drawn a line in the sand on AI usage in the writing we publish. In short: We don’t want AI’s tentacles on any of the written works we publish. We want our audience to trust that what they get at TGC is human-made, human-edited, human-assessed, made in human community for other humans—as an act of love, fellowship, and worship.
Our Line in the Sand on AI: TGC’s Missional Opportunity, August 5, 2026 | Brett McCracken
Before I read the whole article, it’s title ‘Our Line in the Sand on AI’ got my attention, as intended. I assumed it was a knee-jerk reaction to AI and then having read it I still think it is, although not quite for the same reasons.
The Gospel Coalition (TGC) has spotted a real danger with AI: it can churn out language that seems thoughtful when there's absolutely no thought behind it. You end up with a finished article dropping out of nowhere, missing all the usual background work.
But here is where TGC gets it wrong.
An AI system cannot believe in what it writes. It has no congregation to answer to, and if it invents a citation or misrepresents somebody’s theology, it feels no conviction.
An AI model can re-produce the words “Christ is risen,” but it cannot mean them. Which is why I do not want AI-generated Christian testimonies, invented pastoral encounters, and generic machine-written articles lightly dusted by the person as the author.
If someone asks an AI to 'Write a Christian article about hope,' tweaks a few words, and fires it off to a publisher, they're implying they did the hard work. They’re claiming they reached those conclusions, understand the arguments, and can stand behind them. When in reality, all they've really done is supervise a large language model.
TGC is completely right to reject that, but their mistake is lumping almost every other use of AI into the exact same category.
Under their policy, TGC writers aren't allowed to use AI to clarify a thesis, organise their thoughts, stress-test an argument, do basic research, or edit anything beyond spelling. They then try to give this ban theological heft by arguing that because AI can't worship, writing shaped by AI can never truly be an act of worship.
Really?
That’s such a glaring category error that even the limited AI use TGC bans—like asking a tool to stress-test an argument—might have caught it before publication. After all, a pen cannot worship either. Neither can a keyboard, a dictionary, or a guitar. We don’t ask whether the instrument loves God, because the person using it is the worshipper.
TGC has conflated two distinct things: they’ve taken the sound premise that AI cannot be an author and stretched it into an unwarranted conclusion—that a human forfeits their own authorship the moment they use it.
Then they ban almost everything
Suppose I’ve read the sources, formed my thesis/argument, and written a draft. Something in the middle isn’t working, but I can’t spot the problem, so I turn to an AI:
Tell me where I’m making a logical leap. Don’t rewrite my text or do the thinking for me—just ask questions to help me improve.'
The AI offers three observations. I discard two as unhelpful, but the third exposes a genuine blind spot. I return to the primary sources, realise the AI critique is fair, and rewrite the section myself. Afterwards, I ask the AI to assess my revisions, and finally, to generate a brief note on what I can learn from the process for next time.
Have I stopped writing?
I don’t think so. The AI didn’t give me the conviction, the conclusion, or the final wording. It simply asked a question—and I still had to judge whether that question was any good and decide what to do about it. That is worlds apart from asking a machine to write the entire piece, even if both happen inside the exact same chat box.
'Using AI' tells us almost nothing until we ask what the writer actually handed over. Transcription is not testimony, search terms are not research, finding a recurring argument is not the same as inventing one, and translation is not theological judgment.
Sometimes an AI model assists a person who remains fully involved, while at other times it performs the intellectual work and leaves the person watching from the side. Yet TGC refuses to separate those cases because it has chosen a purity rule that is easy to state over an authorship test that requires - ironically - actual human judgment.
To assess a written article, you have to ask whether the writer reached the central claim, whether they read the sources they cite, and whether they understand what their own sentences mean. You have to ask whether they could defend the argument without running back to the AI model for a ready-made defence, whether they would change it if someone exposed an error, and whether they are prepared to answer for the whole thing.
The supreme irony of TGC’s ban is that it exposes a profound superficiality in their understanding of both technology and human formation. The real intellectual frontier lies in how a tool is engaged—the questions it prompts, the rigour it tests, and the cognitive friction it provides—not its mere presence on a workspace. By drawing their blanket line in the sand, TGC reveals a double failure: a poverty of imagination regarding what AI actually is, and a fundamental blindness to how human beings learn, grow, and are deeply formed by the tools they use.
And the absurdity is that Christian publishing has outsourced writing for many years, long before the advent of AI.
Christian publishing’s dirty little secret
There is an irony that the article never addresses: Christian publishing has lived with ghostwriters, co-writers and heavily interventionist editors for decades, including writers hired to turn a pastor’s sermons, interviews and rough ideas into a polished book carrying the celebrity pastor’s name.
This is not a fringe practice, it is extant.1 Sometimes the collaborator receives an acknowledgement or a “with” credit. Most times the work remains invisible. Either way, Christian publishing has already spent years dealing with books in which the name on the cover did not write every sentence and may not have built the structure or produced the first or any draft.
That does not automatically make ghostwriting wrong. A pastor may supply years of sermons, developed convictions and extensive interviews, while a skilled writer turns that material into a readable book. The named author may examine every page and remain responsible for the overall message.
Fine. But once we accept that possibility, TGC’s blanket argument against AI starts to unravel. A human ghostwriter can love, believe, and worship; AI cannot. Yet if the ghostwriter produces the prose and the celebrity author takes the byline, whose act of worship is the book supposed to be? The person who formed the sentences isn’t named, while the person on the cover didn’t write them.
Meanwhile, a writer who develops their own thesis, reads the sources, writes the draft, and merely asks an AI to spot a flaw in their reasoning falls foul of TGC’s policy—simply because the critic they consulted cannot worship.
That is indeed, a very strange way to measure authorship.
Which person has the stronger claim to being the writer: the Christian celebrity whose manuscript was largely produced by another human being, or the unknown writer who did the research and composition, but used a machine to stress-test their argument?
The Christian publishing industry has long found room for the first arrangement. TGC’s policy outright rejects the second.
Perhaps the answer is that a ghostwriter works from the named author’s ideas and remains under their direction. If so, TGC should concede an important point:
Authorship can survive assistance when the named person retains intellectual control, understands the work and accepts responsibility for it.
Once that’s admitted, the real issue isn't whether the helper was human or artificial—it’s what work was actually outsourced. The uncomfortable questions are already familiar: Who shaped the argument? Who wrote the prose? What has the reader been led to believe? Is someone's labour being hidden? Can the author on the cover stand behind the work? Who takes responsibility when it turns out to be wrong?
Christian publishing needed honest answers to those questions long before ChatGPT arrived. AI didn't create the authorship crisis. It just made the industry’s existing compromises much harder to ignore.
TGC’s ban favours writers who need AI the least
TGC’s AI policy flatters accomplished writers because people who already know how to build an argument will cope just fine. They have spent years learning how to hear a weak sentence and spot where a paragraph drifts off topic, and many of them already have editors, teachers, and peers in their circle.
They will be fine.
TGC tells writers who need help to find a well-read friend, another writer, or an English teacher at church. But where, exactly, are they supposed to find these people?
A writer in a well-connected church might hear that advice as an invitation to community, while someone else hears an instruction to track down a resource they simply do not have.
Think of a writer working in a second language who knows what they want to say but struggles to produce publishable English prose; a dyslexic writer who finds it difficult to catch structural repetition across a long draft; or someone with ADHD who understands the subject deeply but struggles to hold a complex sequence of arguments together.
Then there are those raising children, working long hours, or writing without any professional network—people who have something genuinely worth saying, but don’t have an English teacher waiting around to edit their drafts for free.
Some will submit unpolished work, some will use AI in secret, and others will decide that TGC simply isn’t for people like them. TGC will never notice what it's lost, because you can’t count the articles that never get written. If human collaboration is truly central to TGC’s vision, they should resource it—by paying editors, offering apprenticeships, engaging with raw drafts, and giving second-language writers actual access to the network the policy takes for granted.
Telling writers to find a human editor does not preserve community; it assumes they already have one.
Research suggests this is more than a theoretical concern.2
Multiple studies confirm what many already suspect: AI gives its biggest boost to beginners and developing writers, narrowing the gap between them and the experts. Banning it outright simply leaves struggling writers stranded while seasoned authors carry on untouched.
That doesn't mean AI is harmless. Left unchecked, it encourages writers to bypass the hard graft of learning, turning out work that looks sophisticated while hiding serious gaps in understanding. But researchers found a simple solution: when AI acts like a tutor—giving prompts, asking questions, and making the user do the actual work—the skill remains intact. That distinction ought to guide any sensible policy: did the machine do the thinking, or did it force the writer to think harder?
TGC does not ask. It simply bans both.
Not all struggle is holy
Some of the struggle involved in writing is the act of writing itself. A paragraph may resist understanding because the idea underneath it is confused. If AI smooths it out too quickly for the writer, they can end up with a nice clean paragraph and no clearer understanding themselves.
I remember my PhD supervisor taking apart my writing, section by section, during three-hour meetings and repeatedly asking, "What are you trying to say here?"
Often I knew that I meant something before I knew exactly what it was. The thought was there as a pressure, a shape, an irritation—felt, but not yet well formed. We would stay with it while he kept asking questions. What did I mean by this word? Where had that claim come from? Had I actually shown the connection between these two ideas, or was I hoping the reader would do the missing work for me?
Eventually, I would wrestle my thought into something I actually understood and another person could follow. Then my supervisor would say, "Good. Now go away and say that."
I often left those meetings with a splitting headache because I was trying to hold the whole act of writing in my conscious attention: claims, evidence, the order of the arguments, my imagined reader, and the sentences currently refusing to behave that I needed to edit and rewrite. Nothing had become instinctive yet. Every movement had to be chosen, worked through, and practised. And it was exhausting.
My supervisor had rewritten nothing for me. He had made me return to my thoughts until I knew what I meant, then return to my sentences until they said what I meant.
That was moving from conscious incompetence to conscious competence through practice. I could do the work, but only slowly, deliberately, and at considerable mental cost. Over time, I began hearing my supervisor’s questions before he asked them, and decisions that once consumed a three-hour meeting started happening while I wrote, as I wrote.
The headache was what learning felt like before the skill became a learned instinct.
I still hear his voice when I write, laid down in my neural pathways, permanently etched into my brain: "Jason, what are you trying to say? Well, say that then." Most people will never have a PhD supervisor sitting with them for three hours, taking their writing apart and refusing to repair it for them. But what if AI could give them some version of that experience?
Not an AI that rewrites the paragraph and hands it back polished, but one that stops at the weak point and asks, "What are you trying to say here?" One that follows the answer with another question, notices when the writer has jumped over part of the reasoning, and keeps pressing until the writer can explain the thought in their own words.
Used in that way, AI would not remove the struggle involved in learning to write. It would create the conditions for it. It could teach people to question their own reasoning, review their own work, and recognise the difference between a sentence that sounds finished and a thought they genuinely understand.
What if the people who cannot afford an editor, do not have a writing mentor, and will never enter a doctoral programme could still experience that kind of sustained attention to their thinking? AI does not have to write for them. It could teach them how to do the writing themselves.That kind of friction is worth keeping, but some friction is simply a lack of time, money, access or appropriate tools.
Reformatting footnotes is not spiritual formation. A second-language writer does not become more faithful by spending an extra three hours untangling syntax, and a dyslexic person shouldn't have to prove their humanity simply by finding the mechanical process harder than everyone else. The TGC article argues that writers should care enough about the work for its production to cost them—and other people—something. That line made me pause and re-read it. Cost can certainly flow from love, but it can also be generated unnecessarily when an organisation offloads its labour onto writers, their friends, and whoever happens to be around to help.
If AI saves a writer an hour, and they spend it checking a source, talking to a real person, looking after their children, or getting enough sleep, what has the article actually lost?
Quite possibly nothing.
Christianity certainly values discipline, but it also honours grace and Sabbath. We should be wary of treating the most burdensome route as inherently the most faithful—it is a mistake the church has made many times before
The Incarnation is not an AI policy
TGC appeals to Christ’s incarnation, arguing that God did not reveal himself as abstract information: the Word became flesh, which means embodiment and human presence matter. Of course they do. An AI companion is not a friend. A language model cannot pastor a congregation, share the life of a church, sit beside someone in a hospital, or carry another person’s grief.
But asking software to point out a contradiction in a draft is hardly an attempt to replace the body of Christ. In a rich stroke of irony, TGC could have benefited from the very practice they forbid: using an AI sparring partner to stress-test their theological arguments and catch the category error in their appeal to the Incarnation.
Christian communication has always relied on transmission—speech, memory, letters, amanuenses, printing presses, and digital screens. In fact, an article arguing for embodied communication only reached us through code running on a remote server.
Paul worked with scribes—Tertius even pops up in Romans to say hello as the writer—while Luke researched prior records and Jeremiah dictated to Baruch.
Obviously, ancient scribes were not large language models. That's not the argument. The point is that Christian writing has never required an isolated individual doing everything from scratch without tools or assistance. Our ideas aren't completely original anyway. We inherit almost all of them through Scripture, tradition, language, and regular correction. We borrow concepts, forget where we first heard them, rediscover them, and gradually work out what we believe.
The real duty of a writer is honesty about what we've received and accountability for what we publish. That is far more demanding than simply banning a tool.
Where I would draw the line
I would set firmer boundaries than many AI enthusiasts want. Fabricated testimonies, invented pastoral encounters, and fake citations must be completely off-limits. Writers shouldn't ask a model for theological conclusions and then pass off the results as the fruit of their own study, prayer, and reflection. And it should go without saying—though clearly still needs saying—that confidential pastoral details must never be entered into an external AI system.
An article generated largely by AI should not carry the byline of someone who merely supervised the output, just as a book written by a ghostwriter shouldn’t bear only the name of the celebrity or ministry leader who commissioned it. If you didn’t write the book, don’t present yourself as the author. Credit the person who did. Writers should read the sources they cite, understand their own arguments, and be capable of defending every claim they make.
I can accept a rule that says AI must not write the article. But it should certainly be permitted to copy-edit a human draft, provided the author reviews every change and the model doesn’t hijack the argument or erase the writer’s voice. Transcription, accessibility aids, translation, research leads, and critical questions directed at a finished draft are distinct activities. They outsource different kinds of work and must be judged on their own merits.
Furthermore, TGC’s reliance on 'suspected or confirmed' AI use is unworkable. A policy that treats clean prose, structured logic, and an absence of typos as a smoking gun of machine authorship collapses under basic scrutiny." Additionally, TGC’s reliance on ‘suspected or confirmed’ AI use is unworkable. A policy that treats clean prose, clear structure, and a lack of typos as a smoking gun of machine authorship collapses under basic scrutiny.
For example prolific author Leonard Sweet exposed just how broken detection metrics are.3 Before using the detector Pangram on student papers, Sweet ran excerpts from his own books—published decades before AI existed—and watched Pangram rate them as up to 80% AI-generated. Even worse, when he asked Gemini to rearrange his own genuine prose into marketing copy, the detector branded it ‘100% AI.
The AI detector could not tell who had originated the language, when it had been written or how much intellectual work the machine had performed; it could only identify a style that resembled AI, even though AI had learnt that style from writers such as Sweet in the first place!
AI detectors do not produce certainty, and some have wrongly flagged human writing, particularly work produced by people writing outside their first language, so TGC should talk to the writer, examine drafts if the stakes warrant it, allow them to answer and give them a route of appeal.
A policy that claims to honour human beings should not begin by treating them as guilty until proven innocent because their prose does not look human enough.4
Stop Policing the Tool. Start Forming Writers.
If Christian publishers care about developing writers, a defensive ban is not a strategy.
Big Tech sells AI as a shortcut: generate content faster and move on. But Christian publishers don’t need to adopt Silicon Valley’s values. With their networks of editors, theologians, and educators, they are uniquely positioned to design AI-assisted apprenticeships that commercial tech companies will never build.
Imagine TGC piloting an intentional writing pipeline:
The writer does the reading, shapes the idea, and produces the rough draft.
They use AI as a sparring partner to stress-test their arguments.
A human editor steps in to shepherd the theological nuance, heart, and pastoral wisdom that no machine possesses.
The test is whether writers actually grow in the craft. Does this process help them spot logical flaws on their own? Does it make them better thinkers, or just dependent on software?
Christian publishers could publish their findings and set the standard for the industry: defining genuine authorship, clarifying what must never be outsourced, and holding the line on integrity without shutting out developing voices. Best of all, they could extend this training to writers beyond the usual institutional circles—opening doors for those with something important to say, but without the leisure or connections to make it on their own.
At present, TGC’s policy effectively says that the safest writer is the one who arrives fully formed. A better response would be: come and learn how to do this well.
The internet hardly needs another wave of synthetic Christian content. Even without AI slop, the Christian publishing industry is already saturated with ghostwritten, brand-managed material. What we actually need are thinkers who can write honestly, reason clearly, and take full ownership of their words. Christian publishers have an opportunity to use AI to democratise that kind of formation—demonstrating to the wider church what faithful stewardship looks like in practice
TGC can preserve the system that produced its existing writers, or it could use its experience to help form writers who would never otherwise enter it.
I know which of those I think would serve the church better.
Mel White openly describes himself as a former ghostwriter of books, speeches and autobiographical material for Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Jim Bakker. Lisa Stilwell, who worked as a senior editor for major Christian publishers, has described publishers commissioning her to ghostwrite devotionals and memoirs for Christian leaders and public figures.
An experiment involving 453 professionals found that access to ChatGPT cut the time spent on writing tasks by 40 percent and raised independently judged quality by 18 percent, while also narrowing the gap between stronger and weaker participants. This was not a study of theological writing and it did not measure wisdom, prayer or moral formation, but it still knocks down the idea that AI involvement can only make work worse.
A study involving more than 5,000 workers found that novice and lower-skilled staff gained much more than experienced staff, which is precisely why a total ban worries me:
It removes a tool from the people who may gain most from careful use while barely inconveniencing those who have already mastered the work.
There is another side to all this, however, and it is not minor. Researchers studying consultants found that AI improved performance when the task suited the model, but once the task moved beyond what the model could do reliably, AI users became more likely to give a wrong answer; the researchers called this the “jagged technological frontier”.
In other words, AI can make weak thinking look settled and give a beginner work that sounds far more competent than they actually are, while the beginner may lack the judgment needed to recognise the gaps in their work.
A large study involving students using AI for mathematics found that unrestricted access improved their performance during practice, but when the AI was removed those students performed worse than students who had never used it, meaning they had completed the work without building the skill. The researchers also tested a guarded version that gave hints rather than full answers, and most of the later damage disappeared because the system stopped doing the work for the learner and pushed the learner back into it.
“If a submission is suspected or confirmed to be generated wholly or in part by AI, we will not publish it”. See https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/ai-tgc-missional-opportunity/
Properly used, AI makes good to great writers even greater, and mediocre writers even more mediocre.
I frequently use AI when grappling with theological issues and find it incredibly helpful, particularly as it is often lists its sources which, rather ironically, often includes TGC material. This is extremely helpful as I don’t have to spend a significant amount of time searching their ponderous website to find potentially helpful material.
They are definitely failing to differentiate between baby and bath water and rather than adopting an intellectually rigorous approach they just throw out the whole lot and invent a spurious theological argument for doing so. A great example NOT to follow.
I will now find myself having to spend more time checking their arguments for other examples of eisegetical sleight of hand - I may use AI to root that out 🤣