A religious institution can accept an AI-generated draft without accepting the machine as an author, judge or ritual participant. The useful question is therefore which work may be delegated, and which human contribution gives the act its authority.
This essay compares four documented settings: papal counsel on homily preparation; surveys of U.S. Protestant pastors; a Sunni fatwa and supervised fatwa workflows in Egypt and Dubai; and a Conservative Jewish responsum on artificial agents. The sources perform different functions. A survey describes reported practice; a fatwa reasons toward a ruling; an administrative account explains a workflow. Comparing them requires preserving those differences.
What is being delegated?
Retrieving a passage, drafting an argument, delivering the words and authorizing a religious judgment are separable tasks. Their significance depends on the act. A useful research summary can be evaluated for accuracy; a sermon or ritual obligation may also depend on the speaker’s formation, intention, office or relationship with others. The cases below locate those boundaries in particular institutions rather than treating acceptance of AI as a single yes-or-no decision.
The pulpit: preparation and authorship
In his meeting with Roman clergy on 19 February 2026, Leo XIV warned against using AI to prepare homilies. His concern went beyond a machine delivering a sermon: preparation exercises the priest’s own intelligence and brings his faith, experience and knowledge of the community into what he says. On this account, the work forms the preacher as well as producing a text. These remarks are pastoral counsel, not a new canonical prohibition. [1]
Barna’s December 2025 survey of 442 U.S. Protestant pastors describes a different kind of evidence. Eighty-seven percent reported using AI in some capacity; 50 percent used it for brainstorming, 36 percent for biblical or theological research, and 24 percent for writing or editing sermons. Seventy-one percent described themselves as cautious about AI, and 63 percent were concerned about its replacing pastors or spiritual leaders. [9]
The earlier January 2024 survey of 278 Protestant senior pastors asked about comfort rather than use: 43 percent were comfortable with AI assisting sermon preparation and research, compared with 12 percent for writing sermons. The percentages cannot form a clean time series because the questions differ. Neither survey shows how much generated text a pastor retained or how it was checked. Both distinguish research assistance from a more direct contribution to sermon authorship. [8]
The comparison is between an official pastoral address and reported practices in a diverse professional population. It does not establish two doctrinal camps. Its value is more specific: the papal address makes preparation itself part of accountable preaching, while the surveys show practitioners drawing different boundaries among tasks.
Fatwa: public reliance and supervised drafting
Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta and Dubai’s Islamic Affairs and Charitable Activities Department (IACAD) address different places for a machine within religious judgment. A fatwa is a religious-legal opinion issued by a qualified mufti; its warrant depends on method and the circumstances of the question as well as relevant texts.
Dar al-Ifta’s December 2025 ruling permits AI technology in principle according to its purpose, but prohibits reliance on current AI applications to obtain fatwas. It argues that such applications lack a mufti’s scholarly formation and contextual judgment. Time, place, custom and the questioner’s situation can change what a responsible answer requires. The restriction therefore concerns relying on the application as a religious authority, not a rejection of every technological aid. [3]
IACAD has incorporated AI into an institutional workflow. Its public-facing Virtual Ifta service launched in October 2019, before the current generative-AI cycle. [4] In March 2026 the department described a closed internal system working with previous fatwas and approved jurisprudential sources. It may draft answers to common questions; trained muftis review them, specialist supervisors conduct further review, and complex matters go to collective human study. [5]
The two records do not answer an identical question. Dar al-Ifta rules on a member of the public relying on an AI application. IACAD describes drafting beneath several levels of qualified review. Their common boundary is final human judgment; their different objects explain why one text excludes current applications from public fatwa reliance while the other describes substantial machine participation inside an institution.
The instruments also differ. Dar al-Ifta offers legal reasoning and a conclusion. IACAD gives an official administrative account, not a fatwa establishing a general rule for all AI use. Its stated workflow documents how the department says it organizes responsibility; it is not an independent audit of every answer the process produces.
Ritual: assistance and obligation
Rabbi Daniel Nevins’s Halakhic Responses to Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Machines was approved by the Conservative movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards on 19 June 2019, by 18–0–0. It considers artificial agency and responsibility, including whether a machine can perform a mitzvah or participate in Jewish ritual life. [6]
The responsum distinguishes an intermediate task from the act a person is obligated to perform. A machine may carry or position an object for ritual use, but the person must fulfill the obligation. In social commandments such as visiting the ill, comforting mourners or supporting the poor, assistance likewise does not remove the need for human initiation and completion. The machine can help bring about an act without becoming a covenantal participant responsible for it. [6]
The Rabbinical Assembly describes approved committee responsa as official positions of the movement while retaining local rabbis’ authority to determine practice for their communities. Committee approval therefore gives the text a recognized institutional position without making it a universally self-executing command. [7]
Different forms of authority
The documents locate responsibility through different means. The papal address reasons from priestly formation; Dar al-Ifta from a mufti’s qualifications; IACAD from controlled sources and successive reviews; and Nevins from legal agency and obligation. Barna’s surveys legislate nothing: they describe what respondents say they do or accept.
This is why apparent agreement on “human oversight” would be too thin a conclusion. Reviewing a generated draft, carrying out an obligation and personally preparing a homily are different human contributions. An institution’s objection may concern the loss of one even when another remains in place.
The labor inside the act
Leo XIV connected AI with dignity, justice and labor when explaining his choice of papal name in May 2025. He invoked Leo XIII’s response to the first industrial revolution in Rerum Novarum. [2] Reading the homily remarks alongside that address suggests a question about work: when is preparation merely a means of producing words, and when does it form the accountable speaker?
That connection is this essay’s interpretation, not an argument the pope explicitly made in the February dialogue. It also offers a comparison, rather than a claim that all four settings share a theology of labor. The mufti’s contextual reasoning and the obligated person’s ritual participation illustrate other ways in which producing the right output may not exhaust the religious act. The Barna surveys reveal attitudes to delegation but cannot by themselves explain respondents’ theology.
What the comparison supports
In these settings, permission to use AI for one task does not transfer the authority attached to the whole act. Research differs from judgment, drafting from authorization, and material assistance from fulfilling an obligation. Those distinctions explain more than a general claim that religions either welcome or resist automation. They also leave room for disagreement about how much preparation can be delegated while preserving the relevant human role.
References
- Leo XIV. “Meeting with the Clergy of the Diocese of Rome.” Holy See, 19 February 2026. Official record.
- Leo XIV. “Address to the College of Cardinals.” Holy See, 10 May 2025. Official record.
- Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta. “Using AI Applications to Obtain Fatwas.” 2 December 2025. Official ruling.
- Islamic Affairs and Charitable Activities Department, Dubai. “Launching the Project of the Fatwas by 10X.” Prospective notice for a launch exhibition scheduled for 29–31 October 2019. Official event notice. The completed launch is documented in Faisal Masudi, “Dubai launches ‘world’s first’ Artificial Intelligence fatwa service,” Gulf News, 29 October 2019. Contemporary launch report.
- Islamic Affairs and Charitable Activities Department, Dubai. “Artificial Intelligence Supports the Fatwa System in Dubai.” 7 March 2026. Official institutional account.
- Nevins, Daniel. “Halakhic Responses to Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Machines.” CJLS HM 182.1.2019, approved 19 June 2019. Official PDF.
- Rabbinical Assembly. “Committee on Jewish Law and Standards.” Institutional description.
- Barna Group. “Three Takeaways on How Pastors Can Use AI.” 22 February 2024. Research article.
- Barna Group. “New Research: Pastors Are Using AI More Than You Think.” 15 June 2026; reports data from a December 2025 survey of U.S. Protestant pastors. Research article.