Evaluating Artificial Intelligence Through a Christian Understanding of Human Flourishing
For Christian communities and AI ethics researchers, this work highlights that AI alignment is a formation problem, not just a safety problem, by demonstrating that training objectives prioritizing broad acceptability lead to theological incoherence.
The paper introduces the Flourishing AI Benchmark: Christian Single-Turn (FAI-C-ST) to evaluate Frontier Models against a Christian understanding of human flourishing, finding that current AI systems default to a Procedural Secularism with a systematic performance decline of approximately 17 points across all dimensions, and a 31-point decline in Faith and Spirituality.
Artificial intelligence (AI) alignment is fundamentally a formation problem, not only a safety problem. As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly mediate moral deliberation and spiritual inquiry, they do more than provide information; they function as instruments of digital catechesis, actively shaping and ordering human understanding, decision-making, and moral reflection. To make this formative influence visible and measurable, we introduce the Flourishing AI Benchmark: Christian Single-Turn (FAI-C-ST), a framework designed to evaluate Frontier Model responses against a Christian understanding of human flourishing across seven dimensions. By comparing 20 Frontier Models against both pluralistic and Christian-specific criteria, we show that current AI systems are not worldview-neutral. Instead, they default to a Procedural Secularism that lacks the grounding necessary to sustain theological coherence, resulting in a systematic performance decline of approximately 17 points across all dimensions of flourishing. Most critically, there is a 31-point decline in the Faith and Spirituality dimension. These findings suggest that the performance gap in values alignment is not a technical limitation, but arises from training objectives that prioritize broad acceptability and safety over deep, internally coherent moral or theological reasoning.