AI and the Christian

Last June, Lee D’Amore spent his evenings planting red “No Data Center” yard signs across his Chesapeake, Virginia, neighborhood. A resident living just blocks from a proposed massive server facility, D’Amore wasn’t prepared to wait quietly while the decision was made without him.

When the city council convened its public hearing, he and his neighbors showed up and held the floor for more than two hours, one voice after another against the project. “Once they’re built, there’s nothing you can do,” he told the council. “If they violate the decibels, what are you going to do? Fine them $1,000? That’d be like me asking you for a penny. Seriously, once this thing is built, it’s all over but the crying.” Then the council voted unanimously.

Be informed, not misled.

The outcome? To block the data center, the chamber erupted in applause.

The local people had persevered.

"As resistance has mounted nationwide, more data center projects are being delayed or outright rejected — 16 projects nationally between May of last year and this past March, according to a study by Data Center Watch, a research project run by 10a Labs, an AI intelligence company."

But a central tension remains: The use of AI applications is skyrocketing. And the data centers to handle all of that have to go somewhere.

I'm not suggesting that the data centers shouldn't be built. I'm simply saying local residents should get involved in their placement before it's too late.

D’Amore’s neighborhood fight is a microcosm of a national standoff that Christians would be unwise to ignore.

The placement of the data centers is a big deal. 

A Gallup survey conducted in March 2026 found that 71% of Americans oppose AI data centers in their local area, including nearly half who strongly oppose them — a figure that now exceeds opposition to nuclear power plants. More than 188 organized groups in 40 states have formed to contest these projects, and Data Center Watch reported that in the second quarter of 2025 alone, $98 billion in proposed facilities were blocked or delayed — more than in all previous quarters since 2023 combined.

According to a 2024 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report commissioned by the Department of Energy, American data centers already consume 4.4% of all electricity generated in the United States, with that figure potentially reaching 12% by 2028. New hyperscale facilities can carry power demands equivalent to hundreds of thousands of homes. Cooling systems require billions of gallons of water annually. Transmission corridors, industrial-scale backup generators, and expanded substations follow close behind. What developers present as a digital investment arrives in communities as a physical industrial presence — with all its consequences.

Genesis 2:15 says, "And the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it."

Residents like D’Amore are often not resisting technology itself. Rather, they believe their communities are being forced to bear high costs for decisions made elsewhere. Data center projects usually move forward through talks among developers, utilities, and public officials before residents even know what is planned.

A bigger deal:

Artificial intelligence is consolidating power in ways few technologies have matched. Whoever commands the infrastructure increasingly influences commerce, communications, military systems, and the flow of information itself. In March 2026, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stood before BlackRock’s U.S. Infrastructure Summit and declared that “intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.” 

Robert Maginnis wrote this in an OP-ED for The Stand. It also appeared in The Christian Post.  

Maginnis is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, senior fellow for National Security at Family Research Council, and the author of 14 books. His latest, "The New AI Cold War," was released in April 2026.

If intelligence becomes centralized infrastructure sold by a handful of corporations, the questions of who sets its moral parameters and who remains accountable when algorithms shape social behavior become urgent matters of faith, not merely policy. As I detail in “The New AI Cold War,”this reflects a civilizational contest already underway.

Scripture does not treat the centralization of human power as morally neutral. The Tower of Babel drew God’s judgment not because its builders used impressive construction techniques, but because they sought collective autonomy from divine authority — fusing technological ambition with pride. That warning does not condemn innovation. Throughout Scripture, God’s people build, cultivate, engineer, and govern. What Babel condemns is the assumption that human capability has outrun the need for moral restraint and accountability before God. Some strands of modern AI rhetoric edge uncomfortably close to that assumption.

Prudence, not paralysis.

Christians should resist the pull toward either reflexive opposition or uncritical embrace.

The biggest deal.

Psalm 20:7 reminds God’s people, “Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we will remember the name of the Lord our God."

Every generation has its “chariots and horses” — the technologies that promise control of the future. Ours now include server farms, algorithms, and the industrial-scale data networks behind them. The temptation to treat technological capability as a substitute for moral wisdom and dependence upon God has never been a safe one. In this moment, it is a newly consequential one.

Be Informed. Be Discerning, Be Vigilant. Be Faithful. Be Wise. Be Prayerful.