Evaluating Artificial Intelligence Through a Christian Understanding of Human Flourishing

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Flourishing AI Benchmark to evaluate how AI models align with Christian human flourishing, revealing current models lack theological coherence and favor secular procedural norms.

Contribution

It presents a new framework for assessing AI responses against Christian values, highlighting systematic performance gaps in moral and spiritual dimensions.

Findings

AI models show a 17-point decline across flourishing dimensions.

There is a 31-point decline specifically in Faith and Spirituality.

Current AI training emphasizes acceptability over theological coherence.

Abstract

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.