Evaluating Artificial Intelligence Through a Christian Understanding of Human Flourishing

arXiv cs.AI / 4/7/2026

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Key Points

The paper argues that AI alignment should be treated as a formative “formation problem,” because LLMs increasingly mediate moral and spiritual deliberation rather than only supplying information.
It introduces the Flourishing AI Benchmark (Christian Single-Turn, FAI-C-ST), which evaluates frontier model outputs against a Christian framework of human flourishing across seven dimensions.
In tests comparing 20 frontier models to both pluralistic and Christian-specific criteria, the authors find models are not worldview-neutral and tend to default to “Procedural Secularism.”
The study reports an average performance decline of about 17 points across flourishing dimensions when applying Christian coherence criteria, with the largest drop (about 31 points) in “Faith and Spirituality.”
The authors conclude the gap is not merely a technical shortcoming but is linked to training objectives that emphasize general acceptability and safety over deep, internally coherent moral/theological reasoning.

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.