The growing panic over AI is about more than technology—it’s a sign of what happens when a people lose their confidence in God’s providence.
The internet is brimming with citizens flooding town halls and city council meetings to protest data centers. In Louisville, protesters with a group called No Data Center 502 have taken to unfurling rolls of red ribbon and chanting “Liar! Liar!” and “Shame!” at planning commission meetings, before processing out en masse as police escort them from the room. In heavily Republican Mercer County, Kentucky, , with one resident invoking Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez approvingly from the podium and another begging the commission to “not let the greed of a few outweigh the wellbeing of our people.” When a commissioner tried to read a prepared statement explaining his yes vote, the crowd interrupted with jeers before he could finish.
Watch enough of these hearings, and a pattern emerges that has little to do with zoning laws or development. They are more like Pentecostal revival meetings than an exercise in local democratic governance.
The crowd doesn’t just object; it testifies. Officials who dare defend a project are shouted down and treated as heretics. Big Tech becomes something closer to a legion of demons than a group of corporations, blamed in the same breath for water pollution, electric bills, and “gambling with our health.” As the crowd whips itself into charismatic fervor, local leaders often respond with repentance, confessing that they were wrong to have ever considered the data center projects in the first place.
Though Americans offer a wide array of reasons why they oppose AI and data centers—from job losses to infiltration—there’s a deeper reason. They gather at city council meetings because these places allow a mostly unchurched crowd to fulfill its desire for community, meaning, and a mission that church once provided.
The Great De-Churching
The de-churching of America is not a new phenomenon. For the first time in U.S. history, —down from 70% in 2000 and a peak of 76% in 1947. As of last November, Gallup found that just three in ten Americans attend church regularly, and the United States has posted one of the largest declines in religiosity of any nation on earth since 2007.
Since America has always been a Protestant nation, this means that an unprecedented number of Protestants are leaving the faith of their forefathers, with many choosing to believe in nothing at all, though the number of “nones” has plateaued in recent years.
Robert Putnam famously posited in Bowling Alone that Americans were disengaging from the associations, clubs, and institutions that once bound communities together, explicitly identifying church decline as a primary cause of the loss of social capital. As Putnam found, we have rapidly become a nation of people who no longer gather, no longer trust one another, and no longer have anywhere to bring our fears and be told we are not alone.
Churchgoing also transcended divisions. People gathered regardless of party affiliation, income level, personality type, or interests. Beyond its theological significance, church met the natural human need to be part of something larger than oneself.
Unlike other collective gatherings, from BLM marches to Trump rallies, local data center hearings most closely resemble church gatherings of old. They are local, rooted in a particular community and space where neighbors can connect. Because opposition to data centers is bipartisan, people of all political persuasions can feel united in a larger cause that transcends party lines. It also provides a similar emotional experience of a low-church service, complete with pastors delivering sermons, congregational responses, and a sense of collective catharsis. It’s a kind of religious service, but without God or the Gospel.
Believing in Anything
But why has AI in particular become the focal point?
To quote the line often misattributed to G.K. Chesterton, “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing, he believes in anything.” Human beings were made to have a relationship with God and to judge our actions, our times, and the movements of history against God’s unchanging laws. Without God as a reference point, fear drives people to extremes, with one bogeyman replacing another as soon as the old one no longer frightens them.
Perhaps nothing reveals an irreligious people’s susceptibility to fear more than climate doomerism. In 2019, AOC declared that the world would end in 12 years if the country failed to take immediate action on climate change. This was just one entry in an unbroken chain of confident, specific, and uniformly wrong apocalyptic deadlines stretching back to the late 1980s. Even secular commentators have started to notice the absurdity. One atheist essayist observed that “climate doomers are the secular version of apocalyptic millenarianism.”
Data center panic is the latest trendy fear, exacerbated by Hollywood’s depiction of machine intelligence and widespread misinformation about the technology. Nonetheless, it is a fear that will be replaced as soon as people realize that warehouses full of servers are as boring as they sound, while the new jobs and boost in local tax revenue are tangible benefits.
Christian Optimism
For much of our history, Americans believed that God is good and that He gave us a book that revealed His plans for creation, His love for man, and His plan for man’s purpose. Whether it’s paganism, fascism, communism, antisemitism, transhumanism, or any other -ism created by man, divine revelation keeps us rooted in the truth and less swayed by intellectual fads or unfounded fears.
When it comes to AI, Christians are uniquely positioned to assess the technology dispassionately.
We can immediately dismiss the most outlandish, sci-fi interpretations of the technology, because AI can’t become conscious or rational. God creates human souls; man cannot give a soul to a machine.
More practically, God charged humanity to steward and cultivate the earth, while His providence rules over everything. For much of America’s history, our nation was not merely Protestant, but Calvinist, rooted in the belief that God’s preservation, concurrence, and governance order all that comes to pass. Rather than stifling human development, this energized it. Americans believed they were called to bring forth the abundance of the earth. This contributed to the distinctly American optimism that has defined our nation for centuries.
Further, the Reformation’s focus on vocation—the conviction that ordinary work, done faithfully, honored God—gave successive generations of American Protestants a theological reason to build railroads, found universities, and eventually split the atom, rather than treating worldly enterprise as a distraction from spiritual life.
This faithful confidence and commitment to work has driven Americans to respond to problems not by retreating, but by charging ahead. For example, when it comes to climate change and energy—issues at the heart of my professional life—a faithful Christian should propose ways to sustain the advances of modern life and introduce newer technologies, like renewables, nuclear, and geothermal, while mitigating problems like carbon emissions. It also requires us to call to account those who wantonly destroy our shared environment or who oppress and marginalize the church, as has been happening in China. This is a grounded view that accepts human sinfulness while recognizing that God has given us grace to do what is good for His kingdom.
Overcoming the AI Drama
Big Tech and pro-innovation policymakers have failed to recognize that opposition to AI and data centers is not merely a practical issue, but a spiritual one. With anti-AI sentiment rising, AI proponents have offered ratepayer protection pledges, local investment funds, community benefit agreements, and dividends of various kinds. Some of this is genuinely good policy, but none of these measures reach the spiritual problem.
Anxious people can benefit from prosperity. But true human flourishing demands something deeper.
The AI panic is not really about AI. It is what happens when a nation has lost its religion. Restoring good old-fashioned American optimism will require something Silicon Valley’s checkbook cannot supply: a people who once again believe that we are guided by the hand of God and called to do great things with the abilities He has given us.
Chris Johnson is the founder and president of the American Energy Leadership Institute.
This is a very thought provoking piece. Thank you for sharing.