Evaluating Artificial Intelligence Through a Christian Understanding of Human Flourishing

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 3 Apr 2026] Evaluating Artificial Intelligence Through a Christian Understanding of Human Flourishing Nicholas Skytland, Lauren Parsons, Alicia Llewellyn, Steele Billings, Peter Larson, John Anderson, Sean Boisen, Steve Runge 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. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2604.03356 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2604.03356v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.03356 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Nicholas Skytland [view email] [v1] Fri, 3 Apr 2026 17:08:29 UTC (32 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)