By Robert Maginnis

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.” The council voted unanimously to block the data center, and the chamber erupted in applause.

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

The Scale of What’s Coming

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.

The pushback is rooted in something concrete. AI may feel weightless and invisible, but its infrastructure is intensely physical. 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.

A Stewardship Mandate Christians Cannot Sidestep

These facts carry moral weight, and Scripture’s language is not subtle about why.

Genesis 2:15 records that God placed mankind in creation “to work it and keep it” (ESV). That is a stewardship mandate — active tending of creation, not passive acceptance of whatever arrives in the name of technological progress. The Hebrew carries the weight of custodianship. Christians who take that seriously should press tough questions when corporate-scale development reshapes land use, strains regional water supplies, and drives electricity costs higher for working families, often with limited community input.

Residents like D'Amore are often not resisting technology itself. Rather, they believe their communities are being forced to bear heavy 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. By the time a public hearing takes place, financial commitments and political momentum can make opposition seem futile. That sense of exclusion — of major decisions being handed down as a fait accompli — is itself a matter of human dignity. The church has a role to speak into it.

The Power Concentration Problem

Alongside stewardship sits a harder strategic warning.

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.” Christians should sit with that sentence. 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.

AI infrastructure will likely yield genuine benefits across medicine, planning, military preparedness, and research, and some data center projects may genuinely serve their host communities. The counsel of Proverbs 22:3 cuts both ways: “The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it” (ESV). Prudence is not hostility toward progress. It is the practiced discipline of distinguishing development that genuinely serves the common good from development that concentrates benefits for distant shareholders while distributing costs to communities bearing the consequences. As I explore in “AI for Mankind’s Future,” the moral dimension of technology is never separable from the values of those who design and deploy it.

The questions worth carrying into local zoning hearings, public meetings, and church conversations are not complicated: Are affected communities being dealt with honestly? Are burdens and benefits distributed fairly? Is creation being stewarded with genuine care, or exploited in a race for market dominance?

The Deeper Trust Question

Psalm 20:7 reminds God’s people, “Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God” (ESV). 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.

Five-plus decades working at the intersection of national security and public policy have shown me what happens when people of faith disengage from difficult ground and leave it to others. The vacuum does not stay empty. Power flows to whoever shows up. I would urge my fellow believers to attend public meetings, press developers and elected officials for honest answers, and bring the weight of a biblical worldview to debates that will shape their communities for decades. D'Amore didn’t need a theology degree to understand what was at stake outside his front door. He saw a decision being made without him, and he showed up. That same instinct — grounded in Genesis 2:15 and lived out in whatever Chesapeake surrounds you — is precisely what this moment requires of the church.

Robert 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,” releases in April 2026.

This article originally appeared here.