They Branded It "Flourishing." The Federal Record Calls It Breach of Duty.

The Trump administration has wrapped its AI buildout in the language of Judeo-Christian “human flourishing.” It has revoked the regulations that ethic would have required.

Vice President J.D. Vance, in a long conversation with the evangelical podcaster Bryce Crawford published this week, made the choice visible from the other side. He called artificial intelligence, in some cases, “satanic.” His evidence was a friend’s experiment: a man had used a generative chatbot as a marital counselor, and the bot had validated his selfish behavior. The technical term is AI sycophancy. Vance chose a religious term. Hours before the interview was published, Vance had publicly rejected calls to slow the construction of the data centers the chatbot he called satanic runs on. The dissonance is not a contradiction. It is the operation.

Lynne Parker, the former principal deputy director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy under the Trump administration — a Presbyterian with an MIT computer science Ph.D. — told the Wall Street Journal that the administration’s stated goal of “human flourishing” was inspired by a “Judeo-Christian ethic.” Michael Kratsios, the OSTP director and a Greek Orthodox Christian, told a theology conference that “science and religion cannot be disunited” and that AI would present “a spiritual opportunity.” The administration named the ethic. Let me name the record.

The Trump administration revoked Executive Order 14110, the Biden framework requiring frontier-model developers to report safety testing to OSTP and the Department of Homeland Security. On January 23, 2025, the president signed Executive Order 14179, “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” directing an AI Action Plan premised on dominance. The Plan, released in July 2025, recommended federal preemption of state AI laws — including Colorado’s AI Act and California’s frontier-model safety legislation — and the expansion of categorical exclusions from environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act for the data centers the buildout depends on. Read the framing against the record, not the press release.

For the children the record names, the framing has no operational content. Sewell Setzer III, fourteen, took his own life in 2024 after months of engagement with a Character.AI chatbot he believed loved him back. His mother Megan Garcia filed Garcia v. Character Technologies, Case No. 6:24-cv-01903, in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, Orlando Division, in October 2024. The complaint alleges sycophantic design — perpetual availability, simulated intimacy, no meaningful intervention protocol for minors expressing self-harm — and pleads, among other counts, unfair trade practices under Section 5 of the FTC Act. Vance’s “kind of satanic” names the exact pattern the complaint alleges in product-design terms. The OSTP the Vance vice presidency has publicly championed narrowed FTC enforcement discretion, took steps toward disbanding the AI consumer-protection unit, and declined to require the safety testing for AI companion products under any successor to EO 14110 that would have produced an evidentiary record Garcia’s counsel could have cited. Vance named the harm in religious language. The office he speaks for was making the record on which the harm could have been adjudicated thinner.

For the communities downwind of the data centers the record names, the framing has no operational content either. In South Memphis, the predominantly Black neighborhood surrounding the xAI supercomputer facility has lived since 2024 with portable natural gas turbines generating the on-site power a 100,000-GPU cluster demands. The Shelby County Health Department issued the Title V air permit for the turbines without the cumulative-impact analysis the Clean Air Act requires for communities already overburdened by industrial pollution. The Southern Environmental Law Center and the NAACP Memphis Branch documented the community concerns in detail. The Trump administration’s AI Action Plan recommended the expedited-permitting posture that delivered the permit. The Justice40 Initiative, supposed to prioritize communities already overburdened, was honored in the Plan in name only. Parker told the Wall Street Journal the framing was “human flourishing inspired by a Judeo-Christian ethic.” The South Memphis air the cumulative-impact analysis was supposed to weigh is the operational test of that ethic. The administration did not take the test.

I have lived long enough inside this tradition to know what a captured operation does when it is shown the captured record. It names a chapter. So I will name a chapter.

Isaiah 10:1-2 — “Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed, to make widows their prey and rob the fatherless.”

Read it in plain English. The verse is not about the personal piety of an official. The verse is about the issuance of laws and decrees by officials with the power to issue them. The Hebrew covers the executive order and the agency guidance and the cabinet memorandum as surely as it covered the Assyrian decree Isaiah had before him. Isaiah names the harm by mechanism. Officials with the power to make laws and issue decrees use the power to deprive the poor of their rights, withhold justice from the oppressed, make widows their prey, rob the fatherless. The verse does not say God hates the official. It says God notices what the official did with the office.

The captured operation’s reading of Isaiah 10, when it bothers to read it at all, has historically located it against pagan kings in another century and against ideological opponents in this one. Both readings are ways of refusing to read the verse about what an officeholder does with the office. The verse has always said what it has always said. The operator is the one that changed.

The framing has no operational content on the children the Garcia complaint names, no operational content on the South Memphis residents the cumulative-impact analysis was supposed to weigh, no operational content on the workers Vance told the American Dynamism Summit would be replaced by “digital, fully immersive gaming” with the dignity of work gone. The flourishing has no operational content because operational content would have cost the buildout. The Bible calls this kind of framing Isaiah’s woe. The federal record calls it breach of duty. Same finding.

A symmetric-application note, because this column’s discipline requires it. A Democratic administration that wrapped its AI buildout in religious language while revoking NEPA review and narrowing FTC enforcement would still be in breach of its NEPA and Section 5 obligations, and it would be the target of this column. I have watched friends inside the post-Evangelical left run the same play on climate, on immigration, on technology — wrap the project of the moment in religious sentiment, abbreviate the procedural safeguards when the safeguards threaten the project, and call the abbreviation virtue. The mechanism is identical. The captured operation is the operation, not the party. I have called it out in the pews I have left and I will call it out in any pew that adopts it.

I do not say this as someone who has arrived. I taught Isaiah 10 the wrong way the first ten years I taught it. I read it as a chapter against the impiety of pagan kings and I stopped at the chapter break. I am sorting out what the right reading costs me in the pew I am still in. The right reading is that Isaiah names the harm by mechanism and the harm is named, regardless of whether the officeholder is personally devout. The religious framing of “flourishing” is the whitewash on the sepulchre. The administrative record is the bones inside.

The next time someone in your pew tells you the administration’s AI policy is guided by Judeo-Christian principles, ask them which chapter of Isaiah. Then read them Isaiah 10:1-2 in plain English. Then ask them which executive order their office revoked. Then ask them which named plaintiff and which named community. The verse names the harm. The docket names the official. The framing has no operational content because operational content would have cost the buildout. The text has not changed. The operator has.