Pray Vote Stand Summit – Dr. Rich Swier

As investors rush to cash in on the current boom in artificial intelligence (AI) and as AI creeps more and more into the everyday lives of Americans, Christians are left to wonder how to approach the burgeoning technology and guard against its dangers. A panel discussion at Family Research Council’s 2025 Pray Vote Stand Summit last weekend explored how Christians should think about AI.

Over the weekend, it was reported that a study out of MIT has helped to confirm the fears of numerous technology skeptics and observers that AI is contributing to the dulling of the human brain. The study found that the more internet assistance (such as ChatGPT and internet search engines) that a student uses to help complete an essay, “the lower their level of brain connectivity, … [with] significantly less activity in the brain networks associated with cognitive processing, attention and creativity.”

Jon Frendl, a tech entrepreneur and founder of the custom app development firm Cappital, warned of the negative effects that AI can have on the brain during Saturday’s Summit discussion.

“[W]e spend calories in our brain, and biologically we want to try to spend less to get to where we want to go, [so] we can kind of be lazy sometimes,” he explained. “… [We can] get the answer from ChatGPT but miss that growth of the wisdom muscle. That’s a real problem fundamentally, and so that’s one area … as parents with our kids to teach them to be skeptical. Classical education does this really well, … to flex those wisdom muscles [and have] conversations with our kids about AI. … Let’s show them AI lying and just saying things off the cuff that are clearly not true. Plant that doubt so they understand and they can flex that wisdom muscle and grow it.”

But it’s not just AI’s contribution to the loss of cognitive abilities that worry parents. Reports are emerging of minors being goaded into committing suicide by AI chatbots, as well as the continued decline of mental health linked to social media, which software engineers like Brandon Maddick say is likely to get worse with AI.

“If we’re engaging with these conversational AI tools on a regular basis, with personal conversations in a way that animates them beyond their tool capabilities — if that’s a danger for adults, you can only imagine the danger that it is for children,” he emphasized during the Summit panel. “I’m sure you all have seen news articles of the mental health crisis that is only going to be expanded upon with the advent of AI chatbots. And it’s scary to think about the future where the kids that are three, four, five, six today grow up and are in high school, and a third of them, their best friend is an AI. So I think there’s definite risks that can drive wedges between the familial relationships, as folks try to replace those with AI chatbots that cater to their every need.”

Frendl further cautioned that Christians must start preparing for a world in which AI will grow at an exponential level, which could affect livelihoods.

“[T]he way to really do a lot of work in AI is you build several AIs that help to build even better AIs, and those better AIs help you build even better AIs. So there’s an exponential nature to that,” he explained. “And when you combine that with the amount of investment across the board internationally, and then really you can look at power companies and chips, which are the fundamental things necessary behind this. … This is just getting started, and it’s going to radically change things at such an exponential [level].”

“But,” Frendl continued, “one of the hopes I have, … I think people are going to probably get pretty scared, probably lose a lot of jobs. Unfortunately, it’s going to be really hard. I think they’re going to be running back into the churches and they’re going to need embrace, right? I think that’s going to happen. I think that’s going to be the place of human connection that they’re hungry for. ‘The AI chatbot they fell in love with hit its context window and was gone. You know, maybe I need to go to church.’”

Maddick, who serves as head of product for the Christian AI platform Dominion, went on to argue that Christians must engage with emerging technology in order to establish moral and ethical guardrails.

“[I]f Christians don’t engage with AI at all, we will be left behind because the enemy is going to use it,” he underscored. “[I]t is a tool, [which should] not [be used] for personal conversation to replace … your relationship with your parents, or your relationship with your kids or your pastor. Using it in the automated, productivity enhancing ways that it’s designed to be used for is how … we can reap the benefits without seeing many of the harms. I think a model that’s not optimized for engagement, but is instead optimized for productivity rather than personalization is a good step in that direction.”

As to a general strategy for how Christians should approach AI, Frendl detailed a three-pronged course of action.

“[F]irst of all, free will,” he insisted. “We should never submit to AI — AI submits to us. It is a tool that we use. … The second is sober mindedness. I would make the argument that being sober minded means using our brains. … Have the mental fortitude to think through things, have wisdom and intelligence on something which you can grow, then you’re going to do that even more with AI. … [T]he third is love. I think we must have a critical look at what’s happening here in the context of love, and this thing’s trying to get me to start feeling like it’s there for me in ways that are inappropriate.”

Practical advice for parents to guard their children from the dangers of AI starts with disabling voice options, Frendl contended. “Don’t use voice with the kids. … Keep it to text. Because when you increase more senses and it starts sounding like a human, it’s easier for [children’s] pathways to think that this is personified. They made it that way for engagement. … So just use a text. … Just give me the facts.”

Maddick concluded by advising families to build relationships and foster community as an antidote to the isolating effects of AI and social media.

“[G]et out in the community with your kids,” he urged. “Find a set of like-minded parents and have your kids form human relationships. Social media is probably 1% of what we’re going to see with this, because the information you put on social media is tiny compared to the conversational information you’re putting into these machines. We’ve already seen the impact of social media fragmenting our communities, fragmenting families, fragmenting the kids community in their grade at school. Ensuring that your kid has human connections, … that your community starts to come back together is the solution to this, because technology is funneling us all into our different corners of the internet. … [We must] connect in person and form real human communities again.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

The biggest problem with America’s broken border policy is that it perfectly reflects the values of the Biden-Harris administration, an immigration expert told a group of Christian conservative leaders.

“They’ve said for three years now that they have designed an immigration system that comports with their values,” explained Chad Wolf, acting secretary the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration and now executive director of the America First Policy Institute, at the 2024 Pray Vote Stand Summit (PVSS) in Washington, D.C., last Saturday.

While a values-based immigration policy may sound appealing, especially to people of faith, Wolf told PVSS that the devil’s in the details. The Left’s anti-American “values” clash radically with the views of most Americans.

The Left’s first immigration-based “value is anyone and everyone should be able to come to the United States, full-stop,” said Wolf. If someone can reach American shores, they should be able to emigrate. Since America is a proposition nation — a “nation of immigrants” with no historic roots in Western Christian culture — the United States should serve as a home for anyone of any background or viewpoint.

Secondly, the Left believes that “anyone should be able to seek asylum here in the United States — and we may be the only country that people seek asylum in, which is a crazy notion. There’s a lot of other safe countries around the world that a lot of these illegal aliens actually travel through to get to the United States,” he said. Numerous alleged “refugees” from Nicaragua, Honduras, or Guatemala pass through Mexico en route to the United States. “Why aren’t you seeking asylum there?” asked Wolf. “They’re forum shopping. They want to come here to the United States for other reasons,” primarily for economic reasons, “and they’re using the asylum system to get there.”

Immigration experts have long documented the abuse of the asylum system, as Western liberals coach economic migrants on what to say in order to obtain asylum status, making them harder to remove.

The Left’s final values-based immigration policy, said Wolf, is that once illegal immigrants “get here, they shouldn’t be removed, that it’s okay that under almost no circumstance should they be removed from the United States.” You can see the results playing out today, he said. “There’s 1.5 million people with a final order of removal today who have said, ‘Nope. You know what, I’m not going to listen to that immigration judge. I’m just going to stay here in the United States.’ And we’re not removing them. There’s no deterrence in our immigration enforcement posture right now. And I think that needs to change, because otherwise, it’s going to continue to be abused.”

“Their values seem to be out of step with most Americans,” Wolf told PVSS. Indeed, polls show a majority of Americans favor mass deportations.

Instead, this administration has incentivized a mass influx of illegal immigrants, said Wolf. “During three-and-a-half to four years, you have about 12 million folks who have illegally come across that border: 10 million have been encountered, and about two million are what we call gotaways — these are folks that don’t come into contact with law enforcement. We don’t know who they are. We don’t know why they wanted to come to the United States. And most importantly, we don’t know where they are today. And this is only increasing.”

“It’s not because Congress passed any bill, because they didn’t. It’s because” the Biden-Harris administration “took certain actions that incentivized people to come here,” he said. “You saw about 94 executive actions taken by the Biden-Harris administration that caused this crisis. Now they have been in overdrive trying to explain that they didn’t cause the crisis, that it was either Republicans or it was the weather cycles, or it was all these other global migration … concerns or reasons, but it’s actually their actions that that” brought about the historic illegal immigration crisis.

“This is all by design. This isn’t because they’re incompetent. This isn’t because they’re bad at their job,” Wolf told the Christian conservative audience. “They have put a plan in place from day one, and they continue to execute that plan.”

The moderator, Jody Hice, senior vice president of Family Research Council, agreed U.S. immigration policy represents “a self-inflicted injury.”

FRC Action President Tony Perkins thanked Wolf for helping Americans in “accurately defining the problem.” He reminded Americans that “personnel is policy. We need to make sure we have the right people in place to have the right policies.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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