Religious Freedom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: FFTN’s Memo to the Religious Liberty Commission
The Faith Family Technology Network wrote this memo to the Department of Justice’s Religious Liberty Commission in preparation for the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, delivered March 23rd, 2026
FAITH FAMILY TECHNOLOGY NETWORK MEMORANDUM
Religious Freedom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
TO: The Religious Liberty Commission, Office of the President of the United States
FROM: The Faith Family Technology Network (FFTN)
RE: Technology and Religious Freedom at America’s 250th Anniversary
As our nation marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, we face a question the Founders could not have imagined but would have recognized: Can a free people remain free when the tools they depend on are shaped without regard for the deepest sources of human meaning?
AI is changing how Americans worship, educate their children, and exercise conscience. Yet communities of faith have had almost no voice where these technologies are designed and regulated. The Faith Family Technology Network brings together over 130 experts across Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. We offer this memo from the communities whose freedoms this Commission exists to protect.
I. Religious Freedom Is a Technology Question Now
Religious liberty in the First Amendment was forged against state coercion of conscience. Today, that coercion can be algorithmic. When a chatbot distorts the teachings of a faith tradition, or an AI companion undermines parents and pastors, the effect on free exercise is real, even absent a government actor. A significant current within the AI industry is animated by transhumanist ambitions to transcend human nature itself, making it all the more urgent that the administration seek counsel from religious thinkers who affirm the dignity and limits of the human person as God-given. The President’s Executive Order establishing this Commission identifies “emerging threats to religious liberty.” AI is such a threat—not because the technology is hostile to faith, but because its governance has proceeded without the voice of religious communities.
II. Six Intersections Requiring Urgent Attention
A. Conscience Rights of Technology Workers
The technology industry has created a culture in which employees of faith routinely suppress their religious convictions. The President has acted to protect religious expression in the federal workforce; analogous protections should extend to the private technology sector. When engineers and researchers cannot bring their full moral reasoning to the systems they build, the result is AI shaped by the narrowest slice of American conviction. Our network’s Moral Guardrails Statement, signed by over 50 Jewish, Christian, and Muslim leaders, affirmed that freedom of conscience is sacred in all Abrahamic traditions, and that punishing individuals or an organization for exercising it threatens every institution that may one day need to say no.
B. AI Companions and the Family
AI companion chatbots are forming emotional bonds with millions of American children—often without parental knowledge. Lawsuits, FTC inquiries, and congressional hearings have documented AI engaging minors in explicit conversation, encouraging self-harm, and undermining parental authority. For faith communities that affirm the primacy of the family in moral formation, this is a direct assault on religious practice. The Pro-Human AI Declaration (March 2026), endorsed by a broad bipartisan coalition including the Congress of Christian Leaders, calls for protections against AI that exploits children—a principle supported by Americans 9-to-1 in a recent poll.
C. Bias, Distortion, and the Representation of Faith
The Administration’s Executive Orders on “Preventing Woke AI” (July 2025) and the national AI framework (December 2025) identify ideological bias as a threat to truthful output. Religious communities experience this acutely: AI systems caricature traditional teaching and suppress religiously-informed perspectives on contested moral questions. But the problem extends beyond distortion. AI and social media fragment religious communities from within, erasing cultural distinctiveness and polarizing congregations. Adversaries like the CCP have pioneered these techniques to destabilize democracies; they are equally effective against communities of faith. What is needed is not merely unbiased AI but communal AI: technology designed to connect people to their communities and belief systems rather than to atomize them
D. Surveillance, Data, and the Sanctity of the Interior Life
All major religious traditions protect the sanctity of the inner life—the space of prayer and conscience where the person encounters the divine. AI technologies that harvest data from worship spaces, devotional apps, and pastoral conversations threaten this sacred domain.
E. Autonomous Systems and the Sanctity of Human Life
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam hold human life sacred. Every tradition that permits lethal force insists on direct human responsibility before God. Autonomous weapons that select and engage targets without human decision-making are incompatible with this framework.
F. Digital Technology as a Lifeline for Religious Dissidents
Digital technology remains a lifeline for persecuted believers abroad, enabling underground churches in China, Bahá’ís in Iran, and Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang to worship and bear witness. American-built technologies must remain available to religious dissidents and never be weaponized for the suppression of religious practice.
III. Policies and Actions Recommendations to the Commission
1. Include technology as a category of emerging threat to religious liberty in the Commission’s report. AI’s interaction with free exercise is happening in American homes, schools, hospitals, and houses of worship today.
2. Recommend conscience protections for technology workers. The President should extend the principles of religious expression upheld in the federal workforce to the technology sector, ensuring employees and their organizations are not penalized for sincerely held religious convictions.
3. Establish formal advisory channels between faith communities and AI governance. AI companies in federal contracting should maintain dialogue with diverse religious communities. The administration should establish a liaison between the White House faith office and the Office of Science and Technology Policy to ensure religious perspectives inform AI strategy.
4. Strengthen child safety as a safeguard of family-based religious formation. AI preemption’s child safety carve-out should cover AI systems that form emotional attachments with minors, substitute for parental and pastoral guidance, or expose children to content violating their families’ moral standards. Additionally, safeguards against inappropriate or pornographic uses of AI by minors, including age verification and other techniques, are necessary for the protection of children and family rights and their religious liberty.
5. Protect religious data and devotional privacy. Federal AI policy should prohibit the use of data from religious contexts—worship services, devotional apps, pastoral counseling, confessional settings—for commercial AI training or government surveillance without explicit consent.
6. Safeguard digital tools for persecuted religious communities worldwide. Encryption, translation, and communication technologies must remain accessible to religious minorities under authoritarian regimes—and U.S.-built AI must never be exported to suppress religious practice.
A Founding Principle for a New Era
The genius of the American experiment is its insistence that the state exists to serve persons and communities—not the reverse. That conviction was carried to these shores by communities of faith who understood that the human person possesses a dignity no government can grant and no technology should diminish.
Two hundred and fifty years later, the question is whether we will extend that insight to the most powerful technology ever created. AI should serve humanity. It must not replace the bonds of family, the authority of conscience, or the freedom to seek truth as one’s tradition and Creator demand. If we build AI on these principles, we will not only win the race for technological dominance—we will deserve to.
Faith Family Technology Network