This story was initially revealed by Capital B Information

RICHLAND PARISH, Louisiana — Seen so far as 2 miles away, a white cross — the dimensions of a 12-story constructing — welcomes you to this largely forgotten stretch of Delta nation.

Whereas cotton not runs supreme right here, each street, poll measure, and industrial promise nonetheless has to cross the religion check that when justified the facility buildings constructed on enslaved labor and reworked its fields. 

“People stay from Sunday to Sunday,” defined Mark Sledge, the lead pastor at Macedonia Baptist Church, a Black church based in 1879 in Rayville, the biggest city within the parish.

As such, nothing strikes with out the church behind it.

“We take into account our church the center of the group. Even when individuals drift, that seed stays inside them as they make selections,” stated Consuela Hunter, a lifelong member of Macedonia and Rayville city alderperson.

However identical to those that as soon as labored these cotton fields, the advantages of at the moment’s financial progress differ alongside racial traces as Meta, the mother or father firm of Fb, Instagram, and WhatsApp, scrambles to construct a $250 billion knowledge middle, the biggest within the Western Hemisphere, on this rural pocket.

In principally white evangelical Baptist church buildings, congregants have praised the challenge as windfall, a divine engine for jobs, evangelism, and serving because the “arms and toes of Jesus.” Some have even organized month-to-month feedings and prayer drives for the greater than 7,000  building employees now flooding into the parish of 20,000. 

Throughout city, many members of historic Black congregations learn it in another way — as one other empire rising on land their ancestors tended. Believers have centered on defending these left exterior the increase, urging parish leaders to increase reasonably priced housing and strengthen group safeguards for longtime residents. 

These congregations, born of the identical scripture, are divided by historical past — and now, by the fault line of progress itself.

“The white group receives [the benefits of] what’s occurring earlier than the Black group,” stated Jesse Washington, the mayor of Delhi, the second-largest city within the parish and the host of this yr’s Hallelujah Fall Competition. “The variations are robust within the church.”

As Meta builds what it calls the “spine of synthetic intelligence,” the query of religion has grow to be existential.  

Even by Louisiana requirements, itself a state the place spiritual adherence is actually the best within the nation, Richland Parish is church-saturated. The county is house to greater than thrice as many church buildings because the U.S. common.

With employees flooding in from everywhere in the nation, the material, politics, and values of the group would possibly change, residents worry. 

As congregations have wrestled with what the challenge means, lawmakers in Baton Rouge have been rewriting the principles to make it occur.

Within the aftermath, the transformation in Richland Parish has arrived sooner than anybody — or any zoning plan — may take up.

“It’s merely unfathomable,” Washington stated. “It’s bringing extra employees than we have now residents, and extra vehicles than we are able to depend.” 

Since Meta introduced its challenge, land costs have doubled and Black and white households in trailer house parks have been evicted so higher-earning building employees may transfer in, he shared.

By yr’s finish, greater than $200 billion in knowledge infrastructure tasks meant to energy synthetic intelligence will probably be underway throughout Southern states the place low-cost land, favorable politics, and low vitality prices have drawn the tech trade inward.

 Within the first half of 2025, knowledge facilities and the information-processing networks they maintain accounted for 92% of the nation’s financial growth. Already, this infrastructure has begun to upend livelihoods and hole out human relationships. On the similar time, it’s elevating medical care and catastrophe forecasting at the same time as knowledge facilities devour sources at a tempo the planet might not bear.

However within the rural South, the place church buildings outnumber chain shops and politics stays preached from pulpits, the rise of those knowledge empires exposes a deeper cultural wager.

Nationally, faith’s function is resurging simply as synthetic intelligence remakes the financial system. These twin forces are intertwined by a conservative revival searching for to merge governance, enterprise, and perception below a distinctly Christian body.

A testing floor for AI and spiritual nationalism

LEFT: Site visitors accidents, some lethal, have occurred on the street connecting Richland Parish, based on Delhi’s mayor. TOP RIGHT: The Meta building web site (Adam Mahoney/Capital B; Courtesy of Meta) BOTTOM RIGHT: One of many few cotton farms left within the parish is up on the market. 

For generations, there was one telltale signal you have been getting into this stretch of Northeastern Louisiana. Cloudlike tufts of cotton clung to fences and ditches, incomes the world its proud title because the “white gold capital of the South.”

However this sleepy rural space is now an industrial artery. The vehicles that thunder previous the cross not carry cotton. They haul the uncooked supplies of a special form of empire: one spun not from fiber, however from fiber optics. 

For Louisiana, that is the one largest private-sector funding in its historical past, surpassing conventional oil, gasoline, and manufacturing tasks which have traditionally outlined the state’s financial system. Within the Oval Workplace, President Donald Trump has proudly waved round photographs of the challenge’s renderings. His assist, in some ways, is calculated. 

Beneath Trump, the Environmental Safety Company has recast its mission round technological dominance and spiritual nationalism. The company’s acknowledged objective is to “make america the Synthetic Intelligence capital of the world” and, within the company’s chief’s phrases, to take action by driving “a dagger by way of the center of local weather‑change faith”— changing it with what Trump describes as religion‑primarily based values of “freedom, laborious work, danger‑taking, and above all a belief in almighty God.”

The administration has argued that attaining this imaginative and prescient begins by transforming the land itself. That revival, consultants contend, attracts vitality from dominion theology, a biblical interpretation asserting that people — particularly Christians — are divinely mandated to rule over nature, not merely to steward it. 

Arguably, there isn’t any higher place to check this than Louisiana, which is house to the nation’s largest share of white residents who assist or sympathize with Christian nationalism, a motion searching for to fuse Christian doctrine with public coverage. Within the Bayou State, 7 in 10 adults imagine “God gave people the correct to make use of the Earth, together with the crops and animals, for humanity’s profit.”

“There’s a mentality that trade, by way of some form of mandate, can come save our communities,” stated Davante Lewis, the one Black elected member of Louisiana’s Public Service Fee, which is tasked with regulating trade. Lewis represents part of Louisiana often known as “Most cancers Alley,” the place industrial air pollution has been linked to a most cancers danger that has been estimated to be almost 50 occasions the nationwide common.

However as all the pieces adjustments round Richland Parish, residents at the moment are questioning who holds the facility to resolve what sort of imaginative and prescient of house and group is price believing in? They usually’re not alone on this journey. 

Amongst spiritual individuals, white evangelicals are probably to say climate-related points are usually not actual, vote Republican, and imagine People ought to observe the values of the “generations that got here earlier than us.” Compared, members of traditionally Black church buildings are extra probably than the typical American — spiritual or not — to say local weather and environmental threats are “very severe” and that we, as a rustic, want to contemplate new beliefs in our decision-making course of. 

This divide is why, some students have concluded, that a lot of America’s industrial base exists within the South. 

A cluster of students and spiritual leaders have linked the long-held energy of white evangelicals to overpollution. They argue that firms have flourished within the South as a result of white evangelical tradition permits tolerance of business air pollution as an ordained proper. Black church buildings and spiritual networks, in the meantime, function because the South’s ethical counterweight, mobilizing resistance to industrial siting and air pollution. 

“Within the Bayou State, 7 in 10 adults 
imagine ‘God gave people the correct
to make use of the Earth, together with the crops
and animals, for humanity’s profit.‘”

In 2019, professor Kevin Smiley on the College of Buffalo discovered that counties with excessive shares of evangelical Christians skilled better well being and environmental harms from trade, even when controlling for revenue and race, indicating that “spiritual tradition might not directly reinforce unequal environmental outcomes.”

It appears, consultants advised Capital B, that the info middle increase might replicate this actuality. 

The South has “been the bottom zero for that for a very long time,” Lewis stated. “A whole lot of the issues which can be occurring on the federal degree have truly been occurring for years earlier than that, and that’s the reason trade nonetheless sees Louisiana as this type of open place to settle.”

The tech increase creates jobs for some, however at what value?

Following a morning service in early October, the parish corridor of Macedonia Baptist Church is stuffed with churchgoers ready to stuff styrofoam bins with turkey sandwiches, potato salad, and pound cake. The yellow partitions round them are adorned with a wallpaper depicting harvest baskets, bundled crops, and small American flags. 

Leaning over her plate, a younger mom of two murmurs concerning the knowledge middle. “They are saying it should change all the pieces.” 

Deacon Glen Brown, 68, stands exterior the corridor and displays on what change has meant right here earlier than: guarantees that cross over Rayville’s Black neighborhoods whereas costs climb and mom-and-pop retailers disappear. In each path of him, deserted and dilapidated properties line the road.

Throughout the parish, in majority white areas, the median family revenue is greater than the state’s common at $63,000. In majority-Black areas like Rayville, the median family revenue is $37,000.

With out significant funding, Brown stated, the church stays the Black group’s final regular place of hope. “You’re bringing all this in,” he stated, “however it doesn’t matter if individuals are nonetheless simply making an attempt to make it.”

The know-how increase has created jobs, however not all the time the type that rework native life. The U.S. knowledge‑middle workforce has surged from roughly 300,000 to half a million individuals in lower than a decade. But most of these everlasting roles are reserved for engineers and technicians — positions demanding superior levels or certifications far past what’s typical in rural Louisiana.

If unemployment stays the identical, however costs proceed to inch up, Brown believes “crime and habit will rise.” A licensed drug and alcohol counselor, he helps lead weekly Alcoholics Nameless conferences within the parish corridor. Parish residents report poor psychological well being and habit at a price greater than 93% of the nation, and it’s the worst in Rayville.

“Individuals are going to start out feeling like they’re not wished right here,” he stated. “That’s why the church stays on the middle. When nothing else works, individuals nonetheless come right here.”

That endurance runs by way of Macedonia’s story. Within the late Eighteen Eighties and early Eighteen Nineties, white mobs killed a whole lot of Black residents throughout neighboring parishes and lynched a 15‑yr‑outdated woman in Rayville. Out of that terror, in 1886, Macedonia’s founders created the Brothers and Sisters of Love and Charity — a mutual support society that buried the lifeless, taught the residing, and cared for each other when nobody else would. 

Almost 150 years later, the explanations these societies existed nonetheless shadow the land. 

As Black theologian Anthony Pinn, a professor at Rice College and a number one scholar of African American faith, defined, for Black Southerners the church has all the time been a stand‑in for what Black communities have been denied.

“The Black church developed as a response to not belonging,” Pinn stated, “an area the place Black magnificence, substance, and worth are acknowledged in a world that has refused to see them.”

That place towards religion, he added, has all the time been cautious about guarantees of progress. 

LEFT: The development challenge may final till no less than 2030. TOP RIGHT: Residents imagine native farms will probably be diminished over the approaching years. BOTTOM RIGHT: Downtown Rayville at sundown. (Adam Mahoney/Capital B)

A “God-given alternative”

The following night, the farmland burning orange at sundown, about 20 older white parishioners from a close-by Southern Baptist congregation collect exterior a century‑outdated, eggshell‑white, one‑room church only a few hundred yards from Meta’s building web site. They hand out 200 boxed dinners to employees — principally white and Spanish‑talking Latino males — leaning on mud‑caked pickup vehicles with plates from Florida to Oregon.

Pastor Justin Clark of Rayville’s First Baptist Church sees the outreach as an extension of the church’s mission, not a political stance. On the church’s web site, a banner proclaims that God “is actually bringing a as soon as‑in‑a‑lifetime alternative to our space.” That chance, he believes, comes within the type of Meta’s large knowledge middle. Since building started, his church has joined a rotation of Southern Baptist congregations cooking for a whole lot of employees every week. 

“We all know not everybody is happy concerning the challenge,” he stated. “However our calling doesn’t change. We selected to lean into the truth that this can be a God‑given alternative to share the love of Christ.”

However that’s the place the distinction lies within the Bible Belt, as Pinn put it. The place Black congregations  “have all the time needed to make a approach for individuals in a world not constructed for them,” white congregations may afford to show mission work outward by spreading charity with out ever having to problem the buildings that made it mandatory.

Based in 1845, the Southern Baptist Conference broke from Northern Baptists to defend and protect slavery. Its founders declared bondage “an establishment of heaven” and taught that white dominance was God’s design. For generations after emancipation, its pulpits preached obedience and hierarchy — values that dovetailed with segregation and Jim Crow. It’s nonetheless on this custom that white church buildings hardly ever wanted to be political or activist; their social order was already upheld by regulation, and their religion bolstered the present hierarchy. 

“Amongst spiritual individuals, white evangelicals
are probably to say that climate-related points
are usually not actual, vote Republican, and imagine that People
ought to observe the values of the ‘generations that got here earlier than us.‘”

Within the years since, the conference has distanced itself from its earlier positions, however has nonetheless pushed conservative beliefs throughout the state. Since 2017, the conference has endorsed the show of the Ten Commandments in Louisiana public colleges, defended Accomplice monuments, and rejected resolutions on systemic racism as “liberal ideology” and “unbiblical.”

But, spiritual conservatism right here isn’t purely racial. Throughout the road from Macedonia, one other Black Baptist church echoes related ethical codes, calling queerness and abortion sins and portraying poverty as a consequence of straying from God.  

Such teachings underscore how deeply the area’s religion traditions proceed to form the ethical financial system that outlasts politics or progress.

Might the challenge intensify outdated inequities?

Because the Louisiana Public Service Fee debated the Meta energy plan this summer season, Lewis sat alone on the finish of the desk, flipping by way of spreadsheets on carbon output whereas his colleagues hailed the challenge as a “miracle.” When the roll was known as after 4 hours, his lone “no” landed in a room thick with boos and chants of “disgrace.”

To land the $30 billion “Hyperion” challenge, state leaders overhauled tax incentive guidelines and fast-tracked zoning and vitality permits. The power will cowl greater than 2,000 acres of Richland farmland and require three new gas-fired energy crops to maintain its processors cool.​ Finally, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg stated he hopes it should develop to be the dimensions of Manhattan in New York Metropolis. Already, it’s anticipated that it’ll use twice as a lot vitality as New Orleans. 

Louisiana’s marketing campaign to reinvent itself as a “tech capital of the South” rests on a well-known cut price: public incentives in change for “industrial salvation,” Lewis stated.

Supporters say the funding will deliver jobs and modernization to one among Louisiana’s poorest parishes. However native officers see the deal slicing each methods. “We’re working each day on new sewer and water traces,” stated Washington, the native mayor. “It’s progress, however individuals who lived right here for many years are being priced out.” Since Meta’s announcement, farmland values in Richland Parish have jumped to $20,000 per acre. The Louisiana common is simply $3,200 per acre, based on market listings. The median parish house worth now exceeds $270,000 — an 80% rise from early 2024.

A latest housing examine says the parish might want to see a 10% improve in housing yearly by 2029 to accommodate newcomers. Even in essentially the most resourced city cores, housing sometimes will increase between 2 and 5% yearly. 

Lewis warns that the challenge may intensify outdated inequities consequently. “These are computer systems, not factories. They’ll use huge water capability, drive up emissions, and increase payments for individuals who can’t afford it.” 

Meta’s filings present the ability will devour a whole lot of hundreds of gallons of water a day, which may pressure the parish water system that earned an “F” grade from the state in 2022. In the meantime, regardless of internet hosting an infrastructure challenge constructed to energy international connectivity, solely 68% of Richland residents have web entry, in contrast to 85% of Louisianans and 90% of People. 

“We will’t maintain performing like know-how and trade will come save us” Lewis stated. “Meta’s presence gained’t deliver broadband to Richland Parish or clear water to its properties — that also takes public will.

Within the meantime, stated Hunter, Macedonia’s church historian, every week, one other for‑sale signal goes up. Pickup vehicles idle exterior, and building employees are outbidding households who’ve lived right here for generations.

“Groceries, gasoline, electrical energy — all the pieces going up,” she stated. “We’ll maintain welcoming individuals, however we additionally must make the housing reasonably priced for individuals who need to keep.”

A easy ethics debate, or not?

Past Richland Parish, consultants stated, one query nonetheless lingers with AI, the South, and the church: who, ultimately, is entitled to play God?

For clergy comparable to Clark, know-how can amplify divine objective. For Sledge and others at Macedonia, it threatens to invert the ethical order completely, changing stewardship with consumption.

“There are hurting individuals in our group, and so they come wanting somebody who’s actual, somebody they’ll speak to concerning the actuality of this place,” stated Sledge, recalling his years ministering within the parish jail.

It’s at this level the place Lauren Griffin says the battle over the parish’s – and the South’s – id will start to diverge essentially the most. Griffin, a professor in Louisiana State College’s spiritual research division, runs the college’s new AI & Faith Collaborative. The analysis group investigates the connection between faith, tradition, and synthetic intelligence. 

AI is already shaping how individuals worship, study, and picture the sacred: algorithms are curating sermons for preachers, prayer apps are delivering personalized devotionals, and predictive fashions are influencing ethical debate and the way the phrase is acquired. It’s also dictating, for instance, what sort of data one receives on their social media timeline a couple of $30 billion knowledge middle. 

But the reverse can be true. If knowledge facilities and their employees come from extra rural, Christian pockets, that will additionally be sure that AI evolves with our religion’s fingerprints nonetheless seen, she stated.

As new applied sciences take root and the boundaries between religion and progress blur, communities face the problem of naming what they belief — and what they worry. 

“What’s most troubling,” Pinn stated, “isn’t who individuals worship with, however how spiritual rules and theological claims on this case get used to justify disregard and the marginalization of populations.”

That ethical rigidity, he stated, endures as know-how remakes human work and ecology. “Church buildings might need assumed an ethical framework premised on human exercise on the planet,” Pinn stated, “however synthetic intelligence is forcing a rethinking of morality and ethics.”

The wager, Pinn stated, is whether or not prosperity constructed on synthetic intelligence can coexist with a lifestyle rooted in God and land.

For Lakeisha Williams, a 45-year-old mom of three in Delhi, the talk is kind of easy. All that issues is having the ability to keep in her house. On her road, some properties have jumped 125% this yr. 

And for Sledge and Clark alike, God is the drive behind retaining Richland Parish and its present residents round, even when the work between Sundays appears completely different. “We simply maintain preaching the message of hope and doing no matter we are able to to be supportive of one another whereas trusting God,” Sledge stated.

For the following a number of years, they each anticipate days to hum loudly with equipment. However they hope the prayer and the songs stay, too.  

This story has been up to date from its authentic revealed story, revealed on November 19, 2025.

Associated