Photo illustrations by Alexandra Watts/Capital B

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

While cotton no longer runs supreme here, every road, ballot measure, and industrial promise still has to pass the faith test that once justified the power structures built on enslaved labor and transformed its fields. 

“Folks live from Sunday to Sunday,” explained Mark Sledge, the lead pastor at Macedonia Baptist Church, a Black church founded in 1879 in Rayville, the largest town in the parish.

As such, nothing moves without the church behind it.

“We consider our church the heart of the community. Even if people drift, that seed stays inside them as they make decisions,” said Consuela Hunter, a lifelong member of Macedonia and Rayville town alderperson.

But just like who once worked those cotton fields, the benefits of today’s economic growth differs along racial lines as Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, scrambles to build what could be the largest data center in the Western Hemisphere in this rural pocket.

In mostly white evangelical Baptist churches, congregants have praised the project as providence, a divine engine for jobs, evangelism, and serving as the “hands and feet of Jesus.” Some have even organized monthly feedings and prayer drives for the more than 7,000  construction workers now flooding into the parish of 20,000. 

Across town, many members of historic Black congregations read it differently — as another empire rising on land their ancestors tended. Believers have focused on protecting those left outside the boom, urging parish leaders to expand affordable housing and strengthen community safeguards for longtime residents. 

These congregations, born of the same scripture, are divided by history — and now, by the fault line of progress itself.

LEFT: Pastor Mark Sledge poses inside of Macedonia Baptist Church. RIGHT: Parishioners of the Louisiana Baptist Convention gather for a monthly feeding of Meta construction workers at Holly Ridge Baptist Church. (Adam Mahoney/Capital B)

“The white community receives [the benefits of] what’s going on before the Black community,” said Jesse Washington, the mayor of Delhi, the second-largest town in the parish and the host of this year’s Hallelujah Fall Festival. “The differences are strong in the church.”

As Meta builds what it calls the “backbone of artificial intelligence,” the question of faith has become existential.  

Even by Louisiana standards, itself a state where religious adherence is essentially the highest in the nation, Richland Parish is church-saturated. The county is home to more than three times as many churches as the U.S. average.

With workers flooding in from all over the country, the fabric, politics, and values of the community might change, residents fear. 

As congregations have wrestled with what the project means, lawmakers in Baton Rouge have been rewriting the rules to make it happen.

In the aftermath, the transformation in Richland Parish has arrived faster than anyone — or any zoning plan — could absorb.

“It is simply unfathomable,” Washington said. “It is bringing more workers than we have residents, and more trucks than we can count.” 

Since Meta announced its project, land prices have doubled and Black and white families in trailer home parks have been evicted so higher-earning construction workers could move in, he shared.

By year’s end, more than $200 billion in data infrastructure projects meant to power artificial intelligence will be underway across Southern states where cheap land, favorable politics, and low energy costs have drawn the tech industry inward.

 In the first half of 2025, data centers and the information-processing networks they sustain accounted for 92% of the nation’s economic expansion. Already, this infrastructure has begun to upend livelihoods and hollow out human relationships. At the same time, it is elevating medical care and disaster forecasting even as data centers consume resources at a pace the planet may not bear.

But in the rural South, where churches outnumber chain stores and politics remains preached from pulpits, the rise of these data empires exposes a deeper cultural wager.

Nationally, religion’s role is resurging just as artificial intelligence remakes the economy. These twin forces are intertwined by a conservative revival seeking to merge governance, business, and belief under a distinctly Christian frame.

A testing ground for AI and religious nationalism

LEFT: Traffic accidents, some deadly, have happened on the road connecting Richland Parish, according to Delhi’s mayor. TOP RIGHT: One of the few cotton farms left in the parish is up for sale. BOTTOM RIGHT: The Meta construction site (Adam Mahoney/Capital B; Courtesy of Meta)

For generations, there was one telltale sign you were entering this stretch of Northeastern Louisiana. Cloudlike tufts of cotton clung to fences and ditches, earning the area its proud title as the “white gold capital of the South.”

But this sleepy rural area is now an industrial artery. The trucks that thunder past the cross no longer carry cotton. They haul the raw materials of a different kind of empire: one spun not from fiber, but from fiber optics. 

For Louisiana, this is the single largest private-sector investment in its history, surpassing traditional oil, gas, and manufacturing projects that have historically defined the state’s economy. In the Oval Office, President Donald Trump has proudly waved around photos of the project’s renderings. His support, in many ways, is calculated. 

Under Trump, the Environmental Protection Agency has recast its mission around technological dominance and religious nationalism. The agency’s stated goal is to “make the United States the Artificial Intelligence capital of the world” and, in the agency’s leader’s words, to do so by driving “a dagger through the heart of climate‑change religion”— replacing it with what Trump describes as faith‑based values of “freedom, hard work, risk‑taking, and above all a trust in almighty God.”

The administration has argued that achieving this vision begins by reworking the land itself. That revival, experts contend, draws energy from dominion theology, a biblical interpretation asserting that humans — especially Christians — are divinely mandated to rule over nature, not merely to steward it. 

Arguably, there is no better place to test this than Louisiana, which is home to the nation’s largest share of white residents who support or sympathize with Christian nationalism, a movement seeking to fuse Christian doctrine with public policy. In the Bayou State, 7 in 10 adults believe “God gave humans the right to use the Earth, including the plants and animals, for humanity’s benefit.”

“There is a mentality that industry, via some kind of mandate, can come save our communities,” said Davante Lewis, the only Black elected member of Louisiana’s Public Service Commission, which is tasked with regulating industry. Lewis represents a part of Louisiana known as “Cancer Alley,” where industrial pollution has been linked to a cancer risk that has been estimated to be nearly 50 times the national average.

But as everything changes around Richland Parish, residents are now questioning who holds the power to decide what kind of vision of home and community is worth believing in? And they’re not alone on this journey. 

Among religious people, white evangelicals are most likely to say climate-related issues are not real, vote Republican, and believe Americans should follow the values of the “generations that came before us.” In comparison, members of historically Black churches are more likely than the average American — religious or not — to say climate and environmental threats are “very serious” and that we, as a country, need to consider new beliefs in our decision-making process. 

This divide is why, some scholars have concluded, that so much of America’s industrial base exists in the South. 

A cluster of scholars and religious leaders have linked the long-held power of white evangelicals to overpollution. They argue that corporations have flourished in the South because white evangelical culture enables tolerance of industrial pollution as an ordained right. Black churches and religious networks, meanwhile, operate as the South’s moral counterweight, mobilizing resistance to industrial siting and pollution.

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In the Bayou State, 7 in 10 adults believe “God gave humans the right to use the Earth, including the plants and animals, for humanity’s benefit.”

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In 2019, professor Kevin Smiley at the University of Buffalo found that counties with high shares of evangelical Christians experienced greater health and environmental harms from industry, even when controlling for income and race, indicating that “religious culture may indirectly reinforce unequal environmental outcomes.”

It seems, experts told Capital B, that the data center boom may reflect this reality. 

The South has “been the ground zero for that for a long time,” Lewis said. “A lot of the things that are happening at the federal level have actually been happening for years before that, and that is why industry still sees Louisiana as this kind of open place to settle.”

The tech boom creates jobs for some, but at what cost?

Following a morning service in early October, the parish hall of Macedonia Baptist Church is filled with churchgoers waiting to stuff styrofoam boxes with turkey sandwiches, potato salad, and pound cake. The yellow walls around them are adorned with a wallpaper depicting harvest baskets, bundled crops, and small American flags. 

Leaning over her plate, a young mother of two murmurs about the data center. “They say it will change everything.” 

Deacon Glen Brown, 68, stands outside the hall and reflects on what change has meant here before: promises that pass over Rayville’s Black neighborhoods while prices climb and mom-and-pop shops disappear. In every direction of him, abandoned and dilapidated homes line the street.

Across the parish, in majority white areas, the median household income is higher than the state’s average at $63,000. In majority-Black areas like Rayville, the median household income is $37,000.

LEFT: Residents fear that the rural county may become more developed and lose pieces of its culture. RIGHT: One of the few cotton farms left in the parish. (Adam Mahoney/Capital B)

Without meaningful investment, Brown said, the church remains the Black community’s last steady place of hope. “You’re bringing all this in,” he said, “but it doesn’t matter if people are still just trying to make it.”

The technology boom has created jobs, but not always the kind that transform local life. The U.S. data‑center workforce has surged from roughly 300,000 to half a million people in less than a decade. Yet most of those permanent roles are reserved for engineers and technicians — positions demanding advanced degrees or certifications far beyond what’s typical in rural Louisiana.

If unemployment remains the same, but prices continue to inch up, Brown believes “crime and addiction will rise.” A licensed drug and alcohol counselor, he helps lead weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the parish hall. Parish residents report poor mental health and addiction at a rate higher than 93% of the nation, and it is the worst in Rayville.

“People are going to start feeling like they’re not wanted here,” he said. “That’s why the church stays at the center. When nothing else works, people still come here.”

That endurance runs through Macedonia’s story. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, white mobs killed hundreds of Black residents across neighboring parishes and lynched a 15‑year‑old girl in Rayville. Out of that terror, in 1886, Macedonia’s founders created the Brothers and Sisters of Love and Charity — a mutual aid society that buried the dead, taught the living, and cared for one another when no one else would. 

Nearly 150 years later, the reasons those societies existed still shadow the land. 

As Black theologian Anthony Pinn, a professor at Rice University and a leading scholar of African American religion, explained, for Black Southerners the church has always been a stand‑in for what Black communities were denied.

“The Black church developed as a response to not belonging,” Pinn said, “a space where Black beauty, substance, and value are recognized in a world that has refused to see them.”

That position toward faith, he added, has always been cautious about promises of progress. 

A “God-given opportunity”

The next evening, the farmland burning orange at sunset, about 20 older white parishioners from a nearby Southern Baptist congregation gather outside a century‑old, eggshell‑white, one‑room church just a few hundred yards from Meta’s construction site. They hand out 200 boxed dinners to workers — mostly white and Spanish‑speaking Latino men — leaning on dust‑caked pickup trucks 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 website, a banner proclaims that God “is literally bringing a once‑in‑a‑lifetime opportunity to our area.” That opportunity, he believes, comes in the form of Meta’s massive data center. Since construction began, his church has joined a rotation of Southern Baptist congregations cooking for hundreds of workers each week. 

“We know not everyone is excited about the project,” he said. “But our calling doesn’t change. We chose to lean into the reality that this is a God‑given opportunity to share the love of Christ.”

But that is where the difference lies in the Bible Belt, as Pinn put it. Where Black congregations  “have always had to make a way for people in a world not built for them,” white congregations could afford to turn mission work outward by spreading charity without ever having to challenge the structures that made it necessary.

Founded in 1845, the Southern Baptist Convention broke from Northern Baptists to defend and preserve slavery. Its founders declared bondage “an institution 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 is still in this tradition that white churches rarely needed to be political or activist; their social order was already upheld by law, and their faith reinforced the existing hierarchy. 

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Among religious people, white evangelicals are most likely to say climate-related issues are not real, vote Republican, and believe Americans should follow the values of the “generations that came before us.

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In the years since, the convention has distanced itself from its earlier positions, but has still pushed conservative ideals across the state. Since 2017, the convention has endorsed the display of the Ten Commandments in Louisiana public schools, defended Confederate monuments, and rejected resolutions on systemic racism as “liberal ideology” and “unbiblical.”

Yet, religious conservatism here is not purely racial. Across the street from Macedonia, another Black Baptist church echoes similar moral codes, calling queerness and abortion sins and portraying poverty as a consequence of straying from God.  

Such teachings underscore how deeply the region’s faith traditions continue to shape the moral economy that outlasts politics or progress.

Could the project intensify old inequities?

As the Louisiana Public Service Commission debated the Meta power plan this summer, Lewis sat alone at the end of the table, flipping through spreadsheets on carbon output while his colleagues hailed the project as a “miracle.” When the roll was called after four hours, his lone “no” landed in a room thick with boos and chants of “shame.”

To land the $30 billion “Hyperion” project, state leaders overhauled tax incentive rules and fast-tracked zoning and energy permits. The facility will cover more than 2,000 acres of Richland farmland and require three new gas-fired power plants to keep its processors cool.​ Ultimately, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg said he hopes it will grow to be the size of Manhattan in New York City. Already, it is anticipated that it will use twice as much energy as New Orleans. 

Louisiana’s campaign to reinvent itself as a “tech capital of the South” rests on a familiar bargain: public incentives in exchange for “industrial salvation,” Lewis said.

Supporters say the investment will bring jobs and modernization to one of Louisiana’s poorest parishes. But local officials see the deal cutting both ways. “We’re working every day on new sewer and water lines,” said Washington, the local mayor. “It’s progress, but people who lived here for decades are being priced out.” Since Meta’s announcement, farmland values in Richland Parish have jumped to $20,000 per acre. The Louisiana average is just $3,200 per acre, according to market listings. The median parish home price now exceeds $270,000 — an 80% rise from early 2024.

LEFT: The construction project could last until at least 2030. TOP RIGHT: Residents believe local farms will be diminished over the coming years. BOTTOM RIGHT: Downtown Rayville at sunset. (Adam Mahoney/Capital B)

A recent housing study says the parish will need to see a 10% increase in housing every year by 2029 to accommodate newcomers. Even in the most resourced urban cores, housing typically increases between 2 and 5% every year. 

Lewis warns that the project could intensify old inequities as a result. “These are computers, not factories. They’ll use enormous water capacity, drive up emissions, and raise bills for people who can’t afford it.” 

Meta’s filings show the facility will consume hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day, which could strain the parish water system that earned an “F” grade from the state in 2022. Meanwhile, despite hosting an infrastructure project built to power global connectivity, only 68% of Richland residents have internet access, compared to 85% of Louisianans and 90% of Americans. 

“We can’t keep acting like technology and industry will come save us” Lewis said. “Meta’s presence won’t bring broadband to Richland Parish or clean water to its homes — that still takes public will.

In the meantime, said Hunter, Macedonia’s church historian, each week, another for‑sale sign goes up. Pickup trucks idle outside, and construction workers are outbidding families who’ve lived here for generations.

“Groceries, gas, electricity — everything going up,” she said. “We’ll keep welcoming people, but we also have to make the housing affordable for those who want to stay.”

A simple ethics debate, or not?

Beyond Richland Parish, experts said, one question still lingers with AI, the South, and the church: who, in the end, is entitled to play God?

For clergy such as Clark, technology can amplify divine purpose. For Sledge and others at Macedonia, it threatens to invert the moral order entirely, replacing stewardship with consumption.

“There are hurting people in our community, and they come wanting someone who’s real, someone they can talk to about the reality of this place,” said Sledge, recalling his years ministering in the parish jail.

It is at this point where Lauren Griffin says the battle over the parish’s – and the South’s – identity will begin to diverge the most. Griffin, a professor in Louisiana State University’s religious studies department, runs the school’s new AI & Religion Collaborative. The research group investigates the relationship between religion, culture, and artificial intelligence. 

LEFT: Lakeisha Williams hopes the project brings investment to her home. RIGHT: For residents, neighborhood relationships have long made the community special. (Adam Mahoney/Capital B)

AI is already shaping how people worship, learn, and imagine the sacred: algorithms are curating sermons for preachers, prayer apps are delivering customized devotionals, and predictive models are influencing moral debate and how the word is received. It is also dictating, for example, what kind of information one receives on their social media timeline about a $30 billion data center. 

Yet the reverse is also true. If data centers and their workers come from more rural, Christian pockets, that may also ensure that AI evolves with our faith’s fingerprints still visible, she said.

As new technologies take root and the boundaries between faith and progress blur, communities face the challenge of naming what they trust — and what they fear. 

“What’s most troubling,” Pinn said, “isn’t who people worship with, but how religious principles and theological claims in this case get used to justify disregard and the marginalization of populations.”

That moral tension, he said, endures as technology remakes human work and ecology. “Churches might have assumed a moral framework premised on human activity in the world,” Pinn said, “but artificial intelligence is forcing a rethinking of morality and ethics.”

The wager, Pinn said, is whether prosperity built on artificial intelligence can coexist with a way of life rooted in God and land.

For Lakeisha Williams, a 45-year-old mother of three in Delhi, the debate is quite simple. All that matters is being able to stay in her home. On her street, some homes have jumped 125% this year. 

And for Sledge and Clark alike, God is the force behind keeping Richland Parish and its current residents around, even if the work between Sundays looks different. “We just keep preaching the message of hope and doing whatever we can to be supportive of each other while trusting God,” Sledge said.

For the next several years, they both expect days to hum loudly with machinery. But they hope the prayer and the songs remain, too.