It puts a lot of features at the fingertips of the faithful, including the ability to filter whole neighborhoods by religion, ethnicity, “Hispanic country of origin,” “assimilation,” and whether there are children living in the household.
Its core function is to produce neighborhood maps and detailed tables of data about people from non-Anglo-European backgrounds, drawn from commercial sources typically used by marketing and data-harvesting firms.
training videos produced by users show the extent to which evangelical groups are using sophisticated ways to target non-Christian communities, with questionable safeguards around security and privacy.
In one instance, he points to the sharable note-taking function and suggests leaving information for each household, such as “Daughter left for college” and “Mother is in the hospital.”
increasingly popular among Christian supremacist groups, prayerwalking calls on believers to wage “violent prayer” (persistently and aggressively channeling emotions of hatred and anger against Satan), engage in “spiritual mapping” (identifying areas where evil is at work, such as the darkness ruling over an abortion clinic, or the “spirit of greed” ruling over Las Vegas), and conduct prayerwalking (roaming the streets in groups, “praying on-site with insight”).
newly arrived refugees might well find a knock on the door from strangers with knowledge of their personal circumstances distressing—and that’s before these surprise visitors even begin to attempt to convert them.
placing people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds on easy-to-access databases is a dangerous road to go down
In other words first they will use words then move on to more “persuasive” methods when that doesn’t work.
Okay, so this app is super messed up, but this take on prayerwalking is the equivalent to satanic panic for D&D.
Prayerwalking is just what the portmanteau describes. Sometimes it contains an evangelistic bent of looking for specific people to pray with or whatever, but mostly it’s just people out praying for people and places.
ok but accosting strangers with your religion, and using an app to target them, does seem a bit beyond the pale.
Completely agree. I genuinely believe everyone should be allowed to believe and behave how they want, free from coercion, so long as they aren’t inhibiting anyone else’s ability to believe or behave as they please.
I think there’s plenty to criticize here without resorting to the same outlandish polemics they employ.
“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. … But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” Matthew 6:5-6
I don’t disagree with the sentiment, though the historical context makes the statement very different. The point wasn’t that you can only pray in private. The point was you can’t use apparent piety to increase your social collateral.
Doubtless, some of these people are only out there for exactly that reason. Others because they genuinely care and are deeply misguided in how best to demonstrate that concern.
They won’t accept historical context for anything they believe in. Why should this be any different?
Because we should at least be consistent in our arguments even if they’re not. That’s why I’m saying anything at all.