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

  • ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    8 months ago

    Damn it. We already have to deal with the Mormons and the JWs periodically bothering us. Now numerous evangelical churches will be doing it too? I wish they’d all just get lost and leave people alone.

      • ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        8 months ago

        That’s a dark-as-fuck take. But honestly, you are probably on to something with it. Many evangelical ‘followers of Christ’ have a very different view on who he was than I and others do. Their Christ is a gun-wielding, xenophobic, intolerant, white skinned, white nationalist.

        Of course, if they ever get their wish and pass some of these restrictive, oppressive federal laws against ‘non-believers’, the next phase will be ruthless infighting. Because they will inevitably turn on each other over trivial differences of opinion.