Evangelical app 'Bless Every Home' is mapping personal information of immigrants and non-Christians in a bid to conduct door-to-door religious conversions and “prayerwalking” rituals targeting them.
The hot new thing in proselytizing is an app that allows Christian conservatives to collect data on whole neighborhoods of potential converts.
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
I tried but they want you to give them your home address and I didn’t feel like doxing myself. I’m going to have to come up with a different home address that’s valid in their system. At the same time I don’t want to cause grief for the person whose address I use. Maybe I can use a church address.
Yeah I’m wondering what happens if we download it and start giving it bad data. Just say everyone is Christian, or that you’ve met with everyone in your town every day.
Why would you say everyone's a Christian? Might as well have some fun. Change all the ones marking themselves as Christians to say that they're gay liberal polygamists or something.
Fucking Christians, they just can’t believe in their fairy tale daddy in the sky and leave the rest of us alone, they have to smear their god like shit everywhere. Religion is a mental illness, it’s long overdue we start treating it that way.
Big brother who art in heaven, surveillance be thy name. Thy data come, recon be done, stored in SQL as it is in heaven. And lead us not into frustration, for thine is Consistent, Available, and Partition tolerant. COMMIT ;
select * from prayer_requests where response = 'yes' ;
0 rows returned
Very much creepy and very much on brand with evangelical assholes who prey on the less fortunate.
Still, I suppose it will give me more of an opportunity to tell them to kindly fuck the hell off my property when they ask for the 'nice Asian family that lives here' when my very Italian wife answers the door as they stand there looking very confused.
That's such a weird passage. I can't be understanding this correctly. God tells David to count the people. David sends his generals to count the people. They report the count back to David, who apologizes and says he sinned for doing what God told him to do? IDGI
The fact white supremacists hijacked the Christian religion and is using it to effectively push their ideology is telling. I remember when they tried to take over punk music and were quickly told “ Nazi Punks Fuck Off”. Turns out punks have better morals than Christians. Hilarious.
Were you around for the satanic panic bullshit in the 70s or 80s? They painted punks (which were lumped in with metalheads and anyone who didn’t dress like yuppies) as dangerous degenerates back then.
Worked as a nice filter to gain more independent thinkers into those genres though I guess, so it worked out in the end.
Yes they’ve always been racist, But this time it’s much different. Nazis and white Supremacists have blended in with them. I believe this a very important nuanced distinction.
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.
"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
So many people in this comment section not getting it. This is a list of people they will send to the camps. They're preparing for when the fascists take over.
I doubt GDPR can reach this in any way as it's foreigners' data collected and stored in a foreign country.
I'm not sure if it's directly EU-level, but unauthorized identity registries collected without consent are very illegal here; a certain religious organisation already got into trouble for keeping track of households that might want to talk about jesus. If this app is legal in US, the law really needs to be changed.
I don't know the details of this app, but if it's specifically US streets and notes on households there, then GDPR does not apply, as they're not mapping EU households. GDPR is only invoked if the personal information of Europeans is at risk.
Wow, this is absolutely fucking horrific. I assume they've imported everything from Kiwi Farms incarnation too? Bunch of evil fucks.
I'm kinda sick of all' the evil, actually. I get that it's very popular but maybe it shouldn't be? I'll just live in my own mind until people pull their heads out, I guess 🤷 What could possibly go wrong.
I sincerely hope that when they come to my door again, I am in the middle of carving up a side of beef, again. Last time some Mormons knocked on my door, I opened the door, and what they saw was a 6'3" blonde Viking with no shirt, a bloody carving knife, and wiping blood off my hands. When I saw who it was I yelled over my shoulder, (to an almost empty apartment,) "Hey guys, you can let the goat go! I just found us a couple of virgins!"
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]
It's creepy that they are collecting data about us without our knowledge nor consent. And having strangers then telling us private details about ourselves.
I wonder how they would react if we did this to them.
The crowd of "I have nothing to hide" that also has the highest incidence of minor sexual assault, domestic violence, and infidelity? I think they think they're talking to God who forgives whatever if you just say sorry and say a couple poems
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.
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.
That town ordinance certainly won't get abused, like it has in the past. Also, it goes against 1A. Just put up a NTP sign and a fence, they're not suppoed to bother you with that.
How long before they fold their arms and say "well I don't know about that" or "I'll have to ask my preacher"? Will I stay on their list for another round of discussion, or not?
To date the only folks I've interacted with around my neighborhood were Mormon missionaries, who are just so well mannered and youthfully naive I didn't have the heart to pull out a map that shows the distance between Manchester, NY and Jerusalem.
'Angry' proselytizers though I feel like I'd have at least a few words for their deaf ears to balance things out for the rest of the neighborhood having to hear their words in turn.
Are you trying to convince them they're wrong? Or just get them to leave you alone? Wouldn't it be simpler to just tell them you're a believer (in whatever thing they're preaching to you) and then wish them a blessed day or whatever? That would surely get them off your back.
With them it's at least more understandable cause a lot of them it's desperation. I don't have sympathy for the ones who are desperate because they don't want to pay child support, but I atleast understand it. The nosy cultists just want to be superior
IANAL, but I don't believe so. Most/all states have laws that allow people to access your property to come to your front door/porch, I forget the exact name, unless your property is fenced with clearly visible "private property/no trespassing" type signs.
However, once you've asked them to leave, they have to leave or they can be arrested/escorted away for trespassing should they refuse to and police become involved. In your example, if they were to come back after being asked to leave, I believe yes, but you couldn't arrest them, the police would have to.
In that last case, where you have asked them to leave and not come back... but they do. There is a thing called a citizen's arrest. Allowing nonpolice to make an arrest and detain a person. But what the law says and what you can do is often not the same.
I just imagined haveing your doorbell record you saying to never come back, then slapping handcuffs on them if they do. Kinda sounds like fun.