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.
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
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