How Evangelicals Use Digital Surveillance to Target the Unconverted
newrepublic.com
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

  • ChocoboRocket@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    Regardless of your personal actions or beliefs, you are being lumped in with extremists. If that confuses you because you personally feel innocent, there is an expression that goes something like

    “If there are 9 people at a table and a Nazi sits and eats with them, there are 10 Nazis as the table.”

    Tolerating or being indifferent to abhorrent behaviour is the same as rewarding/endorsing abhorrent behaviour.

    As for the definition of evangelicals, there’s the literal definition

    “Evangelicalism (/ˌiːvænˈdʒɛlɪkəlɪzəm, ˌɛvæn-, -ən-/), also called evangelical Christianity or evangelical Protestantism, is a worldwide interdenominational movement within Protestant Christianity that emphasizes the centrality of sharing the “good news” of Christianity, being “born again” in which an individual experiences personal conversion, as authoritatively guided by the Bible, God’s revelation to humanity.[1][2][3][4][5] The word evangelical comes from the Greek word for “good news” (euangelion).[6]”

    And then there is the applied practice of evangelicals who spend considerable wealth influencing politics to turn America (and the world) into a theocratic state with the goal of converting everyone and doing away with anyone who resists their goals.

    They are uncompromising because they believe they act on God’s will giving them unquestionable holy authority to act as they see fit as long as it pushes their narrative and goals.

    It’s not my job to educate you on your own religion, if you’re lost as to why anyone would despise evangelicals even though “they’re not all like that” that is up to you to reconcile.

    There might be a subtle difference between a front lines Nazi and Hitler on the ‘innocence scale’ if you want to split hairs, but to everyone outside that group, a Nazi is a Nazi (who were all essentially evangelicals as well, surprise surprises)

    if you don’t believe me, here’s something to read since you like proof/evidence so much, but I doubt you’ll ever challenge your own beliefs.

    • Sotuanduso@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      So what I’m seeing here is that I’m being accused of fascism because some people I never met who claim to share my religion are fascists. But apparently that’s a justified accusation because apparently I have no issues with them.

      It wasn’t okay to lump Muslims in with Al-Qaeda. Why is this okay? Because the people you’re lumping me in with are in power?