The future of proselytizing—and
surveillance—has arrived. An app called Bless Every
Home, which has been backed by some of the biggest names in
evangelical circles, is mapping the personal information of immigrants and
non-Christians in a bid to conduct door-to-door religious conversions and “prayerwalking”
rituals through their neighborhoods.
The app
boasts influential supporters, including the former leader of the Southern
Baptist Convention, Jim Henry, and controversial Christian data-harvesting firm Gloo. 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.
Naturally, the app also comes bundled with
less attractive bells and whistles, including a range of serious privacy and
data security concerns. Nevertheless, it highlights how a network of
evangelists, determined to bring back the Lord to an America that has seen
Christian beliefs and church attendance steadily receding, plans to reverse
these trends—whether its targets like it or not.
Published by nonprofit missionary group Mapping
Center for Evangelism and Church Growth, the Bless Every
Home app describes itself in its own promotional
video as a “harvest tool to reach souls for Christ.” 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.
It’s all fairly innocuous on the surface, but
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.
One video obtained by The New Republic rates Houston suburbs with large Muslim
populations as “shooting fish in a barrel” when it comes to evangelism. Kevin
Greeson, Texas hub leader of Global Gates, a large
missionary network and enthusiastic customer of Bless Every Home, explains the
ways the app can be used. 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.”
Asked by a trainee how to respond to concerns
that people may have about the app during the training video, Greeson concedes
that “this thing is so powerful—it’s an invasion of privacy.” He claims that
there are 50 different sources of information that are used to provide the
comprehensive dataset, which is all “public information.” This is a bit of a
dodge: Much of the data that Greeson is talking about harvesting in this
fashion is commercial information not generally available to the public. Moreover,
the way he intends it to be used, which in this case would lead to missionaries
essentially publishing online lists of information about targeted ethnic groups
in specific locations, could conceivably be dangerous in the wrong hands.
Contacted by The New Republic about privacy and data security concerns, Greeson,
who emphasized that Global Gates is a paying customer of the app and not
responsible for its content, said that “data remains within the confidentiality
of each Global Gates missionary.” Sharing with partnering churches, he added,
means that “only … one or two people in the church” have access to it.
Greeson added that Global Gates only uses the lists of houses with children for
Vacation Bible School invitations, saying, “We always strive to protect privacy
and especially the safety of children.” A privacy statement on the Bless Every
Home website says that it does not “knowingly collect personal information from
children under 13.” (Representatives for Bless Every Home did not respond to
requests for comment.)
Whatever specific use they might have for the
app notwithstanding, Bless Every Home customers are attracted by a marketing
pitch that offers solutions designed to “support the Great Commission in
America,” which includes receiving weekly updates about new people moving into
their area.
The Great Commission is a widely used term in
evangelical communities, derived from the gospel of Matthew, where Jesus
urges his apostles to make “disciples of all nations.” Once the motivation
behind foreign missionary efforts, these days it has been inverted to target
multicultural, multifaith America.
The Mapping Center for Evangelism and Church
Growth’s founder and president Chris Cooper suggests using the app to conduct
neighborly activities such as putting on a barbecue for potential converts, but
scattered throughout the app’s training and promotional videos are suggestions
to undertake the controversial practice of “prayerwalking.” An idea becoming increasingly
popular among Christian supremacist groups, prayerwalking involves believers
flooding so-called “un-Christian” territories in order to combat “demonic strongholds.” In practice, it varies from blessing new neighbors to gathering groups to pray
in front of everything from mosques to drag bars in service of “spiritual
warfare.”
The practice is derived from a term that comes
from Ephesians 6:12, describing a struggle that is “not against flesh and
blood” but opposing “the powers of this dark world” and “the spiritual forces
of evil in the heavenly realms.” Far from obscure, spiritual warfare is
possibly the most influential doctrine in evangelical circles today,
encouraging true believers to put on the “full armor of God” and go into battle
in their everyday lives.
To be clear, no one is demanding that their flock
go out to storm a synagogue or shoot up a mosque. This brand of “warfare” instead
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”).
Prayerwalking is a relatively recent form of spiritual warfare, and the most widely used one, and its adherents would say that it is
simply a peaceful form of intercession. But the practice developed a dark
reputation in an incredibly short amount of time. It was, after all, a prayerwalk on January 5, 2021, that was cited by the January 6 report as one of two “critically
important” rallies that “helped pave the way” for the violent events the
following day. (Ironically, Kevin Greeson of the aforementioned training
video shares his name with a man who died after a medical emergency during the
January 6 riot at the Capitol.)
Following the prayerwalk, on January 6, there
was a “Jericho march.” Arguably an outgrowth of the prayerwalking movement,
Jericho marches are an idea taken from the Old Testament book of Joshua, where God instructed the
Israelites to march around the city of Jericho seven times praying, singing, and
blowing shofars.
While this wasn’t the first march of its kind, they have since become a
feature of right-wing protest movements across the world. Jericho marches have,
so far, been used as a weapon of protest rather than evangelism, but the fact
that this is their antecedent is troubling.
It doesn’t take a leap of faith to appreciate
that Muslims, Hindus, and Jews might feel uncomfortable seeing a group of
hard-core Christians prayerwalk past their house or place of worship, seeking to
drive out demons and force heathens to see the light. Equally, 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.
There are already hints that this ecosystem
has moved beyond simple prayer. Global Gates, whose training video was the
catalyst for this story, previously employed David and Rivka Costello, an
evangelical couple who allegedly posed as Orthodox Jews to convert Jewish
people to Christianity in the Chicago neighborhood of West Rogers Park (and now
preach a form of Messianic
Judaism that is not recognized by the major Jewish sects).
Another organization, the Unreached People
Groups of North America, of which Global Gates is a partner, has searchable online
databases that use the information available to Bless Every Home customers.
Deploying scores of pages devoted to specific ethno-religious subgroups, such
as “Bozniaks in Chicago” and “Bukharan Jews in New York,” it provides
comprehensive breakdowns of demographics, places of worship, and even cafés
that are frequented by the targeted communities.
It’s not pleasant, but neither is it hard to
imagine the aftermath of an incident of political violence, where an ethno-religious group in
the United States is subject to a pogrom based on online lists. Dissidents from
foreign regimes could rightly have cause for concern. But what’s being
done, allegedly in God’s name, is already enough to make anyone feel squeamish.
Bless Every Home and its many
subscribers may be using commercial data with the best of intentions, but
placing people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds on easy-to-access
databases is a dangerous road to go down, no matter how urgently they want to
spread the good news.
Source: newrepublic.com
