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
Hi, Christian here. I agree that a lot of this is quite fishy. There are a couple things I want to contest though:
Violent prayer. I never heard of it before, but I looked it up. It’s a misnomer, and the definition provided here is incorrect. It simply refers to persistent and fervent prayer.
Prayerwalking. Its inclusion implies that there’s something creepy or dangerous about it, but it’s actually harmless. It’s literally just people going for a walk and praying as they go (not making a show of it.)
That’s weird… I’ve never heard the term, but I grew up in an Evangelical Christian household, and I knew exactly what they were referring to as soon as I read it.
For clarity, which definition did your upbringing suggest?
I don’t know what you mean by “which definition” as though there’s a few for me to select from…? I’m just saying that the term seems self-explanatory to me, and I’m not exactly sure how to describe it better than that.
They think they are literally performing “spiritual warfare,” and that their words have power to destroy (yes, real and literal) demonic forces that are usually the cause of issues in your life. Usually mental health issues, shockingly. They take this VERY seriously as this is a matter of eternity in their addled minds.
It seems as though they believe that the more angry and fervent they are with that “spiritual warfare,” the better it works?