How Evangelicals Use Digital Surveillance to Target the Unconverted

The hot new thing in proselytizing is an app that allows Christian conservatives to collect data on whole neighborhoods of potential converts.

In other words Big Brother Jesus Is Watching YOU!

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.

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.

newrepublic.com