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
I always kind of wonder how it would go if I ever actually answered the door to proselytizing folks.
They’d clearly be unprepared to answer about the late insertion of the fundraising reversal in Luke.
Or the ambiguous engendering of God.
Or the eroding of a matriarchal tradition in early Judaism.
Or that a lot of the stories were probably appropriated from elsewhere.
How long before they fold their arms and say “well I don’t know about that” or “I’ll have to ask my preacher”? Will I stay on their list for another round of discussion, or not?
To date the only folks I’ve interacted with around my neighborhood were Mormon missionaries, who are just so well mannered and youthfully naive I didn’t have the heart to pull out a map that shows the distance between Manchester, NY and Jerusalem.
‘Angry’ proselytizers though I feel like I’d have at least a few words for their deaf ears to balance things out for the rest of the neighborhood having to hear their words in turn.
Are you trying to convince them they’re wrong? Or just get them to leave you alone? Wouldn’t it be simpler to just tell them you’re a believer (in whatever thing they’re preaching to you) and then wish them a blessed day or whatever? That would surely get them off your back.