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

  • Cuttlefish1111@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    The fact white supremacists hijacked the Christian religion and is using it to effectively push their ideology is telling. I remember when they tried to take over punk music and were quickly told “ Nazi Punks Fuck Off”. Turns out punks have better morals than Christians. Hilarious.

    • vala@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Turns out punks have better morals than Christians.

      I don’t think that any reasoning person thought otherwise.

      • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de
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        8 months ago

        Were you around for the satanic panic bullshit in the 70s or 80s? They painted punks (which were lumped in with metalheads and anyone who didn’t dress like yuppies) as dangerous degenerates back then.

        Worked as a nice filter to gain more independent thinkers into those genres though I guess, so it worked out in the end.

        • vala@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          I wasn’t around personally but I’m familiar with the story.

          My point is really that any reasoning person sees that the punk mindset is generally pretty morally sound.

          I don’t think the parents, preachers and politicians involved in the satanic panic were super logical people tbh.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      “Hijacked” implies they weren’t a welcomed part of it from the beginning.

      • Cuttlefish1111@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Yes they’ve always been racist, But this time it’s much different. Nazis and white Supremacists have blended in with them. I believe this a very important nuanced distinction.

      • Cuttlefish1111@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        No doubt, yet I feel the movement (to expand) has been organized and pushed by white supremacists and not Christians.