That ‘Bless Every Home’ evangelism app is still creepy

Back in the heady days of 2021, I wrote about an evangelism app (archive) called ‘Bless Every Home.’ It was creepy sounding even then. Well, it’s back in the news. And somehow, it sounds even worse now.

(This post ran as a BONUS ROUND for the SBC abuse investigation post. I’ve moved its writeup to a separate post because they’re about different topics. For the audio file of this post, see the main link here.

Speaking of evangelical abuse, ‘Bless Every Home’

Recently, New Republic ran a story about ‘Bless Every Home‘ (archive). This is a super-creepy evangelism campaign that has participants making lists of their neighbors and their potential for recruitment. It asks Christians to ingratiate themselves with their targets through favors and compliments. And the information they upload can be seen by other people using the app, so they can coordinate recruitment efforts.

This is as creepy as it sounds. But it’s even creepier than the New Republic article puts it. Here’s what they write:

The app boasts influential supporters, including the former leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, Jim Henry, and controversial Christian data-harvesting firm Gloo. [. . .]

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 from missionary monitoring organization Beyneynu rates Houston suburbs with large Muslim populations as “shooting fish in a barrel” when it comes to evangelism.

They also link to a Julie Roys post about Gloo’s creepy role (archive) in the billion-dollar “He Gets Us” campaign. Gloo is a shadowy, behind-the-scenes data harvesting and mining company. In the “He Gets Us” campaign, they gather information from those interacting with their free merch site and request pages, then get that information out to paying customers with churches and evangelism groups. I’ve seen implications of political involvement on their part, too.

This evangelism app ain’t news, though.

Since December 2021, I’ve been sounding the warning klaxons on this app. I saw a mention of it over at Baptist Press and immediately wrote a post (archive) covering its many, many privacy and security flaws. It doesn’t sound like anything’s gotten better. In fact, it seems only to have gotten worse on both counts. I didn’t even know about Gloo back then. They weren’t on my radar yet. Just on its own, it was that skeevy.

Evangelicals don’t seem to think about the abuse potential of their glib attitude about privacy and security

A long time ago in 2019, I reviewed a bunch of evangelism apps (archive). One of them was so damned alarming that I literally stopped right where I was to write a concerned email to its creators. They did reply to me, but their response didn’t help a whole lot (image archive of full response):

We developed this mobile APP to be an assistant to the believer for evangelism and outreach.
The Prayer request feature is for it as well. When we as a team of evangelist and others go out and witness and someone responds to the gospel we enter their name in as a prayer request. So that we might lift them up in prayer. [. . .]

These individuals have committed to prayer for these needs. Your information is not stored in a data base, it only transmits as an email to these individuals.

When I told them that wasn’t actually allaying my concerns, I got another reply:

I apologize if I was not clear enough. We assume as a ministry that people who present prayer request in a mobile app understand that people will see and be praying for their request. Obviously we don’t List who is actually praying, maybe we should? [. . .]

As far as their request triggering emails to our team, we do not have any type of disclaimers about that. I don’t mind adding that. Something I did not think of just yet.

I don’t think this guy’s malevolent. Rather, I suspect that—like most evangelicals—he didn’t think about privacy concerns because it’s just not on his radar—or at least, was not at the time. As he said a few times, he operates the app as a small ministry with like-minded evangelicals. None of them can conceive of any privacy concerns they might be kicking up here. Evangelicals almost never ever—and I am being exceedingly, one might even say preposterously generous with that “almost” back there—conceive of bad-faith actors getting into their ministries.

“Bless Every Home” doesn’t even have that minor shield

I cannot extend the same good-faith reasoning to the people behind “Bless Every Home.” Even in 2021, I freaked right out over this app’s obvious and considerably-greater privacy violations. No way, no how do its target marks know that their private info is getting into a neighborhood evangelism database—much less consent to Gloo hoovering it up like a five-year-old in front of a chocolate fountain at Golden Corral and then spewing it everywhere they please.

Here’s how New Republic presents this database:

In one instance, he [Kevin Greeson, a Bless Every Home customer and evangelism group leader] 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.”

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.

The guy hilariously backtracked as much as he could after New Republic contacted him for comment. And “Bless Every Home” representatives didn’t comment at all, especially not on their customer calling neighborhoods of Muslims “fish in a barrel” for evangelists like him.

Desperation reveals the true heart of all of us

As evangelicals get more and more desperate to end their decline, we’re going to see increasing control-grabs like this one. We’ll also see more businesses like Gloo springing up to take advantage of that desperation. In the three years since I first saw “Bless Every Home” mentioned, that desperation has reached critical levels.

It’s scary to imagine evangelicals having any kind of information about evangelism targets. It really takes the supernatural quality out of soulwinning, too.

What Gloo is doing makes evangelism sound more like warm or hot reading, the dishonest cousins to cold reading. In cold reading, someone makes a lot of educated guesses about their target based on often quite subtle cues. In the variants, someone has increasing amounts of specific information about the mark that the mark doesn’t know they have. It’s presented as magically-gotten somehow, like a god told them their daughter was going off to college.

In future days, I strongly suspect that we’re going to hear about more and more creepy evangelical and right-wing political projects involving Gloo. Keep your ninja whiskers primed for its name. Something big’s coming down the pike with them. I don’t know what it is yet. But I see it peeking through its blinds.

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