Imagine it’s a bright and pleasant Sunday morning. You walk through the doors of your church and are greeted by familiar faces, friendly handshakes, and warm coffee. The service is an uplifting refuge from a challenging week full of difficulties at home and at work. You sing songs and read scripture in unison as you feel a powerful sense of connection with your church community in this weekly ritual. You listen to your pastor’s sermon and regain a spiritual awareness and meaning that was lost in the week’s rat race and turbulent headlines. Perhaps you make plans with your church friends to grab lunch, and you all leave feeling great. Everyone in your church gets in their cars and looks at their phones before driving away to find each and every one of you was the target of a digital propaganda campaign; you go from spiritual transcendence to the sobering realization that you are a datapoint of a geofencing effort. The casualty of a foreign information war.

This is the collision between one of the oldest domains of the human experience, religion, and one of its newest, cyberspace. The digital holy war is upon us, and the frontline is simultaneously your sanctuary and in your pocket. This signifies a dangerous fusion of the weaponization of religion and screentime in what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself called the eighth front of Israel’s war.

This Israeli geofencing operation was exposed this week, and it must be dissected meticulously. But unfortunately, Israeli data driven propaganda efforts in the United States are nothing new. I know this, because I helped to lead some of these efforts while working as the Strategic Outreach Director at the Consulate General of Israel to the Southwest United States, where I spent over eight years gathering data on thousands of individuals, organizations, and houses of worship.

To give you a better understanding of the scope and scale of my central database, it is an excel doc made up of twenty-four separate sheets. The first sheet is mostly Protestant churches and organizations. It has 985 rows featuring over seven hundred churches, at least 260 of which are megachurches. The second sheet tracks every single prominent Catholic Bishop or Archbishop across our region sixty-nine individuals and over one hundred additional Catholic leaders just in the Houston area. I tracked around 220 interfaith leaders or organizations. Each of these sheets had columns tracking things like denomination, approximate size, public and private contact information, the history of our correspondence, anything noteworthy regarding the church or pastor, and I even had one column labeled controversy where many individuals were involved in serious crimes. I tracked if the church was predominately Black or Latino, because we would do some outreach particularly targeting them. I tracked Christian media organizations, articles about Christian Zionism, and individuals and churches that were opposed to Israel.

I even tracked organizations like the Faith & Freedom Network that are connected to this new geofencing effort. When I go through each sheet pressing CTRL+F and searching for “@” to try to get an approximation of the number of email addresses it adds up to 3,688 cells, and some of these cells have multiple email addresses in them. I would use this information to send out email blasts for prayer campaigns, plan guest lists for large events, and plan outreach efforts to grow my network. I eventually built a reputation in the Houston interfaith scene as being a valuable node of connection. I would often get invited to partner on events with other organizations because they wanted access to the contacts I had. I would add some of them to the guest list while I gained access to the master guest list of these events and harvest new contacts from those lists to expand my own reach. I gathered all of this data and information while I hid behind a VPN and much of my own communications had an encrypted shield.

In regards to the new geofencing effort, it was revealed through disclosures filed under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the same agency I worked under, allocated $4.1 million to the newly formed organization, Show Faith by Works, led by Chad Schnitger, to carry out this propaganda campaign. This California-based outfit plans to target every major church and major Christian Universities in California, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado.

It was reported that they have already identified two-hundred churches in Texas to target as well. Among them is Houston’s First Baptist, where I had already established solid connections. This operation involves placing a digital ‘fence’ around a physical location, and then targeting all the mobile devices trapped inside that fence with propaganda encouraging people to unquestioningly support Israel’s war. It is undeniable that churches are being specifically targeted in a Machiavellian effort to weaponize the theology of American Christians. There is a reason the fences are not erected in random locations. Pro-Israel actors understand that many people will be hesitant to criticize the religious beliefs of others, because to do so is to cross a taboo, so external resistance is minimal. They understand that religious beliefs are an especially powerful motivating force that can enable the powerful to influence the vulnerable. What they don’t seem to understand is the inherent risk of playing with hellfire. There is a difference between influence and control, and sometimes when you play with fire you get burned. Tapping into religious extremism is like feeding a monster, and it can be difficult keeping that monster on a leash the larger it grows.

Make no mistake, the theological belief that Christians must demonstrate unequivocal support for the contemporary Israeli government because of Genesis 12:3 is extremism. The belief that the reestablishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the taking of Jerusalem in 1967 brings us one step closer to an Armageddon that you are aching for based on The Book of Revelation is extremism.

Libertarians and all freedom loving Americans understand the extreme privacy violation and troublesome intrusion of individual liberty that these foreign geofencing efforts impose. Americans should have the right to worship freely and have their data and physical locations secured from the systematic propaganda efforts of a foreign government. I find it insane that this actually has to be articulated, and the silence of our political leaders is deafening. Fenced in, one might ask: “Is this sanctuary a sacred place or a digital prison?” The right to worship freely also includes the right to digital privacy within one’s sanctuary—a right eroded by the same foreign surveillance methods libertarians have opposed when used by our own government to undermine Fourth Amendment principles, like the Patriot Act.

Consider for a moment how the Israeli government might expand and escalate these types of efforts using the data I had already collected on so many churches, organizations, and individuals. They are already all in on this effort; they already have the data, there is little will among our political leaders to challenge this, and other Israeli aligned foreign agents like AIPAC have spent far more than $4.1 million on individual congressional races. It is targeted, sophisticated information warfare done on the cheap and in the name of God. From a strategic perspective, it would be foolish for them not to synergize my database with these geofencing efforts across New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Kansas. I have to live knowing that my labor made the expansion of this digital weaponization possible. Please heed this warning coming from somebody who was on the inside.

My boss used to call these church targeting efforts “faith-based diplomacy.” I call it the subtle side of evil. There is something truly sinister about cynically exploiting people’s religious beliefs and need for community in order to cultivate support for an increasingly violent political project. If this continues unchecked, it will not end with churches. It never does. The so-called ceasefire I wrote about in a previous article has already gone up in smoke as Israeli strikes have killed over one hundred people last week alone. This bloodshed and this propaganda holy war will not stop until more of us say enough.