Autopsy of a Deceased Church

From a book review by Macken­zie Mor­gan on the Quak­er Out­reach site:

Often church­es that fail to reflect their chang­ing local com­mu­ni­ty die off in a gen­er­a­tion or two. Implic­it bias has been a point of dis­cus­sion in some year­ly meet­ings in recent years, and this is related.

In fact, a Friend once told me they’d been asked, “can we tar­get these Face­book ads only to peo­ple who are just like us?”

Actu­al­ly, Face­book can cre­ate what they call looka­like audi­ences. It’s very cool and very creepy at the same time. It’s part of the suite of fine-grain tar­get­ing tools that’s let­ting polit­i­cal pro­pa­gan­dists and lifestyle-focused com­pa­nies con­trol our media con­sump­tion at the social feed lev­el and rein­force liked-minded group­think. Atten­tion silos are dan­ger­ous for our democ­ra­cy and they’re no good for our church­es. If the Quak­er good news has any mean­ing left in it, it has to be wide­ly applic­a­ble out­side of our cul­tur­al, style bubbles.

Autop­sy of a Deceased Church

2 thoughts on “Autopsy of a Deceased Church

  1. Oh, I know Face­book has that. I (sad­ly) worked for a com­pa­ny that does social media ads for mega­corps (because they bought the news soft­ware com­pa­ny I was work­ing for), and that talk was part of what made me flee. 

    It’s just a galling ques­tion. The prob­lem isn’t with the diverse vis­i­tors. It’s with the meet­ing that can’t wel­come them.

    1. Year ago, I found myself in an air­port line with some oth­er Quak­ers on our way to a com­mit­tee meet­ing. One of my com­pan­ions start­ed hit­ting on a young woman near us. She was White and styl­ish in a way that would total­ly fit in a FGC AYF cud­dle pud­dle and he was pros­e­ly­tiz­ing. It was obvi­ous he was respond­ing to her looka­like style.

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