Subscribe to Christian Futurism
<100 subscribers
This article provides general information and theological reflection, not legal advice. Consult licensed attorneys regarding your specific situation and jurisdiction. For technical privacy guidance, see resources from Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), ACLU (aclu.org), and First Liberty Institute (firstliberty.org).
The customs agent hands back your passport but keeps your phone.
“We need to examine this. Standard procedure.”
You stand there. American citizen. Born here. Church every Sunday. You’ve never broken a law in your life.
The agent disappears into a back room with your entire digital existence. Every photo of your children. Your banking apps. The text thread with your spouse about whether you can afford the mortgage this month. Those late-night messages to your pastor about the doubts you’ve never spoken aloud. The encrypted Signal conversations with missionaries in countries where Christianity means prison. Prayer requests from your small group revealing marriages in crisis, addictions nobody else knows about, a teenager’s suicide attempt her parents are still processing.
You wait.
Thirty minutes become an hour. An hour becomes two. You watch other travelers pass through while you stand there, feeling increasingly like a suspect in a crime you didn’t commit.
When they finally return your phone, the agent says nothing. Nothing about what they found. Nothing about what they copied. Nothing about what software they may have installed to monitor you going forward. You receive no receipt. No documentation. No record this interrogation ever happened.
You tell yourself it’s fine. You’re innocent. You have nothing to hide.
But your hands are shaking. Something in your gut knows this was wrong.
Scripture agrees with your unease. And Scripture has something to say about why you’ve been trained to accept it.
If you’ve felt that creeping discomfort when “nothing to hide” rhetoric makes total surveillance feel inevitable; if you’ve wondered why your instinct toward privacy feels almost shameful in a culture demanding transparency; if you’ve sensed that protecting the vulnerable matters more than performing compliance for systems that have no right to your soul’s inner workings; you’re not paranoid. You’re awake.
The question is whether you’ll stay awake. Or whether you’ll do what comfortable American Christians have been doing for decades: roll over, go back to sleep, and tell yourself it’s someone else’s problem.
The Official Fourthwall shop of Rockefeller Kennedy of Christian Futurism. Find the latest content, support Christian Futurism, and stay up to date with the community.
“If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.”
You’ve heard this your whole life. You’ve probably said it yourself. Good Christians submit to authority, right? Romans 13 and all that.
Here’s the problem: this logic baptizes a fundamental rejection of everything Scripture teaches about human dignity.
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. — Genesis 1:26-27 NKJV [1]
The Hebrew term tselem (צֶלֶם), meaning image or representation, doesn’t describe something you earn through good behavior. It describes something you ARE. You bear God’s image not because you’ve proven yourself innocent to some government database. You bear it because the Creator of the universe designed you that way. The tselem Elohim grants inherent worth that exists independent of your behavior, your innocence, or whether the state has decided you deserve dignity today. [2]
Think about what’s actually on your phone right now.
That prayer you typed out at 2 AM when you couldn’t sleep. The search history showing what fears keep you awake. Messages to your spouse about money, about your marriage, about the kids. Conversations with friends where you admitted things you’ve never said out loud in church. Photos of your children in moments you’d never share publicly. Financial records. Medical information. The digital breadcrumbs of your entire interior life.
None of this loses its sacred character because you haven’t committed crimes.
When surveillance systems treat your digital life as state property pending investigation, they’re not just violating your privacy. They’re rejecting the biblical truth that your personhood; your thoughts, your relationships, your struggles, your prayers; belongs first to God, not Caesar.
The “nothing to hide” argument makes innocence the condition for dignity.
Scripture makes image-bearing the condition for dignity.
These are not the same thing. And the fact that you’ve been taught to confuse them is not an accident.
What Scripture Reveals About Information Ethics in the Surveillance Age
“Let every person be subject to the governing authorities,” Paul writes in Romans 13:1-7. American Christians love this verse. We quote it whenever someone questions state power. We use it to shut down conversations about resistance.
We conveniently forget what comes next.
But Peter and the other apostles answered and said: “We ought to obey God rather than men.” — Acts 5:29 NKJV [3]
Same apostles. Same church. Different situation; and suddenly submission has limits.
Paul himself; the same Paul who wrote Romans 13; spent his entire ministry defying government orders. He snuck out of Damascus in a basket to escape arrest. He appealed to Caesar when local officials abused their authority. He wrote half the New Testament from prison cells where he’d been thrown for refusing to stop preaching. He died because he wouldn’t bend the knee to empire demands that contradicted his Lord.
Biblical submission to governing authorities was never meant to be unconditional surrender. We submit when authority operates within its God-ordained scope. We resist when it demands what belongs to God alone.
Your conscience belongs to God. Your family’s privacy belongs to God. Your spiritual community’s confidential communications belong to God. The intimate details of how you bear His image in this world belong to God.
The state has no biblical right to any of it. And surrendering these things isn’t submission. It’s idolatry with extra steps.
You need to understand what’s actually happening right now.
Recent reporting reveals ICE restarted a $2 million contract for Paragon’s Graphite spyware. [4] This isn’t some exotic foreign technology. This is software that can infiltrate your phone remotely; no malicious link required, no suspicious download. It just reaches into your device and takes whatever it wants. Encrypted messages. Deleted files. Everything.
Separate contracts provide billions of daily location signals from millions of American devices, purchased from commercial data brokers without any warrant requirement. [5] Facial recognition systems scan crowds without judicial oversight. Cell-site simulators; fake cell towers; vacuum up communications from everyone in range regardless of whether they’re investigation targets.
This isn’t theoretical tyranny waiting in some hypothetical future.
This is documented surveillance infrastructure operating in your country right now. And you’ve been trained to shrug at it because you have “nothing to hide.”
Here’s where this gets uncomfortable. Because everything I’ve described so far might still feel like someone else’s problem.
You’re not crossing borders regularly. You’re not an activist. You’re not doing anything that would attract attention. You’re just living your life, going to church, raising your kids.
So why should you care?
Because Scripture doesn’t let you off that easy.
“You shall neither mistreat a stranger nor oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” — Exodus 22:21 NKJV [6]
God didn’t tell Israel to protect strangers only when it was convenient. He didn’t say “look out for the vulnerable unless it makes you uncomfortable.” He grounded the command in their own history of oppression: you know what it’s like. You remember Egypt. Now act like it.
The prophets Isaiah and Amos didn’t just critique individual sin. They raged against systemic oppression; and they reserved their harshest words for comfortable people who ignored injustice because it didn’t affect them personally.
Right now, today, people in your community face surveillance risks you think will never experience.
People of color. Ethnic minorities. Foreign-born citizens who’ve lived here for decades. Asylum seekers with legal status. Border crossings that are minor inconveniences for you become hours-long interrogations for them. Device seizures. Biometric collection. Intimidation designed to make them feel like criminals regardless of their actual legal innocence. [7]
When comfortable Christians shrug at surveillance expansion because “I have nothing to hide,” we abandon the vulnerable. We become exactly what Isaiah condemned: prosperous enough to ignore justice, secure enough to look the other way, comfortable enough to tell ourselves it’s not our problem.
And here’s the part that should keep you awake at night:
The millions Christians facing active persecution here at home and globally globally don’t have the luxury of your comfortable assumptions. [8] The surveillance infrastructure being normalized in America gets exported. The facial recognition systems. The predictive algorithms. The social monitoring tools. They end up in the hands of regimes that use them for algorithmic targeting, predictive arrests, and systematic persecution of believers.
When you shrug at surveillance expansion here, you help build the systems that hunt your brothers and sisters overseas.
Your silence isn’t neutral. Your compliance isn’t harmless. Your “nothing to hide” theology funds the machinery of persecution.
A prudent man foresees evil and hides himself, but the simple pass on and are punished. — Proverbs 22:3 NKJV [9]
This isn’t paranoia. It’s the REFUGE Framework applied to the world we actually live in. [10]
1. Recognize threats as real, not hypothetical. Stop telling yourself this is someone else’s problem. The spyware contracts are documented. The data purchases are public record. The infrastructure exists. Pretending otherwise isn’t faith; it’s denial dressed up in Christian language.
2. Establish encrypted communication channels before you need them. Signal. ProtonMail. Set these up now, when things are calm. Not when you’re already in crisis. Not when the missionary in a hostile country desperately needs to reach you and every other channel is compromised. Do it this week.
3. Foster sacred communication boundaries. Some conversations are holy ground. Pastoral counseling. Spiritual direction. Confession. Prayer requests revealing the deepest struggles of human souls. This content deserves protection from systems designed to exploit vulnerability. Treat it accordingly.
4. Uphold the vulnerable through practical action. Help foreign-born church members understand what they face before they travel. Create a community fund for travel devices so international travelers aren’t risking their primary phones at borders. Stop giving advice and start giving assistance.
5. Guard community information systematically. The GUARD Framework coordinates with REFUGE here. [11] You’re not just protecting yourself. You’re protecting everyone connected to you. Everyone in your contacts. Everyone in your message threads. Everyone whose vulnerabilities are documented in your prayer request folder. Act like their safety matters. Because it does.
How Biblical wisdom protects modern Christian communities from digital exploitation
Divine protection doesn’t mean passive acceptance of injustice. It means wise preparation combined with trust in God’s ultimate sovereignty.
“Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” — Matthew 10:16 NKJV [12]
Both. Not either/or.
Jesus didn’t tell his disciples to be naive as sheep and hope everything works out. He told them to be wise. Cunning, even. Aware of the wolves. Prepared for hostility. And simultaneously innocent; not because innocence protects you from wolves, but because your character isn’t determined by your circumstances.
This week: Identify one vulnerable population in your church or community facing surveillance risks that comfortable members don’t recognize. Not theoretically. Actually do it. Find their names. Learn their situations. Start a conversation about what protection actually looks like.
Connect with organizations doing this work: ACLU, EFF, First Liberty Institute. [13] Support groups protecting persecuted Christians globally: Open Doors, International Christian Concern, Voice of the Martyrs.
Stop waiting for someone else to act. The comfortable Christianity that outsources justice to professionals is exactly what the prophets condemned.
Where has “nothing to hide” theology shaped your assumptions about surveillance, and what would it cost you to publicly reject that framework in your community?
Who are the vulnerable people in your church whose surveillance risks you’ve never considered; and what prevents you from asking them directly what they need?
If your compliance with surveillance systems contributes to infrastructure that persecutes believers globally, what does repentance actually look like?
Like what you’re reading? Subscribe to stay updated on how biblical wisdom exposes the surveillance state and protects vulnerable communities. And if this made you uncomfortable, share it with someone else who needs their comfortable assumptions challenged.
Find Christian Futurism here: Substack, Medium, Paragraph
Buy the books on Amazon: Rockefeller Kennedy on Amazon
Available also as a Podcast: on Spotify, as well as PocketCasts!
Support this research and receive priority access to digital discipleship insights through Fourthwall, BuyMeACoffee or Ko-fi. Your partnership funds continued investigation into biblical frameworks that multiply both kingdom impact and digital freedom for the global church.
[1] Genesis 1:26-27 NKJV — Blue Letter Bible: Genesis 1
[2] Hoekema, Anthony A., Created in God’s Image (Eerdmans, 1986), 11-35 — Scribd
[3] Acts 5:29 NKJV — Blue Letter Bible: Acts 5
[4] EFF investigation (2025): ICE Paragon Graphite spyware contract documentation — EFF REPORT
[5] Electronic Frontier Foundation: Border Search Exception analysis — EFF Border Search Resources
[6] Exodus 22:21 NKJV — Blue Letter Bible: Exodus 22
[7] ACLU: Border Rights documentation and case studies — ACLU Border Rights
[8] Open Doors: World Watch List persecution statistics (365 million Christians) — Open Doors World Watch List; See also Rockefeller Kennedy Post #24
[9] Proverbs 22:3 NKJV — Blue Letter Bible: Proverbs 22
[10] REFUGE Framework — Rockefeller Kennedy Post #13: Comprehensive biblical framework for digital protection
[11] GUARD Framework — Rockefeller Kennedy Post #16: Community information protection methodology
[12] Matthew 10:16 NKJV — Blue Letter Bible: Matthew 10
[13] Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), ACLU (aclu.org), First Liberty Institute (firstliberty.org) — Legal resources for digital rights and religious liberty
Rockefeller Kennedy
No comments yet