A Christian phone network aims to purify the internet by blocking reality

Radiant Mobile’s “Jesus-centric” network doesn’t just ban adult content. It risks censoring news, education, and basic facts.

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A Christian-owned company is launching a new cellphone service that will block users from accessing any kind of adult content deemed inappropriate. While porn sites will be banned for all customers, other sites (like those discussing LGBTQ issues) will be blocked by default though that switched can be flipped by an adult.

The goal is to create a “Jesus-centric” network for all clients, according to Radiant Mobile founder Paul Fisher. MIT Technology Review explained how all this will work:

The network, which is currently being tested ahead of its May 5 launch date, will be run by Radiant Mobile, a newly launched mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). These operators don’t own cell towers but buy bandwidth from the big providers (in this case, T-Mobile) and sell to specific demographics (President Trump announced his own MVNO last year called Trump Mobile; CREDOMobile sends donations to progressive causes).

… He says Radiant is working with the Israeli cybersecurity company Allot to block categories of content, such as material about violence or self-harm. Some categories are banned by default and cannot be allowed even for adult users.

…

The technology to do this blocking is a blunt instrument: Allot groups website domains into more than a hundred categories, which include pornography but also violence, malware, gaming, and in Radiant Mobile’s case “sects,” which includes websites about Satanism. If one of its users tries to visit a website that belongs to a blocked category, the page won’t load.

So there’s basically a filter this company manages that blocks access to anything they perceive as un-Christian, including perfectly normal websites that simply talk about things they are too immature to handle. Adults can unblock those sites if they want to, but the assumption is that sex education websites are off-limits. Parents can also block their kids from visiting (or downloading) TikTok and YouTube. (Which is ridiculous given how much thoughtful, useful content is on those platforms if you know where to look!)

Why would anyone pay for a special network when they could simply avoid adult websites already? Presumably because they know they can’t handle the temptation. Or they just don’t trust their children. But if certain URLs are blocked, it’s generally easy to work around those filters. Just ask any tech-savvy kid. (The Radiant Mobile website insists kids will not be able to bypass the filter with a VPN because their system “intercepts traffic before other VPNs can override it.” But that assumes you’re using their network at all times.) And it’s not like you have to go directly to a porn site to watch adult content.

The more important question is how far this self-imposed censorship goes. What about Wikipedia articles on “adult” topics? What about medical websites that discuss health care for trans kids? What if I want to read a news story about what a Christian pastor just did to unsuspecting children? Or about Donald Trump’s affairs and assaults? Why choose this over programs like the Mike Johnson-approved “Covenant Eyes,” which alerts someone else if you visit an adult site (unless you’re Joshua Duggar and you work around the system)?

And if the goal is to censor certain kinds of websites from your children—like websites explaining what’s happening with their bodies during puberty because you believe ignorance is bliss—why on earth would you be so naïve to think they won’t learn that information some other way?

Indeed, even news sites might be blocked in this network:

… if a news site starts hosting enough gender-related content, Fisher might not just label it as “press,” which is allowed, but also “sexuality,” thus blocking the whole domain to any phone with that category blocked.

It’s unclear if gambling or prediction market apps will also be banned for everyone. What about Rumble and right-wing conspiracy theories? What about Roblox with all of its problems? What about museum websites that teach evolution and the Big Bang instead of Young Earth Creationism?

The irony is that your brain is arguably more likely to be damaged by listening to sermons from right-wing zealots, not accessing information about sex.

As conservative Christians would know from their efforts to censor banned books, using a blunt instrument to block people from accessing information rarely works. If anything, it just instills an urgency to get around the wall.

And if this sales pitch isn’t already enough, don’t worry. The company also plans to offer AI-created Bible slop.

To fill the gap left by all the sites being blocked, the company intends to offer access to a library of religious content, including AI-generated Bible videos. It plans to use characters like Cinderella, Tinker Bell, and others (it has obtained rights from the entertainment and media company Elf Labs, which has been amassing rights to hundreds of children’s characters). “Those characters were originally constructed with a conservative perspective," Klimis says. They’ll be used in AI-generated content alongside testimonials and devotionals.

If you’ve ever wanted to listen to Snow White talk about Noah’s Ark and how happy every was to watch God’s genocide of the rest of humanity, enjoy, I guess…

In that video, the bunnies are bigger than the lions, the zebras are as tall as the children, and the giraffes barely make it above Noah’s head. (Fundamentalists call that history.) There’s another video about Adam and Eve, two naked white people in a garden, but because that story has a Christian stamp of approval, it’s marketed as a children’s video.

No word yet on how Snow White plans to explain the story involving Lot and his two daughters… but maybe that won’t matter, according to these Redditors:

So if you’ve ever said to yourself, “I hate my current phone company and I wish it was shittier in every way,” this is the plan for you. It’s like the mobile version of a Christian movie: Worse by every conceivable metric despite the company having access to all the money they’d ever need.

At that point, why even get a phone with internet access at all? Get one of those old flip phones and call it a day.

What Radiant Mobile is really selling isn’t a phone plan. It’s just control. They control adults, and adults get to control kids, and kids are smart enough to get around both sets of censors. Which is something they’re going to have to do given that the Christian adults are effectively isolating them from the information required to function in the real world. The only people meaningfully affected by all this are the ones who don’t realize what’s being withheld from them—and that’s exactly the point. It’s not going to stop bad behavior; it’s just going to keep some people more ignorant a little longer.

This will eventually backfire. Information suppression rarely eliminates curiosity. It only intensifies it. Children and sheltered adults will want to know what’s being kept from them. And some people are going to find answers without useful context or guidance to help them process it, which is even worse than the alternative. Bubbles eventually pop.

Any network that blocks sex education but pipes in AI-generated Bible cartoons isn’t elevating discourse. It’s just harming people in a different way. There are definitely harmful sites online. But people who understand what they’re looking at and have the maturity to handle it are bound to be better prepared to deal with the real world. Not the people trapped in an even smaller, more fragile ecosystem.

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