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Christians like to say God sees everything. At Lakepointe Church, a megachurch in Rockwall, Texas, pastors have decided to place their trust in surveillance cameras instead.
By now, you’re probably familiar with the controversy surrounded Flock cameras: The automatic license-plate readers can be hugely effective tools for catching criminals, but they’ve also been used by law enforcement officials to track a woman in Texas who got an abortion and to stalk an ex. There simply aren’t enough restrictions on how those cameras can be (mis)used.
At Lakepointe, they use a similar system called Coram. They say it’s for security, but it’s hard to believe that’s all they’re using the cameras for considering they have more than 400 (!) of them at their largest campus alone, according to Nathan Apffel of The Religion Business.
Apffel pointed out that the church’s leader, Pastor Josh Howerton, recently said on his podcast that authoritarian governments (like in North Korea) have mass surveillance and that leads to a “dystopian culture.” So why is Howerton insistent on having all these cameras in and around his church?
After confirming on social media that they really did use a lot of cameras (though he didn’t say the exact number), Howerton offered a simple explanation: We need them to “keep our people safe.”
He also said that he’s received nothing but praise for the excess, with supporters telling him they now feel safer at his church—adding that his critics were hypocrites for demanding more oversight inside churches but now balking when that happens.
It’s not hypocrisy to challenge him on this, though. The issue is that no church, not even a megachurch, needs that many cameras for safety.
The question is: Why else does he have them?
There’s at least one answer that doesn’t involve security—and it’s courtesy, once again, of Nathan Apffel: He said the cameras weren’t just at the entrances and in Kids’ ministry areas. They were literally inside staffers’ offices, too.
You and directional leadership had AI tracking cameras installed in most staff offices and other sensitive areas.
Per insiders, the rationale for putting cameras in your staff offices was accountability, which included infidelity, okay? So constant moral Big Brother.
This is the same rationale as Communist nations: This is for your safety, guys. Nathan, this keeps people from doing bad things.
Do you really think your authoritarian mass surveillance will stop people from sinning?
So the church isn’t just worried about people who pose a physical danger to members of the congregation. They want to monitor what everyone’s doing while on the clock, implying that the fear of God isn’t enough to deter them from bad behavior.
It gets worse. They could also be monitoring spaces where you wouldn’t expect there to be a camera at all. Baptist News Global’s Rick Pidcock heard about one of those through a comment left on social media.
According to Mary Kuti, a former Lakepointe worship pastor, one of these “sensitive areas” includes rooms where women undress: “Regarding the cameras: They are everywhere. Some are hidden. In the music studio, cameras were concealed in the black rafters and were not obvious or clearly labeled. Women have changed clothes in those rooms without knowing cameras were present. That alone deserves serious questions about transparency, privacy, oversight and who has access to that footage.”
Yiiiiiikes. Who’s watching that footage? Who has the ability to access it and download it? How long is it kept on Coram’s servers?
It’s not like the church is telling the public the answers to those questions. But we know some of what the church is now capable of thanks to Coram itself. Lakepointe does enough business with them that the company uses the church in a lot of its public press, literally citing them in a press release over the summer announcing tens of millions of dollars in new investments.
Their website also uses Lakepointe as a “case study” so potential clients can see what’s happened since the cameras were installed. In one promo video, a staffer notes that the church now has the “ability to save data in appropriate way, retain it, and take care of it.” (Not great, given what we now know they can film!)
Another video includes this image taken inside the church somewhere, which really isn’t helping dispel the notion that churches are giant for-profit companies masquerading as non-profits. The surveillance makes it look like a casino far more than a church.
The rest of those videos aren’t too disturbing. But Coram’s website goes even further on its page about the church, highlighting “license plate recognition” and the ability to detect firearms.
How many people are trying to shoot up this church that all of this equipment is necessary? How many parishioners are bringing weapons to Sunday services? No clue. But the license plate readers could be useful if you’re trying to figure out which members of the congregation have luxury vehicles and who could then be hit up for large donations.
But maybe no one in the congregation cares. Maybe they don’t mind how much of their tithe money is being poured into a massive AI-fueled surveillance system. Maybe they don’t care if there are cameras able to watch women change since they think so little of women in these churches anyway. Maybe they don’t care how all this data is being used—or whether it’s being bought and sold by outside parties.
I do wonder if they’re aware, though, of what else these cameras could do. In theory, Lakepointe could use Coram’s facial recognition software to know who’s coming to services and who needs a reminder of hellfire. They could track who’s arriving late or leaving early. Hell, what’s stopping this church from installing hidden microphones everywhere to spy on private conversations taking place during sermons under the guise of security in order to identify and expel critics and dissenters? What’s stopping them from catching one of their own staffers committing a crime but destroying all the evidence of that so they’re not implicated?
Without rules and regulations in place, it’s just the wild west here, and Howerton isn’t publicizing any sort of policies about what the church will and won’t do with this power.
If someone’s movements or absences suggest they’re not as devout as Howerton wants them to be, will the church target them for remediation? Will some AI-bot send a message to that person to return to Jesus? It’s already hard enough to deal with religious doubts without a religious Big Brother watching over you at all times. Keep in mind this is also a church that has been accused of geofencing phones within its perimeters, allowing companies to target members of the congregation with hyper-specific advertising.
Pidcock wonders: How much privacy should someone expect at church? He even points to an example in which a former-member-turned-critic of Lakepointe was the subject of their surveillance:
“It all started with being scared of someone named Amanda Cunningham and wanting to know when she or anyone else they have harmed is on campus,” one user alleged. Cunningham is a former Lakepointe leader who has consistently called out the harm being perpetrated in Jesus’ name at Lakepointe over the past few years.
Another possible “bad actor” is Jay Myers, who appeared on “Highest Power: Church + State” with me to share how Howerton belittles his congregation, including making fun of disabled people from the pulpit. In our interview, we played audio that was recorded during a staff meeting of Howerton saying: “You can totally disagree with me, you just can’t do it here. You know, what we have to have is a church and a staff that has 100% unity. That’s the expectation, 100%.”
Nothing cult-like about that at all…
If the church needs over 400 cameras on campus, it’s a sign that they don’t trust their own members. And when you have a church where so much power lies at the top of the pyramid, that means there’s a greater chance members aren’t going to be given all the details about how this system works, much less any ability to opt out.
Perhaps we could give the church a little more leeway if Howerton had a solid reputation, but he has his own history of bad behavior.
A couple of years ago, he got criticized for a “joke” in which he told women to obey their husbands in the bedroom on their wedding night. When he was forced to apologize for that, he plagiarized the apology. When the church wanted a new stoplight that required city approval, they manipulated traffic data to get the outcome they wanted. There’s also a sermon he delivered before the 2024 election in which he told the congregation “How to Vote Like Jesus”… by voting for Donald Trump. He ignored Trump’s fascist rhetoric, blatant racism, incoherent ramblings, senseless policies, noticeable dementia, and desire to destroy democracy. None of that animated him like culture war issues that he felt were the only things that mattered. (Even now, he’s arguing that Senate candidate James Talarico is a “wolf in sheep's clothing who slithered out of the pulpit and into politics.”)
All that’s to say: What do you think a right-wing MAGA cultist is going to do with this many cameras at his disposal? Does anyone seriously believe he and his staff are only going to use them to protect members from potential assailants and never for anything else? That’s already not happening with professional law enforcement officials. And what reassurances is Howerton giving to church members so that they know they’re not subjects of a paranoid dictator?
The point is that this isn’t a story about a security system. It’s another story about how a Christian megachurch is exerting control over its own members. Everyone must be watched at all times because the Church Knows What’s Best, according to a guy who demands “100% unity” from his congregation and staff and has been known to manipulate data to suit his will. This church hasn’t earned the trust you’d want from people using AI-powered cameras to monitor everything it can. The least they could do is answer basic questions about how the data will be used, who will have access to it all, and how the watchmen will be watched.
If a church is supposed to be a place where people can wrestle with doubts and speak honestly about their concerns, the last thing you’d want is the knowledge that there’s a camera on you at all times. It makes it harder to be open, even with pastors in their offices.
If Howerton needs this many “eyes” to maintain safety, loyalty, and “unity,” that doesn’t show the strength and wealth of his ministry. It just reveals just how little trust they have in the very people holding the entire operation together.
It's only bad when North Korea does it!
/s
If technology can be abused, it will be abused. I have a hard time feeling sorry for anyone who would willingly delegate their thinking to a mega-church pastor. Or any other pastor for that matter. The herd instinct runs deep in the human species. It may have helped us survive, but that instinct has become a double-edged sword in the modern age.