A look at Facebook's prayers feature and its outreach with faith groups, which Facebook says was given new urgency during the pandemic
including its new feature for praying on FB https://www.reuters.com/... (1/ Eric Johansson / @ericjohanssonlj : Is it just me or is there something really unsettling with a #bigtech mega-corporate like @facebook trying to gamify and make money out of religion? https://www.reuters.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's prayers feature is the consumer-facing tip of a broader courtship of American congregations that began when faith leaders moved counseling and services onto virtual tools during the pandemic. Days after this Reuters piece, reporting detailed how Facebook is bundling subscription tiers and live-stream donation tools for US churches — the commercial layer under the devotional one.
The criticism from journalist Eric Johansson — that a mega-platform is gamifying religion for revenue — lands against a backdrop where faith-tech already profiles congregants at scale: Gloo, used by roughly 10% of US churches, holds tens of millions of profiles to target ads at people in crisis.
First-order effects
- US churches gain an end-to-end monetization stack on Facebook — exclusive-content subscriptions plus donations inside live streams — making the platform both pulpit and payment processor.
- Facebook takes immediate reputational heat from critics like Johansson, who frame a prayers feature inside an ad-funded engagement machine as commodifying worship.
Second-order effects
- Specialized faith-tech vendors such as Gloo — which already targets ad campaigns at Americans facing personal crises — now compete and interoperate with a general-purpose platform moving into the same pews.
- Donation and subscription tooling gives Facebook new transaction relationships with religious nonprofits, deepening its dependence on engagement patterns that its own internal research flagged, including the survey finding that 12.5% of participants reported compulsive use harming their lives.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, religious practice becomes another vertical organized by platform intermediaries — where prayer requests, giving, and pastoral targeting run through corporate data systems rather than congregation-controlled ones.
- Monetizing spiritually and emotionally vulnerable moments is likely to draw the same scrutiny other engagement-optimized features have faced, potentially pulling faith groups into debates over platform governance and data ethics.
The trend: Big tech platforms are absorbing religious community life into their tooling and ad economies, converting pandemic-era virtual ministry into a permanent commercial channel.