The Mad Hatters: Hackers & The Church

By Rev. Erica Whitaker,

I walk down the hallway towards my office and stop at a small room with the light on and the door cracked. This tiny room is slightly bigger than Harry’s Potter broom closet under the stairs and is also known as the church dumping grounds. It’s full of filing cabinets, old books and technology from the nineties.

I peek my head inside and see one of our newest members of the church sitting on a metal chair – laptop balancing on his legs. A keyboard and computer encumbers a tiny round table with wires and cords draping down a white, crochet table cloth. The young man in his thirties is slouched over wearing a t-shirt that says “Make dormant cyber pathogens great again.” I chuckle getting only half the joke.

He looks up and says, “You know…” I love with technical people sarcastically begin with “you know” because they know and you know that you don’t actually know all the problems they are about to disclose.

He continues, “You know the church’s current network configuration allows for anyone to connect to the network. Anyone can access anything they want; personal information, sensitive documents. You know things of that nature. They can torrent or even look at porn because there’s no restriction. I’m working to limit guest access keeping anyone from being able to look at sensitive information or look at each other. I’m limiting whether they can attack each other or the church network. Right now, anyone can just come in, hop on, steal everything and walk out the door.”

Wow. A part of me is worried and the other part doesn’t care. You’d have to be mad to think anyone would want to hack into our small church and steal our semi-unimportant information.

I reply with a puzzled look on my face. “Hmm. Ok. Remind me what you do for a living again?”

He gives a sigh like he is working hard to formulate an answer I’m going to understand. “I’m basically an ethical hacker. I’m what they call a white hat.”

Did he just say hacker and ethical in the same sentence?

After seeing my reaction, he proceeds to enlighten me on the different types of hackers. There are white hats who hack for companies to test system vulnerability. These hackers work in the light, normally for businesses and corporations.

There are gray hats who are motivated by justice, hacking under the radar when they see malpractice. These hackers work in the shadows, working on their own terms. Then there are black hats who break into systems for their own profit and gain. These hackers work in the dark often taking advantage of vulnerable people and companies.

I brush him off with a patronizing grin and say something to the equivalent of “bless your heart for taking this on.” I, perhaps, like other pastor’s feel ignorant and stupid when it comes to the 0’s and 1’s of my church and often belittle those who I know deep down are smarter than me. The Matrix was a great movie and all but I need to concern myself with Kingdom work. At least this is what I told myself when I got back to my office to make phone calls to members in the hospital and read commentaries for Sunday’s sermon.

It wasn’t until later that week that I realized why people like him, hackers, don’t come to church. They are labeled and boxed up by the church as mad, demonic people. The church and the leaders within really don’t know what to do with them. Out of insecurity and fear we shun people wearing these goofy hats of white and gray. We keep them at a distance, crammed into dusty, dumpy rooms away from the general congregation.

I wonder what this subgroup of culture thinks about the church and the people within. Would they see white hats, gray hats, or just mad hats? Maybe they would just see a bunch of crazy people who invite them to the table who end up running guests off with polite yet ridiculous conversations that end up leading nowhere.

Hackers are humans simply trying to find their voice and purpose in the world. Most of them are fighting for justice in this world without claiming any church or religious institution.

The white hat comes to my office letting me know he’s finished for the day. I ask quickly, “Before you leave, can you tell me what your shirt means.”

He grins, and goes into a long dissertation about some San Bernardino case involving terrorists, the FBI and an iPhone. He sees my eyes glaze over and finishes abruptly, “It’s a shirt from hackers for charity.” He walks out.

I turn to my laptop closing out my sermon and type into the google search engine, “Who are Hackers For Charity?”

Rev. Eric Whitaker is senior pastor of Buechel Park Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky.