You start with sounding like a man that was escalated to a chair he didn't want. You then don't meet on the level.
This statement specifically: "Lodges that post AI-generated visuals are making a category error about what digital communication is."
That's not stated as an approach, or open for discussion. As written, it's accusatory.
Continuing: "For most potential candidates in 2026, your Instagram page, your Facebook feed, and your website header constitute your lodge in its entirety. They are the whole of your organization's public identity." Says who? Your career? Your market data? Loose studies that have no specific weighting in the Fraternity, and a couple Reddit threads? Part of why I joined the Fraternity was the lack of bias, and what this says introduces a significant amount of bias. FWIW I'm 37, am not on social media (aside from Emeth), and have a decade+ career in SMM, SDE, and AppSec. I'm highly critical.
You lost me before you earned the argument. I won't stand for someone speaking for me and my experience with authority they haven't established.
We live on the level. I approach you there. I expect my Brothers to produce something worth my time, given the undiscovered country is somewhere in the West.
I find some of your comment rude and your attitude unconstructive. You assume much about me and my intentions without knowing me personally.
That said, I am willing to engage with your critique in a fraternal manner and on the level.
I do not understand how I was speaking for you or your experience at all. The essay presents observations drawn from recruitment patterns, marketing analytics on digital first impressions (relevant across many organizations, including ours), and examples from Masonic lodges like La Jolla #518. It does not presume to dictate your personal path or anyone else's. If a particular passage gave that impression, I would appreciate you pointing it out so I can understand better.
I also do not see how the essay fails to meet on the level. In Freemasonry, meeting on the level means approaching one another as equals, with mutual respect and without pretense of superiority. I wrote and shared an opinion piece on a Masonic publication precisely for the good of the Craft, as a caution from one Brother to others about risks to our public authenticity and recruitment. It was offered humbly, not as an edict from the East. If you read it as authoritative overreach or accusation, I would genuinely like you to expand on that: which specific passages struck you that way, and how did they fail the principle of meeting on the level?
As for not producing something "worth my time": fair enough. Not every Masonic essay resonates with every Brother, and the undiscovered country awaits us all regardless. If this piece did not serve you, I respect that.
On the specific point you flagged earlier: the claim about most potential candidates in 2026 forming their view of a lodge entirely through Instagram, Facebook, and the website header draws from marketing studies on digital discovery and first impressions among younger generations. These are general analytics findings relevant to recruitment across many organizations, including our Fraternity. I am 34, a millennial with a master's in Marketing Analytics, so I draw from that perspective, but I do not present it as the sole Masonic truth.
I have no idea what SMM, SDE, and AppSec mean, and I am not sure what bearing they have on this discussion. Your experience is noted and respected, and I welcome your critical eye. The essay's core is a caution about preserving authenticity in our public presentation.
If you are ever willing to make the drive, I extend you a sincere invitation to attend Verity in Kent, WA. We meet on the 3rd Friday of each month (dinner 6:30 PM; stated communication 7:30 PM at Kent Masonic Hall). It would be good to discuss this, or anything Masonic, in person among Brothers.
You asked for specifics. Fair. My first comment was hot. I owe you better than that, and I owe the readers better. So I re-read the piece, thoroughly, and here's where I land.
First, since you noted you didn't recognize my shorthand: SMM is Social Media Marketing. SDE is Software Development Engineering. AppSec is Application Security. They're relevant because your essay treats marketing analytics as the only valid lens for this question. It isn't.
Your entire data section treats Freemasonry as a brand and prospects as consumers. Every study you lean on there, Morning Consult (citation 10), NielsenIQ (citation 15), Kirk and Givi (citation 16), Bynder (citation 14), Getty Images (citation 25), measures consumer attitudes toward commercial brands. People evaluating businesses that sell products and services.
A lodge is not a business. It doesn't sell anything. A man's decision to petition isn't a purchasing decision. It's closer to joining a faith community, a mentorship body, a civic organization with initiation rites. The motivational psychology is categorically different from brand loyalty as studied in the Journal of Business Research.
You don't acknowledge this anywhere. You import consumer findings wholesale and apply them to the Fraternity as though the inference is obvious. Citation 10 measured whether Gen Z stopped patronizing a brand. Stopped buying from a company. The leap from "stopped buying sneakers from a brand that used AI ads" to "will refuse to petition a lodge because its Facebook page has an AI flyer" is massive. You don't bridge it. Not with a single study on fraternal organizations, religious bodies, or membership-driven nonprofits. You assert the parallel and move on.
This matters. The entire evidentiary weight of "What The Data Says" depends on that parallel holding. If it doesn't? And you haven't demonstrated it does? The section is extrapolation dressed up as proof.
Citation 7 is doing more structural work in your argument than any other source. The Grand Lodge of California's profile of La Jolla Lodge No. 518. You use it to establish that social media is the primary discovery channel, that social media-referred prospects are higher quality, and that lodges should treat their digital presence as their entire public identity.
That's one lodge. Self-reported data. Profiled by its own Grand Lodge in 2021. No control group. No external validation. No methodology disclosure. It's a promotional piece, not a study.
Here's the thing. You explicitly dismiss your Reddit citations (1 and 2) as "anecdotal sources, drawn from forums rather than peer-reviewed journals." You justify their inclusion only because they demonstrate an internal conversation. Fair enough. But La Jolla gets a different standard? Its data is equally anecdotal, equally self-reported, from a single jurisdiction. Yet you build prescriptive policy on it as though it's established fact.
The evidentiary standard shifts depending on whether the anecdote supports your thesis. That's not analysis. That's confirmation bias with citations.
Your "Clandestine Problem" section cites a single Reddit thread (citation 18) for the claim that 750 bogus grand lodges exist in the United States. You then call this dimension "the most consequential of all."
That's a serious claim. Where's the evidence? You provide zero documented instances of a prospect confusing a chartered, verifiable lodge with a clandestine operation because of image style. No case studies. No survey data. Nothing.
The entire argument runs on a hypothetical: if a prospect can't tell the difference, and if aesthetics are his only signal, then damage occurs. But legitimate lodges have Grand Lodge charters, physical addresses, published meeting schedules, named officers, and histories that predate the internet. A prospect who can navigate Instagram can navigate Google. The premise that visual style alone drives this confusion needs evidence. You don't provide any.
You invoke the rough ashlar, the working tools, the twenty-four inch gauge, and the common gavel to argue that AI content contradicts Masonic teaching because it's produced "without effort or understanding."
Follow that logic. Canva Pro, which you recommend, produces templated graphics without craft. The Scottish Rite's "Not Just a Man" campaign (citation 23) provides pre-built templates and social media graphics that a secretary fills in. No rough ashlar required. Buffer and Later, also your recommendations, automate posting schedules a Brother could handle with more personal attention.
If the symbolic standard is that the labor is the point and shortcuts betray the teaching, your own recommended workflow fails the test. The line between "acceptable convenience" and "philosophical betrayal" isn't principled. It's aesthetic preference in Masonic clothing.
You asked how the essay fails to meet on the level. I'll be specific. The essay doesn't claim superiority over me. What it does is use legislative language: "non-negotiable boundaries," "off-limits," "should never be produced." These are policy declarations, not discussion points. And they rest on one Brother's professional opinion backed by research that doesn't study the population or context in question.
Meeting on the level means acknowledging that your reading of the evidence is one reading. A Brother with a different professional background might weigh the same data differently and reach different conclusions. Your essay forecloses that. It frames its conclusions as settled and its boundaries as absolute. That's where it stopped being discussion and became edict.
Here's where I agree with you, wholeheartedly (I've spoken to these concerns in my own Lodge). Low-effort, obviously synthetic AI imagery is a bad look for the Fraternity. I'm not defending six-fingered handshakes. I'm not arguing lodges should slap AI-generated cathedral interiors on their Facebook pages and call it a day.
But the essay doesn't just get the evidence wrong. It gets the problem wrong. And because it gets the problem wrong, it optimizes the wrong channel entirely.
Freemasonry has never been a walk-in operation. The petitioning process has a human gatekeeper at every stage. You need to know a Mason, or a Mason needs to know you. You need a recommender. You're investigated. The structure of the Fraternity itself guarantees that no man petitions a lodge because he saw an Instagram post. He petitions because a Friend, who he later found to be a Brother, in his life brought him to the door. The digital presence might confirm a decision that's already forming, but it's not generating that decision.
Your essay's core premise is that the Instagram page is the front door. It isn't. The Brother who hands a man a petition is the front door. He always has been.
Which means the question isn't "how does a lodge present itself to strangers on the internet?"
The question is "why would a Brother invite someone into his lodge?"
And the answer to that has nothing to do with social media strategy. It has to do with whether the experience inside the lodge room is worth sharing. Extraordinary ritual work. Genuine fellowship. Real mentorship. A lodge that delivers those things grows because its members can't stop talking about it. A lodge that doesn't deliver them won't be saved by a polished Instagram feed, no matter how authentic the photography.
The real risk of AI content isn't that it repels hypothetical prospects who were never going to find the lodge through Instagram anyway. The real risk is what it signals to the Brothers who are already there. When a lodge posts low-effort synthetic imagery, the man who notices isn't the 27-year-old scroller you built your argument around. It's the Brother who's been showing up every stated communication wondering whether his lodge takes itself seriously. That's not a marketing problem. That's a morale problem. And it's solved by investing in the quality of the lodge experience, not by optimizing a digital channel that isn't driving your actual growth.
What I am arguing is that the intellectual framework you built around a commonsense observation doesn't hold the weight you placed on it. The certainty of your prescriptions isn't warranted by the evidence you assembled. The way you delivered it left no room for Brothers with relevant expertise to engage without first having to dismantle the framing. And the solution you prescribed addresses a symptom while ignoring the actual mechanism by which the Fraternity grows.
I appreciate the invitation to Verity. I may take you up on it. I extend the same invitation to you at Centralia 63, every fourth Monday. This conversation works better over dinner than in a comment section.
Excellent post and interesting perspectives. Reputations take a lifetime to build and moments to destroy.
I think like most significant periods in history with advancements in technology or methodologies there is a learning curve. I think this one in particular has the ability to be incredible, or catastrophic. Our future prospects of outcome seem to be utopian, post apocalyptic Terminator, or perhaps even more concerning Idiocracy.
If we view AI as a tool that requires careful use and consideration, with reviews and modifications along the way it could be a great thing. Recognizing we have the ultimate responsibility for the outcomes we create through its uses. Though there is reasonable concern that many will choose to use it in place of thought or effort, allowing it to steer the ship, not recognizing the dangers of letting the machine chart the course.
When we attribute accountability and responsibility to something other than ourselves we must be willing to accept the consequences of its choices and decisions. Any time we relinquish our responsibility to another, whether AI or our elected representatives, we run the risk of choices and decisions we might not make ourselves, with varying degrees of consequences.
I think it makes a lot of sense that resource constrained organizations would desire to make use of a tool that amplifies their abilities, but we should urge caution to ensure it does not leave our walls without the appropriate level of care. Finding a balance to the extremes.
MWB Bailey thank you for sharing this and hosting the discussion on Rummer and Grapes, WB Bell thank you for taking the time to write this. I look forward to my next visit up at Verity for continued discussion.
Well said WB Nick!
Thank you!
W:.B:. Nicholas did an excellent job capturing the AI impact on our Craft and offered good advice. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you!
Nicely done!
I invite you to read my work on the Taxil Hoax, and the follow-up pieces: https://mrereports.substack.com/p/the-greatest-hoax-of-all-time
Thank you! I haven't had time to read it all, but I've saved it. Good stuff from what I've read so far.
Can you ask the Brother if I may cross-post on Msaonic Digital Trust's website?
Of course. Go right ahead.
Thank you. Republ;ished at https://masonicdigitaltrust.org/blog/2026/03/13/450/
I was hoping someday to create a repository of proper Masonic graphics to be freely used ... maybe we should revisit that.
Fantastic Article.
Thank you!
You are welcome.
Worshipful Brother Bell,
You start with sounding like a man that was escalated to a chair he didn't want. You then don't meet on the level.
This statement specifically: "Lodges that post AI-generated visuals are making a category error about what digital communication is."
That's not stated as an approach, or open for discussion. As written, it's accusatory.
Continuing: "For most potential candidates in 2026, your Instagram page, your Facebook feed, and your website header constitute your lodge in its entirety. They are the whole of your organization's public identity." Says who? Your career? Your market data? Loose studies that have no specific weighting in the Fraternity, and a couple Reddit threads? Part of why I joined the Fraternity was the lack of bias, and what this says introduces a significant amount of bias. FWIW I'm 37, am not on social media (aside from Emeth), and have a decade+ career in SMM, SDE, and AppSec. I'm highly critical.
You lost me before you earned the argument. I won't stand for someone speaking for me and my experience with authority they haven't established.
We live on the level. I approach you there. I expect my Brothers to produce something worth my time, given the undiscovered country is somewhere in the West.
You sat in the chair. Do better.
Fraternally,
Brother Thomas Jost
Brother Jost,
I find some of your comment rude and your attitude unconstructive. You assume much about me and my intentions without knowing me personally.
That said, I am willing to engage with your critique in a fraternal manner and on the level.
I do not understand how I was speaking for you or your experience at all. The essay presents observations drawn from recruitment patterns, marketing analytics on digital first impressions (relevant across many organizations, including ours), and examples from Masonic lodges like La Jolla #518. It does not presume to dictate your personal path or anyone else's. If a particular passage gave that impression, I would appreciate you pointing it out so I can understand better.
I also do not see how the essay fails to meet on the level. In Freemasonry, meeting on the level means approaching one another as equals, with mutual respect and without pretense of superiority. I wrote and shared an opinion piece on a Masonic publication precisely for the good of the Craft, as a caution from one Brother to others about risks to our public authenticity and recruitment. It was offered humbly, not as an edict from the East. If you read it as authoritative overreach or accusation, I would genuinely like you to expand on that: which specific passages struck you that way, and how did they fail the principle of meeting on the level?
As for not producing something "worth my time": fair enough. Not every Masonic essay resonates with every Brother, and the undiscovered country awaits us all regardless. If this piece did not serve you, I respect that.
On the specific point you flagged earlier: the claim about most potential candidates in 2026 forming their view of a lodge entirely through Instagram, Facebook, and the website header draws from marketing studies on digital discovery and first impressions among younger generations. These are general analytics findings relevant to recruitment across many organizations, including our Fraternity. I am 34, a millennial with a master's in Marketing Analytics, so I draw from that perspective, but I do not present it as the sole Masonic truth.
I have no idea what SMM, SDE, and AppSec mean, and I am not sure what bearing they have on this discussion. Your experience is noted and respected, and I welcome your critical eye. The essay's core is a caution about preserving authenticity in our public presentation.
If you are ever willing to make the drive, I extend you a sincere invitation to attend Verity in Kent, WA. We meet on the 3rd Friday of each month (dinner 6:30 PM; stated communication 7:30 PM at Kent Masonic Hall). It would be good to discuss this, or anything Masonic, in person among Brothers.
Fraternally,
Worshipful Brother Nicholas Bell
Worshipful Brother Bell,
You asked for specifics. Fair. My first comment was hot. I owe you better than that, and I owe the readers better. So I re-read the piece, thoroughly, and here's where I land.
First, since you noted you didn't recognize my shorthand: SMM is Social Media Marketing. SDE is Software Development Engineering. AppSec is Application Security. They're relevant because your essay treats marketing analytics as the only valid lens for this question. It isn't.
Your entire data section treats Freemasonry as a brand and prospects as consumers. Every study you lean on there, Morning Consult (citation 10), NielsenIQ (citation 15), Kirk and Givi (citation 16), Bynder (citation 14), Getty Images (citation 25), measures consumer attitudes toward commercial brands. People evaluating businesses that sell products and services.
A lodge is not a business. It doesn't sell anything. A man's decision to petition isn't a purchasing decision. It's closer to joining a faith community, a mentorship body, a civic organization with initiation rites. The motivational psychology is categorically different from brand loyalty as studied in the Journal of Business Research.
You don't acknowledge this anywhere. You import consumer findings wholesale and apply them to the Fraternity as though the inference is obvious. Citation 10 measured whether Gen Z stopped patronizing a brand. Stopped buying from a company. The leap from "stopped buying sneakers from a brand that used AI ads" to "will refuse to petition a lodge because its Facebook page has an AI flyer" is massive. You don't bridge it. Not with a single study on fraternal organizations, religious bodies, or membership-driven nonprofits. You assert the parallel and move on.
This matters. The entire evidentiary weight of "What The Data Says" depends on that parallel holding. If it doesn't? And you haven't demonstrated it does? The section is extrapolation dressed up as proof.
Citation 7 is doing more structural work in your argument than any other source. The Grand Lodge of California's profile of La Jolla Lodge No. 518. You use it to establish that social media is the primary discovery channel, that social media-referred prospects are higher quality, and that lodges should treat their digital presence as their entire public identity.
That's one lodge. Self-reported data. Profiled by its own Grand Lodge in 2021. No control group. No external validation. No methodology disclosure. It's a promotional piece, not a study.
Here's the thing. You explicitly dismiss your Reddit citations (1 and 2) as "anecdotal sources, drawn from forums rather than peer-reviewed journals." You justify their inclusion only because they demonstrate an internal conversation. Fair enough. But La Jolla gets a different standard? Its data is equally anecdotal, equally self-reported, from a single jurisdiction. Yet you build prescriptive policy on it as though it's established fact.
The evidentiary standard shifts depending on whether the anecdote supports your thesis. That's not analysis. That's confirmation bias with citations.
Your "Clandestine Problem" section cites a single Reddit thread (citation 18) for the claim that 750 bogus grand lodges exist in the United States. You then call this dimension "the most consequential of all."
That's a serious claim. Where's the evidence? You provide zero documented instances of a prospect confusing a chartered, verifiable lodge with a clandestine operation because of image style. No case studies. No survey data. Nothing.
The entire argument runs on a hypothetical: if a prospect can't tell the difference, and if aesthetics are his only signal, then damage occurs. But legitimate lodges have Grand Lodge charters, physical addresses, published meeting schedules, named officers, and histories that predate the internet. A prospect who can navigate Instagram can navigate Google. The premise that visual style alone drives this confusion needs evidence. You don't provide any.
You invoke the rough ashlar, the working tools, the twenty-four inch gauge, and the common gavel to argue that AI content contradicts Masonic teaching because it's produced "without effort or understanding."
Follow that logic. Canva Pro, which you recommend, produces templated graphics without craft. The Scottish Rite's "Not Just a Man" campaign (citation 23) provides pre-built templates and social media graphics that a secretary fills in. No rough ashlar required. Buffer and Later, also your recommendations, automate posting schedules a Brother could handle with more personal attention.
If the symbolic standard is that the labor is the point and shortcuts betray the teaching, your own recommended workflow fails the test. The line between "acceptable convenience" and "philosophical betrayal" isn't principled. It's aesthetic preference in Masonic clothing.
You asked how the essay fails to meet on the level. I'll be specific. The essay doesn't claim superiority over me. What it does is use legislative language: "non-negotiable boundaries," "off-limits," "should never be produced." These are policy declarations, not discussion points. And they rest on one Brother's professional opinion backed by research that doesn't study the population or context in question.
Meeting on the level means acknowledging that your reading of the evidence is one reading. A Brother with a different professional background might weigh the same data differently and reach different conclusions. Your essay forecloses that. It frames its conclusions as settled and its boundaries as absolute. That's where it stopped being discussion and became edict.
Here's where I agree with you, wholeheartedly (I've spoken to these concerns in my own Lodge). Low-effort, obviously synthetic AI imagery is a bad look for the Fraternity. I'm not defending six-fingered handshakes. I'm not arguing lodges should slap AI-generated cathedral interiors on their Facebook pages and call it a day.
But the essay doesn't just get the evidence wrong. It gets the problem wrong. And because it gets the problem wrong, it optimizes the wrong channel entirely.
Freemasonry has never been a walk-in operation. The petitioning process has a human gatekeeper at every stage. You need to know a Mason, or a Mason needs to know you. You need a recommender. You're investigated. The structure of the Fraternity itself guarantees that no man petitions a lodge because he saw an Instagram post. He petitions because a Friend, who he later found to be a Brother, in his life brought him to the door. The digital presence might confirm a decision that's already forming, but it's not generating that decision.
Your essay's core premise is that the Instagram page is the front door. It isn't. The Brother who hands a man a petition is the front door. He always has been.
Which means the question isn't "how does a lodge present itself to strangers on the internet?"
The question is "why would a Brother invite someone into his lodge?"
And the answer to that has nothing to do with social media strategy. It has to do with whether the experience inside the lodge room is worth sharing. Extraordinary ritual work. Genuine fellowship. Real mentorship. A lodge that delivers those things grows because its members can't stop talking about it. A lodge that doesn't deliver them won't be saved by a polished Instagram feed, no matter how authentic the photography.
The real risk of AI content isn't that it repels hypothetical prospects who were never going to find the lodge through Instagram anyway. The real risk is what it signals to the Brothers who are already there. When a lodge posts low-effort synthetic imagery, the man who notices isn't the 27-year-old scroller you built your argument around. It's the Brother who's been showing up every stated communication wondering whether his lodge takes itself seriously. That's not a marketing problem. That's a morale problem. And it's solved by investing in the quality of the lodge experience, not by optimizing a digital channel that isn't driving your actual growth.
What I am arguing is that the intellectual framework you built around a commonsense observation doesn't hold the weight you placed on it. The certainty of your prescriptions isn't warranted by the evidence you assembled. The way you delivered it left no room for Brothers with relevant expertise to engage without first having to dismantle the framing. And the solution you prescribed addresses a symptom while ignoring the actual mechanism by which the Fraternity grows.
I appreciate the invitation to Verity. I may take you up on it. I extend the same invitation to you at Centralia 63, every fourth Monday. This conversation works better over dinner than in a comment section.
Fraternally,
Brother Thomas Jost
Outstanding work Bro. Bell!
Thank you!
Thanks everyone for the comments here. I know that our Brother values hearing from everyone.
Excellent post and interesting perspectives. Reputations take a lifetime to build and moments to destroy.
I think like most significant periods in history with advancements in technology or methodologies there is a learning curve. I think this one in particular has the ability to be incredible, or catastrophic. Our future prospects of outcome seem to be utopian, post apocalyptic Terminator, or perhaps even more concerning Idiocracy.
If we view AI as a tool that requires careful use and consideration, with reviews and modifications along the way it could be a great thing. Recognizing we have the ultimate responsibility for the outcomes we create through its uses. Though there is reasonable concern that many will choose to use it in place of thought or effort, allowing it to steer the ship, not recognizing the dangers of letting the machine chart the course.
When we attribute accountability and responsibility to something other than ourselves we must be willing to accept the consequences of its choices and decisions. Any time we relinquish our responsibility to another, whether AI or our elected representatives, we run the risk of choices and decisions we might not make ourselves, with varying degrees of consequences.
I think it makes a lot of sense that resource constrained organizations would desire to make use of a tool that amplifies their abilities, but we should urge caution to ensure it does not leave our walls without the appropriate level of care. Finding a balance to the extremes.
MWB Bailey thank you for sharing this and hosting the discussion on Rummer and Grapes, WB Bell thank you for taking the time to write this. I look forward to my next visit up at Verity for continued discussion.