Life as a Spectator Sport

With all the noise about middle-eastern kids and teenagers being brainwashed into martyrdom, no one is paying attention to what's being done to our own children. Until CNN's documentary, "God's Warriors," only Rolling Stone magazine was giving much print space or time to organizations such as BattleCry, headed by self-proclaimed culture terrorist, Ron Luce. I'm not going to provide their website address, because I don't want anyone linking there from here. But it's listed in Rolling Stone's online article if you have the intestinal fortitude to check it our for yourself.

"Brainwashing" is not too strong a word. Here's a paragraph from the Rolling Stones article:

"The devil hates us," [Luce] exhorts, "and we gotta be ready to fight and not be these passive little lukewarm, namby-pamby, kum-ba-yah, thumb-sucking babies that call themselves Christians. Jesus? He got mad!" Luce considers most evangelicals too soft, too ready to pass off as piety their preference for a bland suburban lifestyle. He hates what he sees as the weakness of "accepting" Christ, of "trusting" the Lord. "I want an attacking church!" he shouts, his normally smooth tones raw and desperate and alarming. He isn't just looking for followers -- he wants "stalkers" who'll bring a criminal passion to their pursuit of godliness.

Luce tells the impressionable youngsters to list on pieces of paper what elements of popular culture they're willing to give up:

Hanneh [a twelve-year-old] starts with Bow Wow and Usher, bites her pen, and then decides to go big: "Music," she writes, then "Friends" -- the nonfundamentalist ones -- and "Party." This, she explains, is a polite way of saying "sex." Not that she's had any, or knows anyone her age who has, but she's learned from Luce that "the culture" wants to force it upon her at a young age. "The world," he tells her, is a forty-five-year-old pervert posing as another tween online."

What's ironic is that many of the people Luce warns against are equally opposed to contemporary pop culture--the mass merchandising of cheap junk, the sexualization of everything in order to sell more of it, the role of television in people's lives, etc. Luce, of course, doesn't mind merchandising his own products: sloganed t-shirts, jackets and caps.

The ironies continue.

The lights in the Cleveland arena fade to blue, and a man on the stage whispers to them about sin and love and the Father-God. They rise, heartened; the crowd, en masse, swears off "harlots and adultery"; the twenty-one-year-old MC twitches taut a chain across the ass of her skintight red jeans and summons the followers to show off their best dance moves for God. "Gimme what you got!" she shouts. They dance -- hip-hop, tap, toe and pelvic thrusting.

Luce's "holy warriors" have been sent around the world to preach his brand of Christianity. Others are turning up in their own pulpits or in the political arena, spreading Luce's contempt for "cultural Christianity."

If this doesn't scare the dickens out of you, consider this militant activity against two Ohio churches.

The group started its crusade when First Baptist Church in Granville hosted "Love Makes a Family," a traveling exhibit by the Family Diversity Project showing photos of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender families.

The night the exhibit opened in July, members of Minutemen United stood outside and protested the exhibit and the church's open attitude toward homosexuality, said the Rev. Kathy Hurt, senior pastor at the Granville church.

Since then, the group has been visiting the church every Sunday, she said.

On one of the first Sundays, six people came to the church's 11 a.m. service and addressed the congregation during a time designated for prayer requests and comments.

Hurt said a man, who introduced himself as a minister from the New Beginnings Church in Warsaw, Ohio, started to give a sermon about how the church was acting against God's word by accepting homosexuals.

Members of Minutemen United also visited King Avenue United Methodist Church in Columbus that same morning, said the Rev. John Keeny.

"They rebuked me as a pastor for preaching that God's love is for everyone," Keeny said.

The pastor said he was proud of the way his congregation responded to the interruption, and he asked them to pray that the hearts of the Minutemen would be open.

First we had Fred Phelps and his funeral-crashing family and followers. Now people posing as Christians are interrupting other churches' services. What next? Dragging people out of those churches to public pillories? Mathew Shepherd style executions? One doesn't want to think so, but there is a fine line between violent words and violent behavior.

Groups like BattleCry are a fertile recruiting ground for white supremacy groups, something I haven't seen mentioned yet. Luce doesn't appear to discriminate, but kids who don't have the privileges of white middle-class society aren't going to be interested in giving them up.

What's more, Hitler and Stalin proved what could be done with a mob of energetic motivated teens--do we need another example?

The final irony, and one that Ron Luce would certainly not appreciate, is his confirmation of mammalian stress behavior. Humans, like their cousins, react in known and predictable ways to stressful conditions. Remove a mouse from its nest, wash it carefully to remove any trace of its former odor, and when it's replaced in the nest, it will be set upon and killed by its former loving family-members, who no longer recognize it as kin. Humans draw in to ever more narrowly-defined social groups who will resort to any level of violence to protect their own, and we're seeing it happen. Whether it's an outcry against gays, or illegal aliens, or the poor, or Muslims or anyone else who isn't one of "us," the outcome is the same--violent rhetoric and eventual literal violence. Welcome to the 21st century.

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