"This is a real war... I want an attacking church." - Ron Luce
On April 19, a new issue of Rolling Stone will hit news stands, and the timing couldn't be better, or worse :
Just as the American mainstream is waking up to the reality that the Bush Administration, contradicting David Kuo's claims on the administration's loathing for evangelicals, has actually packed the federal bureaucracy with partisan religious ideologues, "culture warriors" in professed battle with liberalism and secularism, Jeff Sharlet's new story in Rolling Stone, Teenage Holy War (link to 3 page excerpt of story) addresses a counterpart to the flap over Monica Goodling and her fellows from Regent University that concerns a cadre of partisan religious ideologues within the Bush Administration....
Meet BattleCry
Ron Luce's Battlecry uses slick PR and marketing tactics, to target and indoctrinate America's teenagers into the belief that they are being attacked by and are at war with commercialism, Hollywood, advertising, and, more to the point, liberalism, secularism, communists, feminists, muslims, and many more alleged enemies... Dave Niewert calls BattleCry pseudo fascist. Ron Luce's enemies list is long, and his rhetoric angry
The devil hates us, and we gotta be ready to fight and not be these passive little lukewarm mamby-pamby kum-bah-yah, thumb-sucking babies that call themselves Christians. Jesus ? He got mad!"
Plus, Ron Luce has his own training academy which 6,000 teenagers have attended, he has preached to about 12 million teenagers, and Luce has sent 53,000 of his teen missionaries around the World. What is BattleCry and Teen Mania Ministries ? Try on for size : Jesus Camp, with smoother edges but fully steeped in the ideology of religious war, vastly scaled up and packaged through PR and marketing.
Here's a particularly telling dKos post description of a BattleCry event from last year, 2006.:
Exhibit "A" : "Dash The Babies On The Rocks !"
[image courtesy of Evangelical Right.com] "BattleCry Philadelphia was more than just a vulgar carnival designed to suck donations into the coffers of Ron Luce's corporation "Teen Mania". Indeed, it had a point, to recruit the future elite "warriors" in the coming battle against the separation of church and state. It turned dark and frightening on Saturday afternoon. After Franklin "Islam is a Wicked Religion" Graham came out to thunder against the evils of homosexuality and the Iraqi people (whom he considers to be exactly the same people as the ancient Babylonians who enslaved the tribes of Israel and deserving, one would assume, the exact same fate) we heard an explosion. Flames shot out on stage and a team of Navy Seals was shown on the big TV monitors in full camouflage creeping forward down the hallway from the locker room with their M16s. They were hunting us, the future Christian leaders of America. Two teenage girls next to me burst into tears and even I, a jaded middle-aged male, almost jumped out of my skin. I imagined for that moment what it must have felt like to have been a teacher at Columbine high school. 10 seconds later they rushed out onstage and pointed their guns in our direction firing blanks spitting flames. About 1000 shots and bang, we were all dead.....
A featured speaker, Franklin Graham, who is credited with converting George W. Bush, was introduced. He implied that HIV/AIDS is a punishment from God. "We get outside of marriage and there are consequences."....
. . .
The "heart" of Graham's speech was a call for holy war. He preached about the "battle for souls of men and women from North to South, East to West, over the entire earth." There is, he declared, "No way to God but through Jesus Christ."...
Graham told the biblical story of Daniel "taming the Babylonians." After celebrating the U.S. troops who are killing in Iraq right now, he preached that there is "no difference between the Iraqis today and Babylon 1,000 years ago." In the Bible Babylon is the epitome of evil and decadence. All manner of bloodlust and plunder against it is not just condoned but celebrated. As Psalm 137:9 spells out, even the babies are to be dashed to death against the rocks!
While calling on the youth present to engage in this "battle for the souls of men," he exhorts them, "No souls can be saved without the shedding of blood. Blood must be shed!" "
BattleCry is also a very media savvy organization that is succesfuly coopting the politics of protest, writes Frederick Clarkson on a recent Mother Jones description of a San Fransisco BattleCry rally:
This is a highly political, wave of the future movement, that as the article points out, effectively taps the spirit of youthful rebellion and crafting a kind of Christian right coolness chic. There is a further lesson in this as well: Teen Mania/Battle Cry effectively uses the antics of counter protesters to energize their cadre. Opponents of the religious right need to get a lot smarter than using mere counter protests, (especially those that include Christian-baiting and edgy anti-social behavior) in order to be politically and culturally effective. This article points out some of the ways that counter protesters play into the hands of rally organizers by becoming caricatures of the adversity the group feeds off of.
A BattleCry PSA
A clip from one of last year’s Acquire the Fire youth conference-cum-music festivals, put on by BattleCry founder Ron Luce
ABC Nightline segment on Ron Luce and BattleCry
In a post I made yesterday, I wrote about the depiction of the 150 Regent University Graduates, including Monica Goodling, working in the Bush Administration as a "sleeper cell" :
My GOD ! There are about 150 graduates of Pat Robertson's Regent University within the Bush Administration, almost like a huge Al Qaeda sleeper cell !.... Well, not really ; for one thing, Al Qaeda terrorists don't, as far I'm aware, publish their affiliations on public websites, and a "sleeper cell" that can be outed by a few minutes of Googling isn't much of a sleeper cell, is it ?
Actually, I doubt Monica Goodling or her other Regent University cohorts worried about secrecy much. It actually wasn't, up to now, at all necessary because nobody was paying attention.
So, what's going to happen when people begin to wrap their heads around the sheer scale of Ron Luce's "BattleCry" operation ?
As Jeff Sharlet writes:
He's [Ron Luce] been doing this for two decades but it didn't take off until days after the Columbine shootings of 1999 when, when Luce rallied 70,000 angry, weeping kids at the Pontiac Silverdome outside Detroit. In 2006, he brought his rallies to more than 200,000 kids. Overall, he's preached to 12 million.
They're the base. Of that number, Luce has sent 53,000 teen missionaries around the globe to preach "spiritual purity"- chastity, sobriety, and a committment to laissez-faire capitalism... Luce selected more than 6,000 for his Honor Academy, some of whom become political operatives, media activists and militant preachers who then funnel fresh kids into the Academy. It's a very vertically integrated movement, a machine that produces "leaders for the army", a command cadre that can count on the masses Luce conditions as its infantry."
Luce's operation is in some ways like "Jesus Camp" vastly scaled up and popularized but still saturated in the rhetoric of religious warfare. Says Luce, "This is a real war... I want an attacking church."
Now, please don't freak out when I tell you that Ron Luce's outfit is merely one of the larger, and maybe the biggest, but only one out a number of similar operations targeting children and teenagers for indoctrination into similar "religious war" ideologies....
Please don't head for the hills, really. In fact, there's really nowhere to go because if we don't successfully oppose and defuse such proto-fascist movements as Ron Luce's, it's likely that not much will get done on key, transcendent World problems such as Global Warming. We'll be too caught up in culture war or real war to deal with such higher order concerns.
So, here's my question and challenge - here comes "Jesus Camp" on steroids. So, when the April 19, 2007 Rolling Stone issue hits the newstands will it provoke another Monica Goodling Freakout Time maybe even worse than the last one ?
The best way to avoid the dynamic of freakouts followed by forgetfulness or denial is to pay sustained attention.
There are actually people who pay sustained attention to the Christian right. In fact, I co-founded a website that does just that, and there are probably about 2,000 archived posts on it already, written by people who specialize in paying close attention to the Christian right: of whom I now am one.
Some people even track specific movements and groups within the Christian right. For example, Rolling Stone just picked up the BattleCry story, but the story itself has been driven from below, from Internet empowered, self-driven activists, and by bloggers. Acquire The Evidence has specialized in tracking and covering Ron Luce's "Teen Mania Ministries".
My point here is that I see a pattern, among the American left and on non-theocratic part of the political spectrum, in which consciousness of the Christian right as a movement is, in psychological terms, equivalent to a manic-depressive state or a bipolar disorder.
Here's the progression :
- "Jesus Camp" documentary comes out : FREAKOUT
Time passes, people forget about the Christian right for a while, or concoct theories based on patchy evidence. Maybe some apparently contradictory and reassuring message comes along ; David Kuo releases book, "Tempting Faith", and people are greatly reassured by the message that the Christian right is a paper tiger - the movement is receding !
- Monica Goodling, 150 Regency University Grads. within the Bush Administration : FREAKOUT
This is the dynamic, and I can see the next freakout item, maybe, coming along in the form of Jeff Sharlet's new Rolling Stone story. Now, that's not Sharlet's fault, and in fact he's aware of the phenomenon too:
The sad fact is that such "sleeper cells" aren't an invention of the Bush administration. In the 1970s, as the modern Christian Right took form, conservative evangelical activists realized that to win power they needed not just to elect leaders, but to get their people into the overlooked civil service jobs that are crucial to the way the country is actually run. For instance, in 2003 I wrote about a group called The Family, or The Fellowship, in Harper's; one of my neighbors when I lived in The Family's neighborhood compound was LeRoy Rooker, a mid-level Department of Education lifer (Director of the Dep. of Ed.'s Family Compliance Policy office) responsible, last time I checked, for policy related to student confidentiality and public schools. One of the men I lived with, Gannon Sims, has since gone on to work as a spokesman for a State Department office dedicated to fighting human trafficking. Nothing wrong with that, but it's worth considering that Gannon, when I knew him, was being trained in an organization that believed the only legitimate source of policy was Jesus as he reveals himself to a "new chosen."
Comparing such committed partisanship that expresses itself through government service to Al Qaeda is silly, and it distracts from what's really going on : the American Christian right is an enormous, diversified cultural and political movement that is advancing along many fronts at once, and temporary political reversals such as losing Congress and the Senate are just that: temporary reversals. The movement soldiers on regardless, along multiple fronts, and until Americans who believe in religious liberty, science as the basis for government policy, and pluralistic democracy become politically active, and encourage other Americans to do the same, the Christian right will continue to advance.
Collective freakouts about the latest perceived theocratic bogeymonster of the day or week will do nothing to avert the march of Christian nationalism. No, that takes work, and knowledge of the movement that comes from sustained attention, and then the formulation of a strategic plan and the funding of such a plan.
I would venture to guess that there is more money being spent on the construction of Creationist museums in America yearly than gets spent working against the Christian nationalist and theocratic movements in America. That's where we are right now. That must change.
Let me conclude with the bulk of the post I made yesterday, which sought to put the Goodling flap into context :
I didn't bother writing about Monica Goodling because I assumed that it was common knowledge that Bush Administration was stuffed with ideologues from the Christian right . I guess I was wrong, but I'm perplexed by how wrong I seem to have been. [NOTE: Max Blumenthal did cover the story, providing background on Goodling's background at Regent University in a March 30, 2007 blog post at Talk To Action and on his personal blog ]
I suppose I was under the misconception that many people are aware of the pervasive penetration of the US government and even the US military by partisans of the Christian right and the work of shadow organizations such as Christian Embassy that targets high level officials within the Pentagon or FORCE Ministries that specializes in recruiting, unsurprisingly, members of the US Special Forces.
Then, there's the National Prayer Breakfast run by the "Fellowship" recently described by Jeff Sharlet.....
The list of organizations and groups on the Christian right that seek to both control and supplant government is very, very long. Sometimes it's all in the family too : While Amway/Quixtar heir Dick DeVos guns for public education, his brother in law Erik Prince founded Blackwater USA
Pat Robertson's outfit isn't the only Christian right organization with trained partisans in the US government. Sometimes it seems hard to swing a journalistic story line on US government malfeasance without it toppling someone like Wade Horn, Eric Keroack, or Monica Goodling. [note: moiv's coverage at Talk To Action helped topple Eric Keroack, and Cindy Cooper's reporting was pivotal in bringing down Wade Horn ]
Fact is, the Bush Administration has been stuffed with far right Christian ideologues, visions of sugarplum theocracy dancing in their heads, from day one, and if someone had come up to me, eyes big as dinner plates, to warn me there are 150 graduates of Regent University working under Bush I might have thought to myself "yes, and there are cows in fields too" while I scoped out the nearest emergency exit. And that wouldn't be fair, but by the same token the near oblivion of much of mainstream media to the Bush Administration's hiring of partisan religious ideologues for slots in the federal bureaucracy seems a bit silly.
That the US government has become saturated with culture warriors from the Chrisian right hasn't been especially publicized but neither has it been hidden.
Now, big mainstream media outlets such as the New York Times have picked up on Monica Goodling's links to Pat Robertson and Regent University via blogs, observes Max Blumenthal, and now Robertson's strategic game, long occluded from most media vision by his penchant for idiotic sounding, absurd, or bloodthirsty gaffes is finally out in the open. But will media, blogs, and the US non-theocratic mainstream and left begin to get the bigger picture ? As Max Blumenthal lays it out:
The Christian right is far more than a pantheon of charismatic backlashers with automatonic followers of "old men and women." It is also a sophicated political operation with a coherent long-term strategy. Goodling may be out of a job, but thousands of capable Christian right cadres remain, waging the culture war from inside the White House, federal agencies and Republican congressional offices. Together they will continue to inflame conflicts that were previously unimaginable.
Anyone insisting in spite of continuously mounting evidence that the Christian right is going to simply shrink into oblivion because the Democrats control Congress, or because evangelical leaders are prone to scandal, should learn from Goodling's example and take the fifth.
Writing on Hullaballoo, Tristero puts the hullaballoo over Monica Goodling and the Regent University brigade in perspective:
I am also not claiming that a full blown theocratic dystopia a la The Handmaid's Tale is likely in America's future. However, the theocrats have managed to undermine the separation of church and state in numerous different ways. Many of the goals of the theocrats, which were considered utterly crackpot, are now considered fit for mainstream discussion. Some examples include the establishment of an office of "faith-based initiatives," the utterly substance-less "intelligent design" creationism, the advocacy of a minimalist federal government, the opposition to the U.N. and multi-lateralism, the establishment of a false dichotomy between a dominant "secularism" and a persecuted Christianity, the attempt to undermine and eliminate Social Security, and the placement within the American government, at all levels, of political operatives fully committed to destroying American liberalism.
By "American liberalism" I am not referring specifically to those of us who call ourselves "liberals" but something far broader. The goal of the theocrats is to replace the Englightenment liberal idea of a nation of laws and the consensus of the governed with a government of self-described superior beings who claim they derive their power directly from God.
Such claims immunize rulers from criticism or accountability from the people. Such claims are made, in many different ways, by the Bush administration. Only Bush, of all presidents, at least in recent history, has explicitly claimed that the reason he took the country to war was because God told him to. Furthermore, Bush has never discouraged his far right base from claiming he is God's avatar on earth
But to focus exclusively on Christian theocratic influence within US government is to miss another process, ideological creep.
As I wrote in Science & Cargo Cults, Global Warming, The Devil, and Democracy:
Americans in the 1950's probably had far greater respect for, and empathy with, scientists and the scientific venture. But over the course of the latter 20th Century many seem to have drifted away from or trust in science. Where do beliefs such as belief in Geocentrism or the notion that Global Warming is an elaborate conspiracy to advance a 'satanic', secular humanist "one world order" come from ?
One answer to that question is that in the intervening decades since the 1950's, Christian fundamentalists who felt threatened by secularism and the Enlightenment itself turned methods of modern PR towards the problem of undermining the ethos of the Enlightenment that, some historians would assert, underlay the foundation of America as a nation. The project has been a startling success too : ideas that once circulated on the fringe of the American far right have now moved into the mainstream such that prominent US senators such as John McCain now court the political endorsement of rising Christian right leaders, such as John Hagee, who posit vast, shadowy, satanic conspiracies of "Illuminati" and "international banking groups" to foist a "one world government" on America through the United Nations.
Indeed, the House GOP Minority Speaker considers it OK to court an advocate for worldwide nuclear war. We've come a long way indeed.
[Image below : my figurative artistic treatment of CUFI founder John Hagee, who John McCain, Roy Blunt and many others in the GOP have been courting recently and who was the keynote speaker, before about 1/2 of the Congress and Senate, at AIPAC's February conference in DC. See links directly above for more on Dear. Mr. Hagee.]