The "Teenage Holy War"

The Revealer has an absolutely terrifying look at BattleCry, a militant and cultish Fundamentalist army comprised almost entirely of t(w)eens.

The story deserves extensive quotation in lieu of actual reading:

"When you enlist in the military, there's a code of honor," [Ron] Luce [the BattleCry leader] preaches, "same as being a follower of Christ." His Christian code requires a "wartime mentality": a "survival orientation" and a readiness to face "real enemies." The queers and communists, feminists and Muslims, to be sure, but also the entire American cultural apparatus of marketing and merchandising, the "techno-terrorists" of mass media, doing to the morality of a generation what Osama bin Laden did to the Twin Towers. "Just as the events of September 11th, 2001, permanently changed our perspective on the world," Luce writes, "so we ought to be awakened to the alarming influence of today's culture terrorists. They are wealthy, they are smart, and they are real."

...

On the second day, when the time comes for even the youngest to enlist in Luce's army, I find myself sitting on the main floor of the arena next to a couple of twelve-year-olds, Hanneh and Mallory. Hanneh has straight blond hair; Mallory's a redhead with curls. Mallory wants to borrow my pen. "I have to write a message to MTV," she says. She hunches over in her seat, her hair hiding her hand as she scratches it out. "Dear MTV," she reads aloud, "leave those kids alone!"

Then she adds a kicker: "Repent." I ask her what she means. She giggles as if I'm teasing her. "Ron Luce said so!"

...

The Cleveland event, Acquire the Fire, only one stop in what is becoming Luce's permanently touring roadshow, is not meant to save souls -- most of the kids say they accepted Jesus when they were four or five -- but to radicalize them.

...

"This is a real war," Luce preaches. When he talks like that, he growls. "This is not a metaphor!" In Cleveland, he intercuts his sermons with videos of suicide bombers and marching Christian teens.

...

Luce equates 9/11 with Columbine, and both to the scourge of secular media. “Like the one kiss between Madonna and Brittney that went boom! The whole country took a step down. And they play it again, and again, and again, so you’ve got twelve-fourteen-year-old girls thinking, ‘Oh, it’s OK.’ And nobody seems to care.”

...

Luce absorbs influences without reflection and repackages them as hip and Christian without concern for allusion. The BattleCry aesthetic, for instance, looks as if it were stolen from Stalin's archives, a triangular red flag as its banner and set-jawed kids in silhouette as the new comrades - "trenchmates," in the BattleCry vernacular. Rittenhouse insists it never occurred to him or Luce that they were appropriating the ethos of the Evil Empire. "We just wanted a branding experience," he told me. "Red's a color that's in right now..."

Luce ends his rallies with an illustration from the Book of Judges: the story of a man who, after he gives over his concubine to be gang-raped, kills the disgraced woman and cuts her into twelve pieces, then sends one to each of the tribes of Israel as a reminder of what happens to the ungodly. Foe a finale, Luce or one of his junior pastors dissects a mannequin labeled "with the sins of secularism and then - to the cheer "Cut up the concubine!" -- sends his assistants into the crowd to distribute the pieces.

...

The Honor Academy is a polished campus of new brick buildings growing out of the red dirt of an east Texas compound....There's also what they call the "Back 40," several hundred acres on which stand more primitive structures, retreats for toughening up the kids, and a Quonset-hut officer's club for those who stay to become employees or permanent volunteers, forgoing college or earning mail-order degrees from Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.

Students, called interns, come for a year or more between high school and college. "It's a bubble," one girl says, a safe haven in which to purify before battle. Once accepted, interns pledge to uphold the Academy's tenets. They must promise not only to never criticize the Academy, but also to never allow any aspect of Luce's ministry to be "portrayed in a negative light."

...

Intern days begin as early as 4:45 A.M. with an hour of group exercise on the court near the Academy’s swimming pool. Mornings are for classes: There's "Character Development," which focuses on "obedience" and "purity," and the "World View Module," in which one learns to see current events around the world through the lens of obedience and purity.

Further reinforcement comes from the Academy's required "Life Transforming Events," the most grueling of which is ESOAL (Emotionally Stretching Opportunity of a Lifetime). Luce was reluctant to share details about the "Opportunity," a fifty-to-ninety-hour sleep-deprived endurance test, but a short video of the 2005 ESOAL provides revealing glimpses: students weeping and dragging giant wooden crosses on their shoulders; a boy rolling and puking across a field while a senior intern "sergeant" in camouflage and a helmet urges him on; a platoon of weeping girls; a shell-shocked boy mumbling into the camera, "Don't know what time it is…. Don’t know what matters…. Don't even necessarily know who I can trust."

...

Chuck Colson, the former Watergate felon who has since become the most politically connected fundamentalist in Washington, created a curriculum for Luce called "Rewired," featuring a series of Matrix-like videos suggesting that ideas such as creationism are powerful, dangerous secrets hidden by media elites, who code evolutionary propaganda into movies such as Predator and the Alien series.

...

The moral of the story is that obedience to God matters more than education. Contreras speaks of "generational curses" for those who do not obey - the idea that one must pay for the sins of one's fathers, a notion rejected even by most fundamentalists...

...

Such lessons, however, are secondary to the grunt work of building the BattieCry brand. Interns must log at least thirty-one hours a week working for the cause.

...

Everyone at the Honor Academy has a favorite Scripture verse to keep them pure and holy (some of the boys abbreviate them in ink across their knuckles), but the Bible story I heard cited most often was that of Abraham and his only son, Isaac, whom God commanded Abraham to sacrifice. Abraham consents, but as he's about to drive in the knife, God stays his hand and lets Abraham know he was only testing him. Abraham passed, and for that, he got to be the patriarch of monotheism. "Awesome" is the word most used to describe Abraham's single-minded willingness to destroy that which was most dear to him.

Somehow I feel that these miniature fascists don't quite grasp the nuances of Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith.

Of course, there are those who oppose BattleCry.

Some BattleCry-related videos:

• BattleCry montage
  
• Nightline piece
  
• Bill O'Reilly loves his BattleCry