We were watching CNN late Saturday night and caught the tail end of a report on Teen Mania, Ron Luce’s Christian youth indoctrination organization. Watching the pre-teens and teens at one of Luce’s BattleCry events was downright scary.
Luce’s message, which is tinged heavily with his brand of fundamentalism, is that popular culture is corrupting our youth. He pounds into his young congregants the need to reject all the commercialism, sex, drugs and whatnot rife in secular culture.
He woos impressionable pre-teens and teens with the usual fundie blend of showbiz and pulpit-pounding demagoguery. While telling them to reject pop culture, he uses (Christian) rock music, pyrotechnics, and variety of merchandise to convert his BattleCry event audiences to the Teen Mania way.
Watching adults sway in some kind of hypnotic rapture during a fundie church service is one thing. Seeing kids as young as 10 with their eyes closed and arms upraised, entranced by Luce’s brand of religion by the hundreds is alarming.
Pop culture is evil, kids. It’s poisoning your minds, removing all that is good from your souls. Instead, empty your minds of all free will and follow me instead. That’s the Luce message.
An army of Christian youth robots.
Christiane Amanpour was the CNN correspondent doing the story, part of her series, “God’s Warriors.” A Christian Iranian by birth, Amanpour was clearly drawing parallels between Luce’s Christian militancy and the Islamist extremists she covered in another segment. She questioned Luce point blank about his requirement that students at his Honor Academy follow very strict dress and behavior codes, asking him how those restrictions were any different from conservative Muslims requiring women be veiled. Luce did not provide a substantive answer.
