BATTLECRY RALLY

This sent chills down my spine. Hitler Youth reincarnated.

You can brainwash grown-ups into all kinds of things, but if you want them to put on brown shirts, march to the cause and kill for it, you have to start while they are still kids.

First come the Good News Camps, the Bible Study camps ran by teachers during afterschool hours on public school premises. Perfectly legal apparently, as court rulings finally decreed. Those target elementary school-age children. Wall Street Journal ran an article on this issue a couple of weeks ago. More on that to follow.

Then, as those kids get older, it's BattleCry (quotes from three artiles by the same author follow):



BattleCry For Theocracy


If you've been waiting to get alarmed until the Christian fascist movement started filling stadiums with young people and hyping them up to do battle in "God's army," wait no longer.

In recent weeks, BattleCry, a Christian fundamentalist youth movement, has attracted more than 25,000 people to mega-rally rock concerts in San Francisco and Detroit, and this weekend it plans to fill Wachovia Stadium in Philadelphia.

attleCry is a part of the evangelical organization Teen Mania, and you can learn a lot about the kind of society that Teen Mania is fighting for by reading up on its Honor Academy, a non-accredited educational institution that offers directed internships to 700 undergraduate and graduate youth each year. Among the academy's tenets: Homosexuality and masturbation are sins. Interns are forbidden to listen to secular music, watch R-rated movies or date; men can't use the Internet unsupervised; the length of women's skirts is regulated. The logic behind this-that men must be protected from the sin of sexual temptation-is what drives Islamic fundamentalists to shroud women in burkhas! [..]


Teen Mania and BattleCry are multimillion-dollar operations that send more than 5,000 missionaries to more than 34 countries each year. Their supporters and members are some of the most powerful and extreme religious lunatics in the country. BattleCry's "partners" include Pat Robertson (who got a call from Karl Rove to discuss Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito before the nomination was made public), Charles Colson (who as President Richard Nixon's lawyer was knee-deep in the Watergate scandal and who went to jail for obstruction of justice in the Pentagon Papers case), and Jerry Falwell (who blamed Sept. 11 on homosexuals, feminists, pagans and abortionists). BattleCry's events have been addressed by former First Lady Barbara Bush (via video) as well as former President Gerald Ford. This weekend's event will include Franklin Graham, who has ministered to George W. Bush and publicly proclaimed that Islam is an "evil religion." [..]





Fear and Loathing at Philadelphia's BattleCry

It began with fireworks so loud and startling I screamed. Lights and smoke followed, and a few kids were pulled up on stage from the crowd. One was asked to read a letter.

This was the letter that opened the event. Its author was George W. Bush. Yes, the president of the United States sent a letter of support, greeting, prayer and encouragement to the BattleCry event held at Wachovia Spectrum Stadium in Philadelphia on May 12. Immediately afterward, a preacher took the microphone and led the crowd in prayer. Among other things, he asked the attendees to "Thank God for giving us George Bush."

On his cue, about 17,000 youths from upward of 2,000 churches across America and Canada directed their thanks heavenward in unison.

Throughout the three and a half hours of BattleCry's first session, I thought of only one analogy that fit the experience: This must have been what it felt like to watch the Hitler Youth, filled with self-righteous pride, proclaim the supremacy of their beliefs and their willingness to shed blood for them.


A man of imposing size sat down next to me and my friends and asked us if we were planning any disturbances.

And lest you think this is idle paranoia, BattleCry founder Ron Luce told the crowds the next morning (May 13) that he plans to launch a "blitzkrieg" in the communities, schools, malls, etc. against those who don't share his theocratic vision of society.

Blitzkrieg.

Nothing like a little Nazi imagery to whip up the masses. [..]

(While in the bathroom, I saw something equally unsettling--a preteen girl wearing a shirt being sported by many attendees that night: Jesus on the cross, robes waving, and emblazoned across the front the words "Dressed to Kill.") [..]

It was a mantra Luce repeated all through the night: the need to submit one's self fully to Jesus, to belong completely to Him.

"He doesn't just want to be in your heart, He wants to own your heart.... There's only one good reason to come to Christ: because He's the rightful owner of your life.... You don't have to know much about Jesus, just enough to surrender your whole life."

Throughout this section, a loud crowd from the back of the stadium would periodically erupt, "We are warriors!" [..]





BattleCry: Ron Luce's Holy War

[..] After what amounted to a celebration of genocide against Native Americans and a pep rally for death by STDs, things got really gory: Evangelist Franklin Graham took the stage.

Graham began by tossing out the despicable canard that HIV/AIDS is a punishment from God. "We get outside of marriage and there are consequences," he told the crowd.

He went on to assert that God sees marriage as a "relation between a man and a woman. Not a man and a man or a woman and a woman." This drew him his loudest applause of the day, never mind that the Bible celebrates many instances of marriage between one man and many women. Maybe the next time I go to one of Luce's gatherings I'll take a bunch of bumper stickers that read: "Man + 1,000 Women = Marriage." People can put them on their cars to promote a model of marriage in the Bible-a model in which King Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines (and for some reason God never gave him AIDS as a punishment).


How long must we put up with a world where religion plays a role in whipping up people to kill others?

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." [..]

While calling on the youths present to engage in this "battle for the souls of men," he declared: "No souls can be saved without the shedding of blood. Blood must be shed!"

Shortly thereafter the large screen above the stadium lit up with images of Navy SEALs making their way from backstage. Dressed in camouflage, carrying automatic weapons, kicking down doors and firing blanks into empty rooms along their way, they seemed like the embodiments of the house-to-house raids and indiscriminate killings that have been seen in rare footage that made its way out of Iraq.

Fireworks exploded and flames billowed as Ron Luce greeted the warriors, bragging that all of them had been involved in real battles. They are part of FORCE Ministries, a Christian organization composed of current and retired Navy SEALs, law enforcement members and other military personnel who evangelize at events like these and conduct Bible study sessions at military bases around the world. Among those on stage was a SEAL just back from Afghanistan and a member of a police SWAT team. All of them are trained to kill, and they apparently do so or have done so in the belief that God sanctions their actions. [..]

Da Vinci Code revisited

As the release of The Da Vinci Code was fast approaching, I kept wondering at the amount of negative publicity surrounding the film. Preachers decried its viles and lies from pulpits; in some places, there were mass protests and the viewing opportunities were restricted altogether. In the media, the tone of discussion changed overnight from exalted anticipation to total contempt. AS soon as the critics saw the previous, articles appeared in papers that the movie is terrible, even before the reviews came out.

Well, I thought, the movie may indeed not be very good, but the amount of negativity thrown at it far exceeds the reasonable and customary ... why, I wondered?

It is clear that the religious right sees The Da Vinci Code, with its alternative version of early Christianity, as a threat to the establishment. They also realize the potential of using this movie as a platform for evangelizing. Thus their ire and the multitide of debunking books, which enjoy brisk sales on the wake of Dan Brown's oeuvre.

Yet this doesn't explain why many non-religious people also have a strong negative reaction to the movie.

Perhaps people are so invested in the consensus reality that they in general strongly react to any concept that has a potential to disturb the status quo. This is the reason why most people reject conspiracy theories. This rejection is even more apparent with The Da Vinci Code, since it touches on what is such an integral part of common culture.

Keeping all this in mind, I went and watched The Da Vinci Code the other day. Well, what can I say ... make a guess ...

IT SUCKS! BIG TIME!

Forget the trail-blazing ideas and the iconoclastic plot -- everything is dreadfully superficial and looks dead from the start. The movie struck me as plain BORING. In the book, the clues are revealed gradually, with a lot of background. The move skims over it in a mad race from clue to clue, which gets annoying pretty fast. Both those who read the book and those who didn't soon get lost -- the first know this stuff already, the second can't follow it. Terrible acting from lead stars doesn't help either.

But the best part was when at the end Langdon says to Sophie smth along the lines of "Jesus, Mary Magdalene -- does it really matter what really happened? It is what you BELIEVE that matters ... Imagine what would MM do in this situation ... would she seek to destroy the faith -- or to revitalize it?"

And this is why I suffered 2.5 hours of jaw-stiffling boredom, to hear THIS @#$%?

I think we may soon start seeing car stickers and bracelets with "It is what you BELIEVE that matters" or
"What would Mary Magdalene do?" :):)

This gives a hint of something more incidious than a simple film-making flop. The Da Vinci Code appears to be a successful management program, attempting to accomodate maximum number of people from traditional religious and new-age paths.

IMO the Da Vinci Code may actually have serve the religious right. It may have led the masses to stifle their vague questioning of the official story of Christianity, and into accepting any alternative concept as either a version of the same basic truth, or a work of fiction -- or both.

Yet, this "It is what you BELIEVE that matters" reels of a typically liberal "You're OK, I'm OK, WE are both OK". This kind of talk makes the conservatives' blood boil, since it goes against their proclamed absolute values. Thus we have yet another false dichotomies, when a solution to a problem is reduced to two alternatives, neither of which accurately reflects reality. And a choice between these alternatives inevitably results in a dog fight.

It does cover all bases indeed.