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March 26, 2006
Marching as to War
25,000 evangelical Christian young people participating in an event named “Battle Cry” got in San Francisco’s face for the weekend, protesting "the virtue terrorism" of popular culture. Teens, protesting on the steps of City Hall and carrying medieval battle-style banners, learned about the “brutal attack” being launched on them by advertiser “terrorists,” and were called on to “go to battle” for their generation.
The event organizer, Ron Luce, says the effort is part of a “culture war” and wants young people to turn their backs on pop culture and instead follow the Bible. Can anyone say “Onward Christian Soldiers”?
Big surprise, Luce’s fundamentalist organization for teens, called “Teen Mania” (fitting, if you ask me) is based in Texas. As I’ve asked myself on a number of occasions lately, I can’t help but wondering, “Can anything good come out of Texas?” Apparently, Texan George W. Bush thinks so – he has appointed Luce to a federal anti-drug abuse commission, as if a fundamentalist Christian knows the first thing about how to communicate with drug users.
That aside, I’m a little concerned about the reported response of San Francisco Assemblyman Mark Leno. Of the young fundamentalists, he said, “they're loud, they're obnoxious, they're disgusting, and they should get out of San Francisco." The Board of Supervisors even passed a resolution calling the fundamentalist and outspoken anti-gay teens’ protest an “act of provocation.”
From childhood I was taught, as a fundamentalist Christian, that a time would come when we would be persecuted and killed by our government for our faith. The language of war being bandied about by Luce and his group certainly sound to me like an expectation of the fulfillment of that prophecy. Fundamentalists are ramping up the rhetoric, pushing Christians to the fringes of literalist, extremist belief in the Bible and the need to codify their interpretation of it in this country.
Meanwhile, money-grubbing entertainment corporations are selling extremely gruesome and graphic violence and irresponsible, heartless sex to impressionable young people on a scale that far exceeds the stuff our parents thought was over the top, like “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and “Friday the 13th.” The fundamentalist Christian community is blaming this garbage on “liberals” (interestingly, these same people rushed to take their children to see the horrific snuff-film “The Passion of the Christ”) – and nobody is standing up to say, “It ain’t so.”
Perhaps I’m crazy or overreacting, but having just watched “Hotel Rwanda” I can’t help but worry about the hateful war rhetoric that is developing here. People have a frightening ability to get irrationally violent when they feel their way of life is at stake and no other alternative is left to them. So I have to ask this question: Do we want a bloodbath against fundamentalist Christians? If not, then why are we feeding this frenzy of hatred and division?
I say it is the rational free-thinkers that need to be the grown-ups here. We are the ones who recognize that no god will ever appear and magically vanquish evil for us – only human beings can create a peaceful society. So rather than passing inciteful government resolutions and having government officials spout reactionary epithets, behavior that is so easily interpreted by these people as precisely the official suppression and persecution they have expected, we need to start educating people on the facts.
The facts about Christian history and the origins of the Bible are nearly an automatic deterrent to fundamentalism. You don’t have to twist them and you don’t have to wordsmith. They are what they are. And they support rationality.
Posted by Becky at March 26, 2006 07:32 PM
