While many of us were at the national meeting in NYC April 8-9, a few of the WCW Detroit chapter went out to the BattleCry rally there. They learned a lot about how
these BattleCry youth think and gained some experience trying to win them over. The following is a report from one of
them. We hope it will be useful for
people at coming BattleCry events in Philly and after.
I went out to the Battle Cry youth gathering at Ford Field
football stadium in downtown Detroit
on Friday night (4/7) and again on Saturday. Friday
night I went alone. After a while a World
Can’t Wait activist joined me with a ‘Drive Out Bush’ sign, and a friend rode
by on a bike and saw us and joined in the fray. I brought a few signs but some Battle Cry kids
ran over and grabbed them when I wasn’t looking and destroyed them.
Saturday two of us from WCW went and an anti-war activist
joined us. She had a sign that featured
an Iraqi sobbing over a child’s body with the words ‘Pro-Life?’ Friday
was freezing, didn’t stay more than an hour. Met some good kids though. I had a sign that said ‘Battle Cry: American Taliban
in Training.’ A lot of kids asked me why
are we calling them the Taliban. Well,
when we made plans we decided we would try to win over the youth by exposing
the Battle Cry leadership for their theocratic essence and make the distinction
between the youth in attendance and the leaders. Well, that particular sign did not do that. It
drew the line between us and the youth in attendance. I ditched
that sign for Saturday and returned with ‘Battle Cry Leadership = American Taliban’.
One sign I had Friday said ‘Battle Cry teaches you to not
think.’ The same guy who destroyed my other signs
returned this one altered. They cut out the
word ‘not’ (which, if they’d have left it like that, would have read ‘Battle Cry
teaches you to think’), but they added the word ‘how’, so it read ‘Battle Cry
teaches you HOW to think.’ Those particular
youth did not come back across the street, but I showed the sign to many others
and explained how this one vandal had helped to make our point for us.
I met many good, rational thinking youth. Many were open minded, some curious, most were
friendly. One kid I was talking with for
a while, about music as well as the issue at hand, took a bundle of WCW flyers. When a woman walked up and informed us all
that Jesus loves us, he made a face to me and said ‘That shit really
embarrasses me’.
I was paraphrasing Sunsara Taylor’s point (from her recent
appearance on The O’Reilly Factor) about, what is this morality crisis, is it
from TV and video games, or from the war based on lies and torture and fascism etc.
I found out quickly that a lot of these
youth really oppose the war, and are anxious about where it is headed, and
about the prospect of a draft. Many of
the youth from Canada
really opposed the war. Some arguments
broke out amongst the groups talking with us that I found very
interesting. I was mainly pointing out
the theocratic direction things are going, who is leading it, and where Battle Cry
fits in with that. Almost all disagreed,
said this was about Jesus, about loving, Ron Luce is the nicest guy ever etc. I got a lot of them to say that, yes,
theocracy would be bad, the separation of church and state is important. Many were just clueless, saying, ‘What would
be wrong with the Bible being the law?’
You can almost predict which kids walking up will be more
open minded or thinking– the long haired males, women with colored hair or
punk style clothes. Many would read the
sign and deny it, or get hostile, but others would be curious and ask why are we
saying Battle Cry is similar to the Taliban.
I met some women who were pro-choice. One said it proud, even though many around her
angrily denounced her. I met one woman whose mother had the same lesbian
partner for years. She said she is proud
of her mother. I asked if this right-wing
indoctrination stuff bothers her, she thought about it and said it does some.
On the question of homosexuality, they seemed to be partly
coached. I heard a few of them say that
gays and lesbians have STDs. When I
called one out on that, he changed the story to ‘They have a higher incidence
of STDs than the general population.’ When I asked where they get their info, a
bunch of them started up with ‘Jesus loves gay people’. When I asked them if
gay people need Jesus by virtue of being gay, they of course added, ‘Well, we
all need Jesus.’
I had not done the proper research and did not know which
Bible verses called for execution of homosexuals. When I
claimed that the Bible does in fact do that (and that the leaders of the
Christian fundamentalists who are pushing for a theocracy believe in that), a
group of kids said no it doesn’t.
As I was arguing the point, a woman standing there with
Bible in hand, said, ‘Yes it does’ and named the book and verses in question. I asked her how could she support this and the
other hateful, death to him or hers, in there. She said that that is the old testament, and
people don’t have to be punished any more because Jesus died for our sins. I related the stuff about âbuffet’ Christians
(according to Christian theocrats, you can’t pick and choose, a la a buffet,
which parts of the Bible you like or agree with, that it is ALL the word of
God, even the old testament), that this stuff on death for abortion doctors and
adulteresses, is the words of the Christian fundamentalist leaders that Battle Cry
is a part of, not mine.
Something I could discern was that these youth were
definitely trained on what to say and think on some questions, and not so much
on other questions. They had very
divergent views on the war, torture, Bush’s spying, Bush. Some said Bush was put there by God, others
really loathed him and said it loudly. We
had many very good debates about the war, similar to the debates I have with any
other people out on the street. It
appeared that these youth were not told what to think about the war, yet
anyways.
This crowd was 95% white and from what I gathered from
asking them, many came from rural areas.
What they were absolutely coached on to say, and said it in
lockstep, was around: 1. Abortion, 2. Evolution, and 3. the Constitution. Fetuses are babies, there are millions murdered
each year, fetuses show pain, all the old arguments. One guy said, ‘Why are you so worried about
the killing in Iraq
when millions of babies are murdered?’ When I stopped laughing, I Said, ‘No! Why are
you so concerned with the choices women make concerning their own bodies and
not the tens of thousands of already been born (or, ‘ABBs’, initials we ended
up using a lot) people being killed and tortured in Iraq?’ He was stumped. With all these arguments, we hoped onlookers
were listening and hopefully it will have an effect on them, if not today then
tomorrow, as they encounter more of the real world.
Around evolution, they had some slick and very inaccurate
arguments. One older, obviously better
trained man, came up with a young Black woman, and he argued that Darwin was a
eugenicist, that arguing that man descended from apes is a racist argument, am
I going to tell this young woman that white people are further descended from
apes than Black people, or something like that. I did not respond well as I was overwhelmed by
the low level of this argument. The other
WCW guy with me said, ‘All of humankind originated in Africa’,
which I didn’t think answered all his assertions. However he changed tacts and went somewhere else
with the argument. The Black teenager he
used in his argument ended up being very cool and open minded and actually
agreed with a bunch of things we were saying.
Their arguments against evolution were often framed in terms
that seemed on the surface to be scientific.
It didn’t jibe that these teens would spontaneously come up with some of
these arguments, which they probably would have claimed had I asked. It seems like some boning up (ok, pun
intended) on evolution would be helpful before attending a Battle Cry event or
the sure-to-be many similar events coming up.
I personally found helpful Ardea Skybreak’s series on evolution from
Revolution newspaper (www.revcom.us). There are many other books and articles explaining
evolution on the website of the National
Center for Science
Education (www.natcenscied.org).
The other thing they really seemed in lock-step on is that
the framers of the US Constitution intended this to be a Christian nation. I did not take this on well, even though I had
recently read the Catherine Crier book Contempt, How the Right is Wronging American Justice, which has a good section on the
history of the religious views of the men who wrote the Constitution and how they
arrived at the importance of separation of church and state and also addresses
the great danger of theocracy. I felt
like I needed to supply some names and quotes, which are in that book and
others, but I couldn’t conjure them up, or a very good argument to counter
those, other than the founding fathers had come here to escape religious
persecution. They argued that the separation
of church and state that people talk about is a misunderstanding of the
concept. I don’t remember what they were saying was the proper understanding of
it, but they all pointed out ‘In God We Trust’ on everything, including the
money, as proof of what they’re saying.
Saturday we got there and it looked dead, but we could hear
cheers from inside. One of our new signs
said ‘Battle Cry Leadership = American Taliban’. Another said ‘Religion is ok, theocracy is
horrible’ and the aforementioned ‘Pro-life?’ At the lunch break, we were soon surrounded
by hundreds of youth yelling at us, shooting questions at us, debating with us.
It was really difficult to function in that format. We set out to expose the theocratic ways of
not just Battle Cry but also the very particular and extreme leaders of this
Christian fundamentalist movement throughout society, to really flesh out the WCW
Call, ‘Your government is moving each day closer to a theocracy, where a narrow
and hateful brand of Christian fundamentalism will rule’.
It was extremely difficult to keep focused on theocracy and
not religion vs atheism or secularism, especially when kids kept asking us if we’re
Christians or if we believe in God. A
huge problem with these youth is they are so indoctrinated into a blind faith worldview,
a âthe Bible is all truthful’ certitude, that it was almost impossible for a
huge chunk of them to consider anything that even remotely challenges their
mindset, not to mention anything we were saying.
It was so disconcerting and sinister that I had to remind
myself that the 35,000 present came from all over the midwest, south and Canada. For example, one older man told me that the
war on Iraq was good because
Iraq had planned to invade
the US.
I lost my cool and said ‘Where do you
GET this stuff?!? From Battle Cry, from
your church, where?’ I guess they get it
from a lot of sources, but the reason they are so susceptible is because they
are just blinded by their worldview. If people can believe the ‘Left Behind’
book series to be non-fiction, then they can believe, or be taught, anything. And yes, there were many references to Left
Behind.
Going over the same general points with hundreds of people,
we really found ourselves honing what we were saying, sharpening it up and focusing
on the most important points. What we ended up saying was ‘The leaders of
Battle Cry are part of a 20 year build-up of extreme right-wing (had to define
right wing 100 times) Christian fundamentalists who have gotten themselves into
power at all levels of society and the government and the military. They see this as their time to consolidate power
and turn the country into a theocracy. It won’t mean the rule of good-hearted
Christians; it will be the rule of very Nazi-like leaders who want the most
vicious interpretation of the Bible to be the law of the land. This will mean no rights for people, a long
list of people who can be killed just for who they are, and never-ending war. This movement is led by Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell,
James Dobson, Bill Frist, Tom Delay, and George Bush, and Ron Luce is right in
there with them. They are trying to fool
you into becoming soldiers for their cause’.
We got out lots of WCW Calls. We thought of making a leaflet specifically
for this event but didn’t have time. For
future events, it is something to think about. As the lunch break was ending, red-shirted
Battle Cry security guys were rounding up the youth to go back inside telling
them they would miss the ‘Acquire the Fire’ segment of the conference. The still large groups of youth standing around
basically blew them off, some angrily saying ‘No, we’re talking here’. Some older people, I think they were chaperons,
were telling us in a snotty tone, ‘What other country can you protest in?’ As I
was answering, the police came up and told us to leave or we would be arrested for
creating a disturbance and blocking the street.