By Stanley Rogouski, 5/14/06
A few months ago, when I read about the 25th anniversary of the
death of Bobby Sands, I thought back to my own childhood, and my mixed
Protestant/Catholic family. I remembered looking at the coverage of
‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland and being honestly baffled about how
Protestants and Catholics could kill one another over their religion.
Why couldn’t they simply get along the way we did in the United States?
The people behind Battle Cry, veteran Christian youth organizer Ron
Luce and his backers (who include Charles Colson, Ted Haggard, and Pat
Robertson) don’t like the America where I grew up. And it’s more than
just the separation of church and state. They don’t like the fact that
my parents let me watch TV without any supervision. They don’t like the
fact that I listened to Howard Stern on the radio, that my parents
bought me Neil Young records, and that I used to find it easy to sneak
into R rated movies like ‘The Life of Brian’ by Monty Python. One thing
that always makes me chuckle is remembering Christmas in 1978. My
parents had bought my 12-year-old brother the album ‘Jazz’ by the
British glam rock group ‘Queen’. Imagine their surprise when my brother
unwrapped it under the Christmas tree and a poster depicting 300 naked
women on bicycles fell out of the album jacket, a photograph of an all
girl nude bicycle race that Freddie Mercury had staged to promote the
single ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’. It still makes them laugh. For Ron Luce
and the parents and Christian youth leaders who brought their kids to
Battle Cry’s 2-day extravaganza of militarism, racism, and Christian
music in Philadelphia last weekend, this kind of thing is deadly
serious.
Now don’t get me wrong. Looking back on my childhood there are a lot
of things I would have changed. Perhaps ‘The Collected Works of
Shakespeare’ would have been a better Christmas present for my brother
than ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’. I would not have let my children eat fast
food, and no, I don’t think Freddy Mercury is a terribly good role
model for a 12-year-old boy. Ron Luce, on the other hand, has no
objections to mass culture in and of itself. He has no real objection
to the manipulative techniques of the advertising industry. Luce’s
problem with Columbia Records or Disney isn’t that they do in fact
manipulate vulnerable kids. It’s that that they do for the wrong
reasons, to make money and not to push them in the direction of
fundamentalist Protestant Christianity. In fact, he likes them so much
he’s decided to adopt them for himself.
Battle Cry Philadelphia was certainly as vulgar and manipulative as
anything I’ve ever seen from Howard Stern or Freddy Mercury. A two day
carnival of militarism, racism, and loud, boring rock music, we were
treated to a ‘sex expert’ named ‘Lakita Garth’ who mixed her scare
routine about sexually transmitted diseases and the need to remain
abstinent until marriage (she’s in her late 30s and recently married)
with hateful impressions of stereotypical dumb teenagers designed to
make us all feel superior. It didn’t work. I’m not a young black male
and I’m not a California valley girl, the two main targets of her
‘satire’, but her routine left me feeling angry and depressed anyway.
There were the usual ridiculous ‘Christian Rock’ bands, a group that
kind of looked like Duran Duran, one that kind of resembled Godsmack or
Pearl Jam, and another reminded me nothing so much as a bad imitation
of Matchbox Twenty. There was a spectacularly offensive segment about
the Ecuadorian Indian tribe that was recently the subject of the movie
‘The End of the Spear’. I hope I never have to suffer through anything
like this again. It resembled a Victorian imperialist freak show from
the 19nth Century complete with the simpering, tamed native, once
violent but now gentle, friendly and willing to serve the white man
after his conversion to Christianity brought up on stage like a trained
pet while they read passages from something called ‘The Pidgin Bible’.
Hey mon. You find Jesus. You feel good.
But Battle Cry Philadelphia was more than just a vulgar carnival
designed to suck donations into the coffers of Ron Luce’s corporation
‘Teen Mania’. Indeed, it had a point, to recruit the future elite
‘warriors’ in the coming battle against the separation of church and
state. It turned dark and frightening on Saturday afternoon. After
Franklin ‘Islam is a Wicked Religion’ Graham came out to thunder
against the evils of homosexuality and the Iraqi people (whom he
considers to be exactly the same people as the ancient Babylonians who
enslaved the tribes of Israel and deserving, one would assume, the
exact same fate) we heard an explosion. Flames shot out on stage and a
team of Navy Seals was shown on the big TV monitors in full camouflage
creeping forward down the hallway from the locker room with their M16s.
They were hunting us, the future Christian leaders of America. Two
teenage girls next to me burst into tears and even I, a jaded
middle-aged male, almost jumped out of my skin. I imagined for that
moment what it must have felt like to have been a teacher at Columbine
high school. 10 seconds later they rushed out onstage and pointed their
guns in our direction firing blanks spitting flames. About 1000 shots
and bang, we were all dead.
I then followed the select group of Christian youth out into the
corridor into the tent where we were told about Teen Mania’s ‘Honor
Academy’, some type of Christian fundamentalist boot camp designed to
replace the first year of college for 600 dollars a month. This is
about the same price that I paid to go to Rutgers way back in the
1980s, but considerably less than it would cost to a decent private
university today. I’m assuming this is half the point, that the kids
who wind up attending the ‘honor academy’ will be evaluated according
how useful they’ll be to the Christian right. The select will be given
some type of financial help going to college. The financially well off
will be fine in any case and the rest will be funneled into the
military, Walmart, and various places where they can thump the Bible
and act as the foot soldiers in the army for the coming Christian
revolution.
Finding myself bored with this, I went back into the atrium of the
Wachovia Center and was approached by a young Asian man in his 20s for
a project called ‘The Bridge of Hope,’ a campaign designed to convert
the Indian untouchables (a doe eyed uncharacteristically light skinned
example of an ‘untouchable’ graces the cover of their pamphlet) and
eventually all 2 billion people in Asia to evangelical Christianity. I
chatted him up for awhile. (Got anybody in Pakistan? Nope. But we hope
to. How about Iraq? Soon. The Muslims really need the Bible to overcome
their wicked, satanic religion. How about Israel? Not at the moment). I
went back into the arena and watched a few minutes of a musical group
called ‘Piller’, a dark, pseudo grunge band with the usual heavy power
chords and a stage show full of pyrotechnics so powerful I felt the
heat licking up against my cheeks all the up in the bleacher section.
Well, having watched the coverage of the Great White tragedy the
previous week, I was in no mood for indoor fireworks, so I shoved my
way through the crowd out of the doors and onto the sidewalk where I
joined the small group of counter protesters handing out literature and
engaging the conventioneers in debate.
This is where I figured out that I had finally had enough of Battle
Cry 2006, that they were nothing but a gang of right-wing extremist
bullies hiding behind teenage kids. Getting into a long debate with
someone I thought was safe and relatively moderate (a man in his 30s
who looked a bit like George Constanza) I found out that there was no
real difference between Nambla and the gay rights movement as a whole,
that the ACLU and Moveon.org were both plotting against Christmas, and
that my grandmother, a devout Catholic who attended a Latin mass, lit
candles for sinners, and raised one son who grew up to be a Jesuit
priest, hadn’t really a Christian at all and was probably in hell. I
moved onto the next man, who told me about a book called ‘Saddam’s
Secrets’ by an ex Baathist general (whom I have never heard George Bush
mention but don’t quote me on it) proving that the weapons of mass
destruction were in a big hole somewhere in Syria.
I ended up in a shouting match with a large, ex con who showed me
his scars, talked about his days as an addict (yeah, just the kind of
guy you’d want watching over your teenage kids), and kept grabbing me
and screaming in my face that I was a ‘salad bar’ every time I brought
up the fact that Ron Luce seemed very uninterested in the Jesus of the
Sermon on the Mount (which was never mentioned the whole weekend) or
about why Franklin Graham spent so much time talking about the wicked
Babylonians and not, for example, the Parable of the Good Samaratin.
This man had a real bad concept of personal space since he couldn’t
really understand it when I kept asking him to let go of my arm. It was
getting to the point where there was only going to be one possible
outcome, him getting kneecapped or me getting lynched, so my companions
pulled me out of the debate and we beat a hasty retreat to my car where
we sped up the New Jersey Turnpike back to New York.
Finding myself, at long last, in Orthodox Jewish Crown Heights, then
Godless, secular Park Slope, I almost wept for joy. But I didn’t. We’re
much closer today to Belfast than we were in 1981.