‘Do
you care more about the pigs around you or God?’ BattleCry leader Ron
Luce asked the crowd of more than 17,000 youth gathered at Wachovia
Spectrum Stadium in Philadelphia on Friday, May 12. No, this wasn’t a
metaphor. After reading a passage from Luke 15 that mentions pigs, he
actually had a bunch of those big, oinking, pink, farm animals on stage
with him! Get it, you either get with Luce’s hateful, hyperpatriotic,
woman-bashing, racist god, or you’re a… pig?
And it became clear during the BattleCry rally, all the talk of battles, warriors and war is not metaphor either.
White Man’s Burden
Early on the second day, a tribal drumbeat filled the stadium and a voice boomed out ‘the most violent people in human history.’
Grainy
images appeared on the stadium screens of indigenous Ecuadorians
running and throwing spears. Proof of their ‘barbarism’? Never mind
that their land was destroyed by oil development and their way of life
undermined, these ‘savages’ had killed five missionaries who came to
destroy their belief systems decades ago. One of the supposed killers
is brought on stage. He’s been ‘civilized’ by the Bible and calls on
the youth to sign up for mission trips to go and convert others like
him.
News flash to Luce’s audience: These indigenous
people, whose very existence is hanging by a thread(threatened by the
encroachment of the ‘modern world’ of exploitation, racism,
environmental destruction and cultural genocide(are at least a hundred
million people short of being ‘the most violent people in human
history,’ even if they did what he accused them of.
The reality
is that over a hundred million indigenous people were killed by the
Europeans who followed Columbus to the ‘new world.’ And let’s not
forget that the genocide against Native Peoples was blessed by people
carrying Ron Luce’s Bible.
Finally, after being
programmed with these racist lies, Luce’s flock flooded down to the
floor of the stadium to sign up for missions this summer(to Africa,
Latin America, the urban U.S., Australia, the Mideast and beyond. As
they went, Ron Luce offered odd encouragement, ‘You guys are freaks of
a whole different breed) You guys are a bunch of wild animals. Man!’
Ignorance and Patriarchy
Next
up on the agenda(woman bashing. If you think the world needs an
alternative to the worst misogynist heavy metal or hip-hop, but you still want to see women degraded, insulted, and dehumanized, Luce has got just the thing for you.
Lakita
Wright, self-proclaimed ‘sexpert’ who has spoken to nations, Congress,
and more than half a million young people this past year, stepped up to
preach the ‘naked truth’ (get it?) about abstinence and purity. Her
specialty seemed to be shamelessly promoting racist and sexist
stereotypes that only a Black woman trying to outdo Bill Cosby might be
able to get away with.
She began with a parable that
portrays ‘Lies’ as female and ‘Truth’ as male, then launched an attack
on all the established truths about safe sex and resurrected all the
oldest stigmas against those, especially women, who would engage in sex
outside patriarchal marriages.
She reserved special
derision for the ‘stupid’ young women whose lives are disrupted because
they have a baby. ‘Don’t blame him [the baby]. It’s your
fault. You should have zipped it up. Locked it down. Clank. Clank.’ She
drew chuckles from many men when she ‘slipped’ and called women
‘flea-males,’ saying, ‘Did I say that? Well, if you lie down with
dogs) ‘
Wright led a call-and-response about hundreds of
sexually transmitted diseases and listed, with great drama, all the
pain and disfigurement they can cause. Then, while claiming to care
about these diseases, she went on to assail one thing that is proven to
prevent them: ‘Condoms don’t work.’
Wright bemoaned the
fact that judges in the U.S. today aren’t required to study the Mosaic
books of the Bible. These are the parts of the Bible that celebrate
taking your enemies as slaves, killing their babies, and forcing women
to be concubines (sex slaves), traded and controlled as possessions,
and subject to the most horrific of abuses.
Reality
check: Condoms save lives. Preaching ‘abstinence’ as a way to prevent
STDs kills people. Luce and his klan don’t give a fuck about young
people’s lives(this war on condoms is driven by their literalist
Biblical message: death by stoning for those who engage in sex outside of wedlock.
Holy War(For Real
After
what amounted to a celebration of genocide against Native Americans,
and a pep rally for death by STDs, things got really gory.
A
featured speaker, Franklin Graham, who is credited with converting
George W. Bush, was introduced. He implied that HIV/AIDS is a
punishment from God. ‘We get outside of marriage and there are
consequences.’
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 next time I go to one of Luce’s
conventions, I’ll bring a bunch of bumper stickers that have a stick
figure of a man plus stick figures of 1,000 women with an equals sign
and then the word ‘Marriage.’ People can put them on their cars to
promote a model of marriage in the Bible(where King Solomon had 700
wives and 300 concubines (and for some reason God never gave him AIDS
as a punishment).
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.’
Now, I actually don’t believe that religion is the root cause
of war(that’s more driven by economic and political forces. But how
long must we put up with a world where people are whipped up to kill
people because(as Christian fascist general Jerry Boykin (whose troops
got their asses kicked in Somalia) said: My god is bigger than your god.
Graham
told the biblical story of Daniel ‘taming the Babylonians.’ After
celebrating the U.S. troops who are killing in Iraq right now, he
preached that there is ‘no difference between the Iraqis today and
Babylon 1,000 years ago.’ In the Bible Babylon is the epitome of evil
and decadence. All manner of bloodlust and plunder against it is not
just condoned but celebrated. As Psalm 137:9 spells out, even the babies are to be dashed to death against the rocks!
While
calling on the youth present to engage in this ‘battle for the souls of
men,’ he exhorts them, ‘No souls can be saved without the shedding of
blood. Blood must be shed!’
Then, a group of Navy SEALs
are projected on the large screen above the stadium as they make their
way from backstage. Dressed in camouflage, carrying automatic weapons,
kicking down doors and firing blanks into empty rooms along their way,
they looked like the house-to-house raids and indiscriminate killing
seen in rare footage out of Iraq.
Fireworks exploded
and flames billowed as Ron Luce greeted, bragging that all of these men
have been involved in real battles. They are part of FORCE Ministries,
which conducts Bible studies at military bases around the world and is
made up of current and retired SEALs, law enforcement, and other
military who preach the Gospel. Among those on stage, one is a SEAL
just back from Afghanistan and another was a member of a police SWAT
team. All of them are trained to kill and do so believing God is
sanctioning them.
One of the SEALs told about boot camp
and being forced to surrender his entire will to the demands of his
instructor. Luce stepped in to tell the audience, ‘That is your youth
pastor. He’s going to make you a SEAL for Christ.’ Of course, the great
Commander of this religious army is God who issues his foot-soldiers
armor(‘a shield of faith, a belt of truth, and boots of
preparedness'(as well as ‘offensive weapons’ like the ‘sword of the
spirit’ and the ‘word of God.’
This merging of ‘God’s
Army’ and the U.S. military returns full circle to the event’s opening
when a letter of greeting and blessings from George W. Bush was read.
After that, a minister had led thousands to bow their heads and thank
the lord for giving them George Bush, who coincidentally is the U.S.’s
Commander-in-Chief.
The Two Faces of Christian Fascism
BattleCry
keeps this bloodthirsty holy war madness in the closet. You won’t find
it on their website and you won’t hear it in their major media
appearances. For all his on-stage bluster, and his stacks of books
laced with militarism, when Ron Luce debated me on the O’Reilly Factor,
he sounded more like a wilting flower, ‘Well, there are young people
all over America and they are realizing that they are caught in the
middle of this culture war) They are saying, you know what? We want our
voices to be heard. We love the lord and we’re not mean.’
How
many of the moms and dads and youth gravitating to the Christian
fascists looking for life with a purpose have any idea that the agenda
of their leaders is as gruesome, bloodthirsty, and horrible as the hell
myth that they are being scared into submission with.
But
whether or not you realize what you are signing onto, when you make
your pact with Luce and his bunch, you’re not only signing onto a
brain-deadening fantasy that robs you of your ability to understand and
change the world, you end up being led to fight(and shed blood(in a
‘holy war’ for Bush and all he concentrates.