Emergings of a Cult?

In an OnTheMedia clip airing last Friday, Bob Garfield interviewed Jeff Sharlet who wrote quite an interesting article in the newest issue of The Rolling Stone magazine. The article focuses on Ron Luce who is the founder of an evangelical youth group named "BattleCry". Sharlet describes Luce as, "this brilliant media strategist who recognizes that, look, if I speak about war - if I say that media makers, in fact, are like al Qaeda, which he does in his book, BattleCry - if I say these things, these things are so sensational I'm going to get a lot of attention, and I'm going to grab the attention of kids." ("Hear Their Roar", OnTheMedia, Apr. 6, 07.) Jeff Sharlet spent around a week with the teens behind "BattleCry" in Texas at Luce's own Honor Academy. He began to see that many of these teens were just confused at where they were in life.

Sharlet goes on to explain the hatred that Luce and his followers (or confused teens) have for mainstream media and secularism. In the Rolling Stone article, Sharlet describes the BattleCry rhetoric as "militaristic" and as a huge "youth crusade." Ron Luce is quoted from a rally in San Francisco last March as saying, "When you enlist in the military, there's a code of honor, same as being a follower of Christ." Luce believes that mainstream media is corrupting our society and that him and his followers need to destroy it. This evangelical leader hates the media so much that his Honor Academy is a "high-tech school for training kids how to produce media."
"They're very aware that Christian media for decades was just awful and cheese, and it's just pure kitsch. And I think now they recognize that if we can produce really quality media but that nonetheless has this fundamentalist message, then we're going to win kids over. If they can, you know, get to Hollywood and make movies that are actually pretty good, like The Chronicles of Narnia, those become the media equivalent of gateway drugs to bring you in to drink the full Kool-Aid of fundamentalism." (Sharlet, OnTheMedia, Apr. 6, 07)

So is this "Teenage Holy War" just a sly ploy by Luce to gather followers and promote the evangelical gospel? Or is this an extreme fanatic truly wishing and planning on taking down the mainstream media? The scary thing, is that Sharlet also mentions that the "real enemies" of Luce's Christ are not only the mass media but "queers and communists, feminists and Muslims." So thousands of teens are hearing this extreme message of hate and mixing it with religion pushed with a militaristic mindset. Sound familiar? This guy (Luce) is using what he hates (the media) to do exactly what he hates (the corruption of the youth). I do agree that the mass media does have a large strangle hold over the citizens of this country, over their mindsets, but he is using the same tactics he is fighting against to commit the same act as "the evil do-ers."