Truth is stranger than

Michael Wolraich — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:39:00 +0000

In reply to Patriots! Enter the Militia Members' Music Contest and Get Rocked!

Truth is stranger than satire: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/14021621/teenage_holy_war

Here's my own take (exceprted from my book proposal):

CUT UP THE CONCUBINE! CUT UP THE CONCUBINE! CUT UP THE CONCUBINE!

So ends a typical Acquire the Fire Christian rock festival as thousands of ecstatic teenagers shout in unison. The chant may seem like a strange way to conclude a show, but Acquire the Fire is no ordinary music event. The annual nationwide tour is produced by an organization called Teen Mania Ministries as part of its “BattleCry” campaign to recruit young culture warriors. In addition to the rock concerts cum spiritual revivals, Teen Mania runs summer camps, global missions and a yearlong “Honor Academy” to train young Christians how to resist the influence of the anti-Christian media and infiltrate godless “strongholds” like Hollywood and Manhattan without risk from secular infection. The language of its doctrine is militaristic, angry, and paranoid, with references to “culture wars,” “virtue terrorists,” “stealth enemies,” and the “enslavement” and “rape” of American teenagers. Jeff Sharlet, best-selling author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, calls the BattleCry campaign “one of the most militant fundamentalist youth movements in U.S history.”

So what’s with the concubine cutting? The allusion may be familiar to Old Testament buffs. The tale of the Levite and his concubine from the Book of Judges is one of those charming Bible stories they don’t teach in Sunday school. An Israelite from the tribe of Levi, traveling with his beloved concubine, spent the night with a hospitable old man. After dark, a depraved gang from the tribe of Benjamin gathered outside the house. Pounding on the door, they demanded that the old man deliver the Levite to them so that they could sodomize him. The old man, being a gracious host, refused, but he offered the mob his own virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine as consolation prizes. (Violent homosexual gangs were a common menace in Biblical times, and the old man’s answer comes straight from the Old Testament playbook on “What to do when a depraved mob threatens to sodomize your guests.” In Genesis, Abraham’s nephew Lot offered his two virgin daughters to horny Sodomites who had demanded his guests for their pleasure. Hence the term, “sodomy.”)

When the gang ignored the offer, the Levite chivalrously pushed his own concubine out the door. The men, who were not very particular after all, gang-raped the concubine until she collapsed dead at the old man’s door. When the Levite found her body in the morning, he cut it into twelve pieces, one of which he sent to each tribe of Israel. At God’s urging, the other eleven tribes of Israel then made war on the tribe of Benjamin and slaughtered everyone they found—men, women, children, and animals.

There are many disturbing tales like this one in the Old Testament, but it’s an odd choice, to say the least, for a teen revival. The concubine story works for Teen Mania because it offers a fitting allegory for the organization’s militant agenda: to deliver a figurative call to arms against a depraved mob. The mob consists of modern secularists in positions of power: the media, the courts, government officials, corporations, and liberal nonprofits like the ACLU. The sexual appetites of the Benjamites are particularly apt in the context of Teen Mania’s fierce opposition to homosexuality and sexual liberation. In the view of Teen Mania’s founder, Ron Luce, the very future of Christianity and morality is at risk from “TV and movies laced with blatant sexuality,” “perverted lyrics in today’s most popular music,” “the fight for gay marriage,” and “the Internet laden with pornography and other garbage that is used to shame our society.” In other words, websites for Benjamites.

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Truth is stranger than