Battle Cry Campaign - Major Tenets

Major Tenets

The Battle Cry Campaign maintains that "for the first time ever," "sexualized culture," "point and click pornography," and young people being "saturated with media influence" spell doom for Christianity in America. It also has cited gay marriage and other "culture war" issues as matters of current and future concern:

• "Our current society with 35% baby boomers as bible-based believers: increasingly perverted TV, film, music and video games, proliferation of Internet pornography, rise of activist government officials promoting gay marriage, attempts to remove the Ten Commandments from public buildings and attempts to remove God from the Pledge of Allegiance."
• "What does a nation with 4% evangelical Christians look like? Netherlands legalized euthanasia, Nudity in newspapers in England, Scotland's consenting age is 14 years old, Pastor arrested for preaching biblical perspective on homosexuality."

The campaign focuses on corporations and media outlets for targeting young people with advertising and programming depicting content often labeled objectionable by evangelical leaders:

• "A stealthy enemy has infiltrated our country and is preying upon the hearts and minds of 33 million American teens. Corporations, media conglomerates and purveyors of popular culture have spent billions to seduce and enslave our youth."
• "This generation views 16 to 17 hours of television each week and sees on average 14,000 sexual scenes and references each year. That's more than 38 references every day."
• "This generation spends three hours a day online and is the first to grow up with point-and-click pornography. Almost 90 percent of teens have viewed pornography online at one of the 300,000 adult websites, most while doing homework."
• "More than 25 percent of teen-targeted radio segments contain sexual content; 42 percent of the top selling CDs contain sexual content"

When interviewed at a Battle Cry event in 2007, Ron Luce condemned "purveyors of popular culture" as "the enemy," who according to Luce are "terrorists, virtue terrorists, that are destroying our kids... they're raping virgin teenage America on the sidewalk, and everybody's walking by and acting like everything's OK. And it's just not OK." Battle Cry materials contain charges that a "sexualized culture" is the product of "media people" who are the "virtue terrorists" responsible for sexual content, naming examples such as MTV, "VH 1, Desperate Housewives, and movies like Broken Back Mountain ."

Other encouraged tenets include submission to certain kinds of authority:

• "We will respect the authorities placed in our lives, even though some may not live as honorably as they should."
• "We refuse to be led by those who are morally bankrupt."

Extending from Biblical analogies and characters used as role models, the campaign has used narratives, metaphor and scripted staged presentations including images of weapons, pervasive use of a red pennant, and terms from a war lexicon such as "God's Army", "enemy" and "battle." It has used current and former members of the U.S. armed forces prominently in the Battle Cry stadium events, encouraging young people to become "the warriors in this battle." In "Battle Cry for a Generation," a book released at the start of the campaign, Ron Luce wrote, "This is war. And Jesus invites us to get into the action, telling us that the violent — the 'forceful' ones — will lay hold of the kingdom." At a Cleveland "Acquire the Fire" event, he said, "The devil hates us, and we gotta be ready to fight and not be these passive little lukewarm, namby-pamby, kum-ba-yah, thumb-sucking babies that call themselves Christians. Jesus? He got mad! ... I want an attacking church!" Biblical passages reflecting this militarism that were often referenced in "Battle Cry" and "Acquire the Fire" events and promotional gatherings during the first year of the campaign included the following:

• Psalms 144:1: "Praise be to the LORD my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle."
• 2 Timothy 2:3: "Endure hardship with us like a good soldier of Christ Jesus."
• 1 Timothy 6:12: "Fight the good fight of the faith."
• Ephesians 6:11: "Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes."
• Matthew 11:12 "From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has been forcefully advancing, and forceful men lay hold of it."
• Judges 19-20, the stories known as "The Levite and His Concubine" and "Israel’s War with Benjamin."