AcquireTheEvidence.com Authors' Statement on May 12 "BattleCry" Rallies
This website has never been about recruiting people to counter-demonstrate against these rallies. We have been actively advocating (elsewhere) that people not show up to demonstrate against these particular rallies. This document is here because people are going to show up to do that anyway. There is no one leader of these counter-demonstrations and we are two people and two voices among many.
Teen Mania is at a certain time in its evolution where they have decided to generate publicity to grow their movement, first by going to San Francisco to provoke into existence an opposition where none had existed previously. These City Hall rallies are bait; it is entirely their timing, their framing, and their desire for an opposition deliberately created by their provocative actions and rhetoric. An effective response would be based upon not giving them what they wanted, but instead be an effective counteraction - as opposed to a reaction - on terms other than those set in advance by Teen Mania, and the time and place for that effective response is not at these rallies.
Our advice, and that's all this is, is that people not go out. This advice is not the usual routine of authority figures around the fringes of activism telling activists not to act. One of us has spent the past twenty years as a street activist, and both of us have been going inside Teen Mania's arena events and listening for eight years. Our advice is based on extensive knowledge of this organization, how they're evolving, and thinking strategically as opposed to reacting. Be aware that your mere presence out there, no matter what you say or do, will be used in their propaganda, and otherwise, as validation.
Photo: © 2006 M. Doughney & L.S. Kneisly
Caption lyric from Pillar's "Frontline," used to promote the "BattleCry" campaign
AcquireTheEvidence.com Authors' Statement on May 12 "BattleCry" Rallies
This website has never been about recruiting people to counter-demonstrate against these rallies. We have been actively advocating (elsewhere) that people not show up to demonstrate against these particular rallies. This document is here because people are going to show up to do that anyway. There is no one leader of these counter-demonstrations and we are two people and two voices among many.
Teen Mania is at a certain time in its evolution where they have decided to generate publicity to grow their movement, first by going to San Francisco to provoke into existence an opposition where none had existed previously. These City Hall rallies are bait; it is entirely their timing, their framing, and their desire for an opposition deliberately created by their provocative actions and rhetoric. An effective response would be based upon not giving them what they wanted, but instead be an effective counteraction - as opposed to a reaction - on terms other than those set in advance by Teen Mania, and the time and place for that effective response is not at these rallies.
Our advice, and that's all this is, is that people not go out. This advice is not the usual routine of authority figures around the fringes of activism telling activists not to act. One of us has spent the past twenty years as a street activist, and both of us have been going inside Teen Mania's arena events and listening for eight years. Our advice is based on extensive knowledge of this organization, how they're evolving, and thinking strategically as opposed to reacting. Be aware that your mere presence out there, no matter what you say or do, will be used in their propaganda, and otherwise, as validation.
We wrote the first draft of this essay as a followup to an article on the SF Bay Independent Media Center site that was encouraging a response to this posting on Teen Mania's forum announcing these rallies. We've since revised and expanded that comment posting into this article.
Teen Mania has been running essentially 'under the radar' to those outside evangelical Christianity for twenty years. They are now aggressively seeking publicity for their own organizational purposes - and intentionally trying to provoke an opposition into existence by going to a city (San Francisco) where they knew they could count on somebody giving them exactly the counter-response they wanted. That counter-response is then used by them to organize their people in the U.S. and Canada, on the basic biblical martyr's assumption that if they're seeing opposition then what they are doing is "right." (It may not make sense to you, but that's how they think.)
They have been using what happened in San Francisco in the Christian media and all over the right-wing blogosphere as "proof" that they're on the receiving end of unearned and undeserved hostility. Bogus, but this is how they strengthen and organize themselves. From that they sent press releases before their Detroit event trying to further this persecution-by-hostility-of-the-host-city meme, trying to foment, via press coverage, a confrontation in Detroit... that barely materialized. But they used the video their own video production unit (Center for Creative Media) shot at City Hall in San Francisco, on the big screens in both the stadium shows thus far, as an example of how much harder they need to work, because none of the counter-demonstrations that they see directed toward them gets to their self image, because almost everything they see counter-protesters saying, from their view, has no connection to what they say, or what they're actually doing.
Any response has to be speaking knowledgeably about the organization and the people in it. These are some suggested talking points based on what we know about Teen Mania and the strategy behind the "BattleCry Campaign." These points are based on what's evident from Teen Mania's own materials and events.
Point one: They are creating, through marketing and rhetoric, the exaggerated impression of a horrible new epidemic of teens in "crisis" that is then used to stimulate a particular kind of political movement that has nothing to do with addressing the needs of real, individual teenagers. This is part of the implementation of what Kevin Phillips was talking about when he wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed (4/2/06) that the GOP is becoming a "religious party," what we'd call a religio-political hybrid.
Photo: © 2006 M. Doughney & L.S. Kneisly
Caption lyric from Pillar's "Frontline," used to promote "BattleCry"
Point two: Having created a list of "threats" to teens that are part of this phony "crisis," they offer religious conversion (specifically, to become a "follower of Christ," a "warrior" for Christ) as a universal solution. No other faith or non-faith need apply - no, all other things must be pushed to the sidelines as their fictional rewrite of American history (a la David Barton) dictates that this is a Judeo-Christian nation and the government must reflect their recent rewrite of those 'values' (value #1: war against your neighbor gives purpose, meaning and expansion opportunities) and nothing else.
Point three: They offer this solution to perpetuate churches; it's a justification to organize teenagers to sell religious conversion to others, and part of that strategy is to remove restrictions (both perceived and real) on religious activity in public schools - a captive audience they seek to harness to further this end. They spread fear among their people by insisting that only four percent of the U.S. population are going to be evangelicals of their desired flavor soon if they don't do something drastic right now; this number, like many of their partisan, questionable "statistics" is completely pulled out of a hat by a Christian statistician who is part of this system and who has a personal interest in setting the stage for its growth, perpetuation, and expansion of political power.
Point four: They seek legislation to create government involvement in this church expansion program, if only to validate some of the more whacked-out ideas in it (that sexually explicit (or even suggestive) media causes physical changes in teen brains and thus must be regulated as a faulty product or environmental contaminant, as one example) or to raise the social status of churches through government endorsement of a particular flavor of religion (theirs). The regulation of expression - and ultimately things the religious consider 'blasphemy' - is floating around in this in offhand comments.
The core point being that any response that has any hope of carrying any meaning and effectiveness, and not just helping them inflate their own movement is going to have to be knowledgable about what they are actually selling, down to the details - and then responds based on that knowledge.
Posted April 20, 2006
Revised April 30, 2006
Updated Wednesday May 10, 2006
