What Do We Want? Chastity! When Do We Want It? Now!
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Specifically, the would-be liberators of BattleCry want a government clamp-down on sex and violence in movies, videogames, and the internet. In August, a California affiliate of BattleCry and the Christian Action Alliance rallied at the California capitol against two bills that would have prevented discrimination in California schools on the basis of sexual orientation. Their supporters include Lisa Robertson, Pat Robertson's daughter-in-law, who serves on the Teen Mania board. President George W. Bush is also a fan: in 2002, he appointed Luce to serve on the White House Advisory Committee on Drug Free Communities and last year sent BattleCry a letter of commendation that was read by teens at each stadium event.
After a final round of chants the crowd spilled off the city hall steps, past a man wearing a blue-jean skirt and pink sweatshirt and holding banner that said, "Forget marriage, we just wanna fuck!" The teens avoided a mock jail cell containing someone impersonating Ted Haggard, the former leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, who'd spoken at BattleCry events last year before being caught up in a gay sex scandal. He gave passersby the Nazi salute.
BattleCry, of course, was fighting back with iconography of its own. A phalanx of tough-looking kids waved BattleCry's trademark red battle flags, which also appear on posters and shirts. A rally last year in Philadelphia featured Force Ministries, a group of Christian Navy Seals who stormed onto a stage in full camo, bearing machine guns, and strafed the crowd with blanks.
Such dramatic touches are more than mere inspirations from God. Teen Mania employs Austin-based Tocquigny, a secular advertising and marketing firm, and operates a film company, the Center for Creative Media, run by Doug Rittenhouse, a former producer with VH1. The group's board of directors also includes George Babbes, a former advertising exec with Procter & Gamble who has a PhD in cognitive science from UC Berkeley, and Peter Lowe, the self-help guru who tours the country with his "Get Motivated" seminar.
The motivation was getting serious as teens assembled with their church groups in circles on the plaza lawn. A young man in wraparound sunglasses who looked like a river rafting guide called his flock into a huddle. "All right, come in guys, come in! For Jesus right here on three." His voice went gruff as if he were about to snap a football. "Jesus on three! Jesus on three! One! Two! Three!"
"Jesus!" the kids yelled. "Christ!" a girl added with a giggle.
"That was pretty cool," the girl said to her friends. A precocious, snub-nosed, 14-year-old blonde from West Sacramento, California, she gave her name as Alyssa. "Man, we totally just wanna like grow deeper with God and just come here and collate with other Christians," she told me, "and rise up to the occasion of this battle, you know, that our generation is now facing."
"I stand for what the Bible says," added her friend Marianna, 18, who had recently attended a missionary trip sponsored by Teen Mania. She didn't have time to elaborate; their church bus was leaving. They skipped across the plaza and Alyssa snatched a water bottle that another girl was balancing atop her head.
Jennifer Kerfoot, a 15-year-old who was standing at the curb nearby, politely fielded my questions about her stance on gays. She didn't so much mind that cross dressing nuns had showed up, though she wasn't exactly psyched about it. "I think that if you are gay, you can be gay and I don't have a problem with you," she said. "I just, I don't want to see it and I don't want to hear it." But she lives in Eugene, Oregon, she added, "so I'm used to it."
A minivan slowed slightly and a driver in a lumberjack shirt leaned out the window, both middle fingers protuberant, and yelled, "Fuck you, fuckers!"
It wasn't exactly what the organizers of the counter-protest, the anti-Bush group World Can't Wait, had in mind. "We decided this year not to be just a wall of confrontation," activist Ben Rosen said. He was aware of the pleas to ignore the event but felt a need to explain BattleCry to the teens. That involved distributing fliers equating BattleCry with Christian fascism and yelling, "You want homosexuality criminalized!" into a megaphone. Other locals picked up on the strategy. A man in a purple sweatshirt and handlebar moustache circled at close range on a pink mountain bike. "You're not Christians!" he hoarsely yelled. "You're on a drug!"
Seventeen-year old Annie DiGrazia, who wore a camouflage baseball cap, joined hands with her friends, closed her eyes and prayed for the yelling bike man as tears streamed down her face. "In the name of Jesus we carry on with caring for people dear Lord," she sobbed. "Continue to bless their lives so that they can be blessed in your name."
"That's right, just drown it out," bike man said.
But DiGrazia was on a roll. She bounced and swayed and her friends shook their heads. "The enemy is coming at all sides Lord God," she chanted. "But we know that You are stronger than any work that they can afford to give us Lord God. We are not strong but we will be strong with You, Lord God."
Bike man drifted away and DiGrazia wrapped up to the applause of onlookers who'd gathered around. "The Spirit said 'Move,'" she explained, "and I'm like, 'OK!'" But then bike man quickly returned. "Excuse me, if you are real Christians," he said, "why don't you go to a real Christian church?"
The girls looked at each other and smiled. "What is a real Christian church?" one asked the others. The giggled and launched another chant: "We are the body! We are the body! We are the body! Uh huh!"
The bad spirits had lifted. "That turned a negative into a positive," a girl said.
"I'm on fire with the Lord, I don't know abou-choo," DiGrazia added funkily.
Bike man coasted around the plaza. "You're phony Christians!" he kept yelling, though eventually he came to a stop, calmed down, and introduced himself to me as Ben Goldstein. He'd arrived in San Francisco in 1969. He'd come out in 1970. He'd come down with AIDS some years later and now worked in a soup kitchen. He just wanted the kids to spend more time helping the poor, which seemed sort of blandly reasonable to a gaggle of skateboarder types who'd stuck around. They bid him farewell and followed the hordes across town to the Technicolor sound stage, leaving the plaza empty and gray.
Josh Harkinson is a reporter for Mother Jones.
