Onward, Christian Soldiers

Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Madison Avenue are powerful opponents. Despite Battle Cry's well-packaged trappings, the youth groups I met with are hardly teeming with culture-immune, Scripture-quoting Christian warriors. They're kids who like pop music, struggle with popularity and want to be prettier and thinner. They forget about the whole God thing sometimes, and honestly, they'd still really like it if their youth minister would get some pizza.

Luce believes that between teenagers and the marketers, advertisers and entertainment outlets that want their attention, "it's not even a fair fight." But Luce says the Battle Cry package, in the hands and hearts of a dedicated church, can even the playing field, taking the average kickball-and-pizza youth group to a whole new evangelical level...or else.

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Lecturing at a giant, high-tech nondenominational church on Central Expressway, Luce has more than just PowerPoint holding his audience's attention. Flanked by projection screens playing videos of little girls doing their best Britney Spears sexy dance that give Luce a prime opportunity to look scornful and scandalized, he is backed by a display table full of Battle Cry paraphernalia. But Luce's real weapons are his sound bites. Every other sentence out of Luce's mouth is ready to be sampled on television news, and right now, he's riffing on pornographers.

"They're going after our babies!" he cries, painting a bleak, sex-obsessed picture of today's teenage generation sure to stick with the couple hundred senior pastors and youth ministers at the Battle Cry Leadership Summit.

"How about we just make it really hard for teenagers to go to hell?" Luce asks the nodding, grunting audience.

Now, he's winding down. Luce has already hit the high points, referencing everything that gets people stirred up about things these days: September 11, the divorce rate, penguins.

"These virtue terrorists are just as bad as Al-Qaeda!" Luce warns.

Luce rattles off a few numbers. Soft-core porn images appear on MTV 3,000 times a week, Luce says, and heads shake throughout the room. Each day, he adds, 8,000 teenagers contract a sexually transmitted disease. Teens who watch a lot of sexually oriented programming on television are twice as likely to engage in sexual activity, he says. It's not all fuzzy math. Luce's STD stats are backed up by similar findings from PBS and the RAND Corporation, though the soft-core porn numbers are all Luce's.

Then, of course, there's the Internet porn. "Point-and-click pornography," Luce calls it, wrecking marriage after future marriage for the teenagers who view it. But the clincher is the penguin metaphor. That's what will really get these adults thinking.

The clip on the projection screen is from March of the Penguins. A lone little chick waddles out into the cold, ignored not only by its peers but by Mama and Papa too. In no time at all, a bird of prey swoops down upon the helpless baby, and all is lost. At first, everyone laughs. But then, the room grows silent.

"It is time we learned a lesson from our penguin friends," Luce says. He bows his head in prayer. "Forgive us as adults for allowing this culture to build up around them," he says, softly. Then, even softer. "In Jesus' name we pray." Now, a whisper. "In Jesus' name we pray. Amen."

Then, it's back to banging the Battle Cry drum. After his suggestion about making it difficult for teens to suffer eternal damnation, Luce drives home his solution: the Battle Plan. Double your youth group size. He tells these church leaders, "Jesus didn't die for 10 quality people."

Get their parents involved in monitoring media consumption, he says, and get a TiVo while you're at it. That way, parents can lock out the nasty influences of shows such as Family Guy and the gay-friendly Will and Grace, recording only that which is wholesome. Battle Cry folks even get a special discount thanks to a partnership with the company. "To bless you," Luce tells the crowd.

And there is, of course, the "rocket-propelled grenade disguised as a book," Luce's own Battle Cry for a Generation, complete with a glowing endorsement from the fallen former president of the National Association of Evangelicals, Ted Haggard, smack dab on the first page. But don't worry, Luce tells the audience about buying his book. "Nobody's making money off this." Of course, that might depend on how you define the phrase "making money."

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According to Teen Mania's IRS reports, Luce paid himself $127,500 in 2004. His wife, the Teen Mania secretary, came away with just $35,000. The organization's chief operating officer, former marketing executive Rick Brenner, made more than both of them combined: $180,455.

Those numbers aren't unheard of in the nonprofit sphere, particularly considering Brenner's background, handling brand management for Noxzema skin care, Green Giant and Procter & Gamble. In the corporate world, he'd probably be making much more. And Luce does travel a lot, working nonstop hours as head of what claims to be the largest teen ministry in the United States.

Teen Mania cycled through almost $25 million in expenses in 2004 and took in more than $26 million in revenue, leaving a meager $1.5 million for a rainy day. For all his powerful rhetoric against the evils of making profit off teenagers, Luce draws a thick line between what he's doing and what the mass media do.

"It's not strictly anti-capitalist," Luce explains after the leadership summit lecture. "Capitalism's great, but capitalism with no morals whatsoever, that's the issue." Anyone's welcome to make as much money as they can, in Luce's view, so long as they're not doing what companies such as Viacom, MTV's parent corporation, do with "cradle to grave" strategies for luring in youth. "They're preying on our kids, making money. Laughing at them as they eat the poison candy they give them."