by Jeff Sharlet
LUCE DOESN’T SO MUCH preach the Bible as read his own life through the filter of scripture. That’s a method as old as Saint Augustine, but usually the story of “Once I was lost, now I’m found,” ends in joy. Luce, with a circular genius that’s part showmanship and part pathology, wires the happy ending back into the anger of being lost, a rage he won’t leave behind.
When Luce was fifteen, he ran away from his mother, who beat him, to look for his father, who had abandoned them and his four siblings when Luce was seven. “I hated my mom’s guts,” he says. Luce was certain his father would save him. He found him near San Francisco. He asked if he could move in. Sure, said his dad, but he set a condition. “Son, if you’re going to try any of that pot, be sure to bring it home so we can all try it together.” Luce was a dutiful boy. He bought some weed and trotted back to his dad’s house and with his father and stepmother, he got high. Or rather, they did; Luce says he wanted to inhale, but he didn’t know how.
These days Luce refers to his fifteen-year-old self as a “party animal,” because he thinks doing so helps him relate to the kids. But the truth is that Luce’s wild days were limited to the year he spent in his father’s house. Then he left it for God’s. In 1978 a friend took him to a “packed-out little church” filled with people singing as if they were in love. “I was so smitten,” he remembers. “I marched back to school and told all my friends, ‘People are lying about God!’” He meant the people who said God was nothing but a happy hippie in the sky. Luce’s new God was as mad as he was.
When Luce was sixteen, three weeks after he was saved, he came home one day to find a small pile of blue jeans and barbells and car magazines on the front porch: “All my stuff. The door’s locked.” His stepmother had given Luce’s father an ultimatum: Her, or the pumped-up, pissed-off kid with the big cross dangling from his neck. “Jesus freak,” she called Ron. Luce gathered up his things and moved in with his new pastor. “Jesus freak”—he loved that idea.
Luce went on to Oral Roberts University, the Tulsa, Oklahoma, campus best known for the sixty-foot-tall bronze statue of praying hands at its entrance, and he was a Jesus freak there, too. Some of the wealthy students liked to throw parties no different from those of a secular college. “I’d be like, ‘What are you doing? You’re wrecking my school!’” After he graduated he traveled around the world with his new wife, Katy, Jesus-freaking out lost souls in dozens of countries before God gave him a “heart message”: “Come back,” said the Lord. His job was to save America’s teens. They returned in 1986 and began crisscrossing the country in a Chevy Citation. Now he travels by private jet, with a caravan of three eighteen-wheelers and tour buses full of teens following on the ground.
Luce still dresses as if he’s sixteen, but these days his clothes are chosen for him by his two teenage daughters, Hannah and Chastity, Christian punk-rock girls homeschooled by Katy. He says “um” a lot when he talks to teens. The smooth, knowing patter he offers to secular adults is the affectation, the cover for the permanent adolescent housed within. “Um-um-um,” he stutters, pacing back and forth across a stage. He’ll be speaking to five thousand kids at an arena in Phoenix, or thirty thousand at a stadium in Detroit. The lights will drop down to indigo, and a guitarist will stretch single notes into soft cries, and Luce will murmur into his microphone, “Run to Him. Run to Him.” By “Him” he means the Father-God, but he’ll keep slipping between the divine and the dad who failed, whispering to the kids about fathers who never told their daughters they were pretty or their sons that they were brave. The kids will be on their knees, bent over, shoulders shaking, low sobs gurgling like a creek beneath Luce’s words.
And then Luce will bark like a dog. “War!” The word bursts out of his throat at regular intervals as if he has a Tourettic twitch, but his rage is strategically timed. “Are you ready to fight?” flashes across giant movie screens while he preaches. The image of a teenage boy doubles itself, then quadruples, until an army of identical boys fills the screen, forms a phalanx, and begins marching. The sound track is machine gun and metal, Pillar’s “Frontline” anthem again. “The Enemy”—words—blinks across the screen.
“WHY DO I BEGIN by speaking of war?” Luce opens his most popular book, BattleCry for My Generation. “I have seen the enemies of our children march across the land, leaving ravished young hearts in their wake. I have seen the wounding effects. I’ve listened to the stories of teens hurting.”
It reads like a clumsy echo of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked. . . .” And yet Ginsberg’s hallucinations contained poetic precision. Howl ’s hurting teens were a 1950s “lost battalion of platonic conversationalists,” burned out by the “scholars of war” and the “one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar,” diagnosed as crazy because of their lust and the poetry that brought them joy, unsuccessful even in suicide when the big empty earnestness of postwar America began to eat them alive. Luce, too, often speaks of suicide, and he, too, blames it on what Ginsberg described as “the nitroglycerine shrieks of the faeries of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors.” Luce hates Madison Avenue, hates big media. Only he shortens this all down to those two words to which his presentations always return, “the Enemy.”
Sometimes the Enemy is Satan, broadly defined; sometimes it’s strangely specific—Luce is keeping an eye on hip-hop star Nelly, whose “Play It Off” he quotes as evidence of the Enemy at work: “I had her m-f——a——,” writes Luce, from which we are to deduce “motherfucking ass.” Sometimes the Enemy is simply “these people,” a phrase he uses with such frequency when whispering, brokenhearted, or shouting, enraged, about secular entertainment that it’s hard not to hear an echo from the days when Billy Graham and Richard Nixon swapped bile and conspiracy theory about Jewish-controlled media. (“They’re the ones putting out the pornographic stuff,” Graham and Nixon agreed in 1972.)
And yet Luce is no more an anti-Semite than he is a fan of Howl. He absorbs influences without reflection and repackages them as hip and Christian without concern for allusion. The BattleCry aesthetic, for instance, could have been stolen from Stalin’s archives, a triangular red flag as its banner and set-jawed kids in silhouette as the new comrades—“trenchmates,” in the BattleCry vernacular. Luce ends his rallies with a figurative dismemberment that evokes nothing so much as slasher porn, a woman’s body cut to pieces in a shower. Luce thinks he’s taking it from the Book of Judges, the story of a man who, surrounded by enemies, gives up his concubine to be raped to death; in the morning, he hacks her body into twelve pieces and sends one to each of the tribes of Israel, a warning, Luce believes, of the fate of the ungodly. Luce resurrects the warning by killing a mannequin, each part labeled with a sin of secularism, as he stokes the kids into a chant that’s not frenzied but determined: “Cut up the concubine. Cut up the concubine.” Luce dispatches the pieces into the crowd. In Cleveland, one sensible fourteen-year-old boy snorts at the sight of a girl hugging her catch, a naked torso labeled porn. “Imagine carrying that home,” he whispers. Thousands of kids do; they shriek for the prize of the head, still on offer.
THE MOST DEVOTED TEENS become recruits, joining the eight hundred high school graduates who pay $7,800 a year, plus “mission fees,” to attend Luce’s Honor Academy. The Honor Academy is a polished campus of new brick buildings growing out of the red dirt of a compound deeded to Luce by the wife of a country singer named Keith Green, who found Jesus after much searching, built a ministry called Last Days, then fulfilled his own prophecy by dying in a plane crash. From the fountain near the entrance—a geyser of muddy water that on windy days spreads out like a red veil—you can see nearly every building: two men’s and two women’s dorms, named for Luce’s favorite missionaries; the headquarters of Global Expeditions, which sends out thousands more missionaries every year; the cafeteria and campus store, which offers BattleCry’s skate
-chic gear, Luce’s books, and little else; and the building that houses the main auditorium, pillared with artificial stone set in a biblical style. There’s also what they call a “back forty,” actually several hundred acres on which stand more primitive structures, retreats for toughening up the kids, and a Quonset hut “officer’s club” for those who stay on to become employees or permanent volunteers, forgoing college or working toward a mail-order degree from the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in their few off hours.
Students, called interns—that gets Luce around the labor laws that’d prevent him from requiring the teens to devote time to selling and setting up Luce’s public events—come for a year or more between high school and college. The application is rigorous. More important than grades are the pass/fail “Personal History” questions: “Have you ever been involved with the occult/cult?” “Have you ever struggled with: Homosexuality? Pornography? Any eating disorder?” Recommenders must rate the applicant’s “positive contagious spirit” and reveal any knowledge of his or her homosexual tendencies. Once accepted, interns must promise not only never to criticize the Honor Academy but also “never [to] allow the Honor Academy to be portrayed in a negative light.”
Luce’s goal is to immunize them from secularism’s appeal so that they can “infiltrate” the “strongholds” of godless humanism—Hollywood, Manhattan, Washington—without fear for their purity. “Turn and burn,” goes a popular saying at the academy. That is, look away from Jesus for even an instant—at, say, the hot girl in Potter’s Desire, the academy’s evangelical dance team—and you might find yourself in hell instead of Texas. Which is why every student must pledge to confront other students if their behavior is ungodly, or simply too arousing. Politely, of course; “God is a gentleman,” a Goth named Cale told me.
Intern days begin at 4:45 a.m. with an hour of group exercise, followed by breakfast and an hour of Quiet Time. Mornings are for classes: “Character Development,” which focuses on “obedience” and “purity,” and “Growth,” which offers more of the same, and “Worldview,” in which one learns to see current events through the lenses of obedience and purity. To help, interns receive checklists of appropriate behavior. One for women reminds them not to attract attention to themselves, to be women “of few words,” and to inspect their clothing before they leave their rooms for “stumbling blocks”—any aspect of their dress that might draw a man’s attention and distract him from his devotion to God. There are also gender-divided purity classes. The girls’, “Women at the Well,” is taught by Shannon Etheridge, the author of four volumes in the Every Man’s Battle antimasturbation series that has sold more than two million copies. Etheridge boasts that her “passion for sexual purity didn’t begin inside church walls, [but] in mortuary college.” Which makes strange sense when you consider that the goal of such purity is to die to the flesh.
That’s the purpose of the academy’s required “Life Transforming Events,” the most mortifying of which is ESOAL (Emotionally Stretching Opportunity of a Lifetime). Luce was reluctant to share details about the “Opportunity,” a fifty- to ninety-hour sleep-deprived endurance test, but a short video provides revealing glimpses: students dragging giant wooden crosses on their shoulders; a boy rolling and vomiting across a field while a senior intern “sergeant” in camouflage and helmet urges him on; a platoon of weeping girls; a shell-shocked boy mumbling into the camera, “Don’t know what time it is. . . . Don’t know what matters. . . . Don’t even necessarily know who I can trust.” In a letter written in defense of ESOAL’s harsh tactics, a 2009 graduate frames the suffering as a gift:
A day after ESOAL had ended, I was making a phone call when I went into a acute seizure mode, foaming mouth, loss of hearing, couldn’t see and extremely inflamed back. I was hyper-ventilating because my body was no longer under my control. I felt helpless as I heard my best friend for the last time in five hours say ‘hold on Chase.’ I woke up in the hospital and was told I had Meningitis developing from swallowing the putrid water in ESOAL. I was fine, I was quarantined for five weeks and came back. The [Honor Academy] wanted to put me up [on campus] but my parents paid for a hotel in Lindale. I wracked up a huge bill with just staying there. However I was blessed. I recovered. I learned so much during my five week absence, praying and gloryfing [sic] God for saving me and sending me such great people.
Luce lectures at least once a week on “character,” often explored through stories from his life. I sat in on one class that included a character test. The first question was, “Which of the following is the first phase of leadership development?” Possible answers included “Sacred Foundations,” “Fundamental Foundations,” or “Sovereign Foundations.” Other questions are easier, such as number 22, a true/false query: “Our greatest challenge as leaders is to develop a godly character?” Only a real “Phlegmatic/Melancholy” type could get that one wrong. Luce also subjects all his interns to “personality tests” by which he assigns them their “ministries” in his organization—a Phlegmatic/Melancholy might end up licking envelopes, while a Sanguine/Choleric could be on her way to MCing an Acquire the Fire rally. Interns must log at least thirty-one hours a week working for the cause. Around seventy of them learn how to produce visual media of sufficient quality that several have started climbing the ranks in secular media, fulfilling Luce’s “infiltration” dream. Hundreds, however, work in theological boiler rooms: cubicle mazes in which they spend their days cold-calling youth pastors to sell them blocs of tickets to upcoming events, or phone counseling would-be teen missionaries on how to raise the funds to pay for a trip through Global Expeditions.
“I talked to this one missionary,” an intern in a missions recruiting class told her teacher the day I sat in, “but actually it was his dad, because he”—the prospective missionary—“was like twelve.” The father thought dispatching his son overseas sounded like a great idea, but the boy’s mother nixed the trip. The student recruiter wanted to know what she should do with this prospect. Should she call him again? Yes, said the teacher, only a few years out of high school herself, but only if she could avoid speaking to the mom.
At an Acquire the Fire rally I met an intern named Chereth, long limbed and happily awkward, who had been doing missions work since she was thirteen. Her missionary specialty was drama. In the streets of Romania, Peru, and Mexico, she’d performed as “Weeper,” which came naturally to her if she thought of Christ bleeding on the cross. “Like this,” she told me and then entwined her legs like a ballerina on point, spreading her arms and rolling her eyes. She dropped the pose. “It’s amazing!” she said. “I have absolutely no talent whatsoever!” She meant that she did not so much act as let God “use” her, arranging her willowy arms and legs into tableaux of suffering.
I met a boy, Logan from West Texas, reedy and rosy cheeked, blond curls like Shirley Temple’s, who said he’d been a wicked, lustful thing before he “sold out” for the Lord. “What did you do?” I asked in a low voice. We were in the lobby of a Dallas megachurch, where Logan had been pressed into service for one of Luce’s Leadership Summits for pastors. “I played Grand Theft Auto,” Logan murmured. Just once, at a secular friend’s home.
“That’s all?” I asked.
No. He sank deeper.
“What was the worst?”
“I cheated,” he whispered, his pale blue eyes blinking like pinned butterflies.
“On your girlfriend?”
On a chemistry exam. A chemistry exam? What did that have to do with purity? “Lust,” he said; he had lusted for an A, but it was no different from Grand Theft Auto’s whores. Worldly desires are all the same, he explained: They originate not in one’s heart, which is where Jesus lives, but “below.” His eyes flickered downward, to the hell burning in his jeans.
EVERYONE AT THE Honor Academy has a favorite scripture verse to keep them pure and holy (some of the boys abbreviate them in ink across their knuckles), but th
e Bible story I heard cited most often was that of Abraham and his only son, Isaac, whom God commands Abraham to sacrifice. Abraham consents, but as he’s about to drive in the knife, God stays his hand and lets Abraham know he was only testing him. Abraham passes, and for that he gets to be the patriarch of monotheism. Interns take a quiz on “The Making of a Leader,” which includes the question, “Abraham being asked to sacrifice Isaac is an example of what kind of check?” A “check” is a test given by God. I suspect that the correct answer is B, an “obedience check,” but it could be D, which holds that killing Isaac would have been just a “ministry task.” “Awesome,” is the word most interns use to describe that reward for Abraham’s willingness to destroy that which was most dear to him.
So it was with sex, in the minds of the interns, eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, most of whom want nothing more than to collapse into one another’s arms. And yet, because God commands it, they sacrifice their desire. Like Abraham who kept his son and passed the test anyway, they are sure they will be rewarded: They will deny their lust and have it, too.
One Friday night I joined a table full of Honor Academy women in the cafeteria. They were talking about their sacrifices. For most of them it was music; then again, they claim they didn’t even want to hear music that doesn’t glorify God. One woman remained quiet, so I asked her what brought her to the academy. She surprised me with her answer: She wanted to be a novelist, she said, like Dostoyevsky. Only one of the other women knew who Dostoyevsky was, but they were impressed by her ambition and her willingness to talk to a stranger. They’d been living with her for a while but she hadn’t told them much about herself, and now here she was, quietly revealing her history.