Devil Horns from Liberal Street Fighter
Oh, this is just WAY too fucking funny, in a black humor sort of way:
Nov. 24, 2005 | On the night of Oct. 6, David Ludwig, 18, and his 14-year-old girlfriend, Kara Beth Borden, went to church. There was no sermon, though — at least not a traditional one. David and Kara were at the Lancaster Bible Church in Manheim, Penn., for a Christian rock concert. As the punishingly loud guitars of Audio Adrenaline and Pillar strained the limits of the church sound system, the kids screamed and pumped their fists and banged their heads. “Pillar and Audio A rock my face off!” David wrote on his blog the next day. Kara spent almost all the money in her pocket on a Pillar sweatshirt. She was wearing it the morning of Nov. 13 when, police say, David shot and killed her parents and fled with her at his side. (google cache of his blog here).
Damned kids and their rock … oh, wait … SAVED kids and their BLESSED rock music!!
Like many edgier evangelical bands, Pillar specializes in battle anthems, composed on the premise that Christians are under constant spiritual attack. The emotional effects are remarkably similar to those of any secular odes to alienation and rebellion, and the vast majority of Christian teens who are drawn to such music, like the vast majority of their non-Christian peers, find comfort in the roiling cacophony that mirrors their inner lives; it helps them get through some difficult years in one piece. Any Christian artist can share legitimate and profound stories of young people who found genuine grace through their music. But there will always be a small fringe of disturbed people who are looking for an excuse to go over the edge, and who will find it in angry and tormented lyrics — even if those lyrics are supposed to be about eternal salvation.
I know I shouldn’t, but this is just TOO much to ignore.
I’ve lost count of the number of bands, albums, video games and movies that have come under attack from the Christian Right. In fact, it’s the commercial truism that pop culture continues to reward rebellion and alienation, including the Christian pop culture:
It is still possible to find fundamentalist Christians who hold that all rock ‘n’ roll is the devil’s music, and that CCM is only a more deceptive variety. The mainstream Christian culture industry, however, is too sophisticated and too profitable to turn its back on any form of musical expression. But with the proliferation of Christian music — and books, movies, stand-up comedy, and pro wrestling — the line between faith and sin has become blurred, and pop proselytizers will have to ask themselves if they are really changing hearts or just winning fans. Evangelicals justify their embrace of 21st century pop culture forms by saying that the Bible calls them to be “in the world, but not of it.” This week, sadly, they are both.
So, what should we blame it on? Can we blame it on the world going to hell? Can we blame it on poor parenting, genetics or is it simply the way rock music mirrors the roiling anger and testosterone-driven blood in the loins of frustrated teenaged boys?
Or should we get back to what we CAN do in a civil society? We hold people accountable for their actions, and their justifications or the music they listened to or the digital enemies they fragged are merely details in the stories we tell each other about these events.
I would submit that the real root to so many of these problems, going back through the long history of crimes of passion, is that people don’t communicate and pressure builds, and sometimes it explodes. David quoted another favorite band on his blog, Project 86:
Fireproof
Here’s a chance to show you how I feel
A chance for you to see it’s real
To see just what I feel inside and who it is that’s by my side
I will never change my mind
Try to torch me and you’ll find
You can’t turn me or deter me
No matter how you try
You can’t burn meChorus
I know where I stand and what’ll happen if you try it
I am FIREPROOF
I know my heart and I just can’t deny it
I am FIREPROOF
I tried to tell you but you wouldn’t be quiet
I am FIREPROOF
I’ll never bow down and you won’t buy it
I am FIREPROOFNow you know what I’m all about
There’s no chance I’ll ever doubt
The only one who can control me
I extol the Almighty
You want me to put it on the line
And give yield to you this time
See but I won’t compromise and I realize
It’s my time to rise
It’s my time to riseChorus
You’ll never take me in the fire
You’ll never take my own desire
It is, of course, unfair for me to quote the lyrics of his music to condemn his cultural experiences for his behavior, but after decades of hearing such bullshit from the right, well, payback is sweet.
note — first link to main story is to Salon dot com, and you’ll have to watch an ad
You know, I’m not quite sure why, but I haven’t heard this mentioned in any of the MSM coverage of this story.
Weird, isn’t it?
More seriously, all that “spiritual war” stuff is really frigging scary. It basically comes down to the belief that there are invisible, evil demons running around that only the “saved” can see and combat, and which are responsible for pretty much everything that goes wrong. Possibly including, depending on who you listen to, all non-“saved” people. So I must say that David’s actions don’t surprise me at all.
If they came to the conclusion that her parents were in the clutch of said demons because they tried to separate the couple, that certainly explains quite a lot…
it’s pretty twisted, and makes the whole myth they have that they’re persecuted much more dangerous.
The Salon story is the only one I saw, though I did find it on a couple of music oriented sites, like the one I linked to in the story that notes his site was taken down.
And that myth is pretty high up on the danger scale to start with. When a group with significant power starts believing that its failures are due not to problems with its philosophy or actions, but due to conspiracies working to eliminate it… Well, the effects can be really damn scary.
The TV here was set to CNN when I was making my lunch yesterday. They had a story on where they were asking two things: “what kind of relationship can a 18-year-old boy have with a 14-year-old girl” and “what would make her do this?”
No mention that I noticed of their religion. Though there was certainly plenty of implication that they were lower-class.
What a coincidence.
I live within an hour of where those kids are from, and most of the news I’ve seen mentions the homeschooling factor (most likely for religious reasons, but never actually said), and the pictures of the family home make it clear that they were not lower class. I keep thinking that it’s interesting (in a tragic way) that the parents were probably homeschooling to limit their kids contact with non-believers, and look where the trouble came from-right within their little Xtian community.
can’t let anything derail the lazy naratives that the media uses.
I suspect it’s not laziness — most reporters I know are a long way from that.
I’d bet in this case it’s two things.
First, reporters rarely have the TIME any longer to do any significant “reporting” — when you’re expected to file a MINIMUM of 4 stories a day, without going into overtime, you don’t get to do more than minimal research on any of them.
Second, if you run any story that is in any way less than blowjob obsequious about the radical nutjob Xian right, or that even MENTIONS that sick and twisted people sometimes hold sick and twisted religious views, you can count on a deluge of angry letters, hate mail, and death treats from the “sick and twisted religious views” community. And they will be aimed at everyone from the writer up to the publisher AND, more importantly, at the advertisers.
Reporters lose their jobs for being in any way responsible, or even blamable, for such things.
Yeah, it sucks… but the advertisers pay the bills and things that cause the advertisers to shy away will have the inevitable downstream effects.
And many of those advertisers are run by hard-core Republicans.
Not that they’d let their personal beliefs get in the way of good business or ethics or anything.
Well, of course not…
But if you ask anyone who actually DOES, or tries to do, honest reporting on controversial topics, they’ll tell you that knowing that your publisher will/won’t back you when the feces hits the rotary blade is crucial to deciding what you do and don’t write. There’s a LONG list of stories that’ll never be reported in the commercial press simply because of the expected or certain public outcry…
Right now most of those stories have a left/progressive impact, primarily because the right has its shit together about manipulating and twisting the process and can put together a much louder public outcry in much less time. (there’s a whole host of reasons for that, which are more or less equivalent in many ways to the differences between neofascists and progressives.)