Ron Luce's "stealth evangelism" guide exposed (part 3)
As if our poor beleagured custodial staff didn't have enough problems, how about tract-handling with food? 31. REAL FOOD Use the Real Food tactic to get the gospel into people's hearts during lunch time in your cafeteria. Standing in line for lunch at school usually is a brain-dead activity. But you can infiltrate the cafeteria by putting a tract on every tray before people pick them up. Whilst amusing, it's rather unlikely for a large number of reasons: a) Generally school lunchrooms are operated by a dedicated staff of food service employees. Students, by and large, aren't allowed in the lunchroom until lunch is served (in other words, the dominionist kids would have to skip class to infiltrate the lunchroom, especially in schools with staggered lunch schedules). This is in part due to homeland security concerns and partly due to concerns regarding food allergies and even basic food poisoning prevention. (Anymore, to be a "lunch lady" you are required to go through a specific certification course on food preparation safety and food-prep security offered by the local department of health.) b) In many schools, there are either multiple lunch lines (this was even the case in my own school in the late 80's where a separate salad line existed) or there are no cafeteria personnel at all and all lunches are sent preboxed and pre-prepared (I was also in a school system in my early high school years where this was the case). c) Again (due to zero-tolerance policies) anyone caught trying to interfere with the lunchroom equipment in such a manner would probably at best be suspended. (Very often, there are specific lunch monitors even in high school--partly because kids have been occasionally busted in text-message drug deals and similar misbehaviours during lunch periods. In addition, due to homeland security concerns, the use of lunchrooms period by non-school staff has been severely restricted in many school districts. Generally kids seen as being disruptive in any manner are often banned from lunchroom at a minimum. (Again, this is due to multiple unfortunate incidents--the most infamous possibly being the Columbine shootings, but also because of students sometimes deliberately doing things like bringing allergenic food to a "peanut-free table" set up for allergic kids.)
We go straightaway back into at least the sixth listing mentioning a criminal science headline at number 32 (at this point I am wondering if Ron Luce has a bit of a "Law and Order" fetish): 32. STAKEOUT Ah, yes, fun with yet another tactic promoting scoping out the specific weak spots of a potential target so that they can rush in for the "kill". (Yes, as a matter of fact, they DO act a lot like wild dogs worrying down a deer or cow. No offense to the wild dogs meant, of course.) Old-school crackers have a term for this too--"social engineering" and "vulnerability probing"--the idea being that you end up gaining the trust of an individual, and map out the weak points of a system to infiltrate it. Kevin Mitnick used to be a veritable genius at this sort of "social engineering" before he got imprisoned for it; now he sells his services as a "white-hat" social engineer teaching people how not to fall for the same tactics he used to break into a large number of systems--including some linked to the Department of Defense. It's also interesting how they promote--subtly, mind--the general concepts of "deliverance ministry" again. One of the urban legends that has had continuous running since the very invention of jazz music in the dominionist community (and one which has helped fund the careers of "Christian Contemporary" artists like Carman nicely as an "alternative" to "demonic" secular music--not uncoincidential) is the idea that certain rock songs, or certain song lyrics, contain hidden references to Satanism or the devil. (This began with blues singers being accused of selling their souls to the Devil, expanded to rock-and-roll being accused of being satanic (common lines given were about the Eagles' "Hotel California" being about the Church of Satan (in fact, it's a song about drug addiction), Ozzy Osbourne's "Suicide Solution" telling kids to kill themselves (here, again, a song about addiction, specifically about how alcoholism is a form of slow suicide) and how the band Kiss' name supposedly stood for either Knights In Satan's Service or Kids In Satan's Service (in fact, it's neither, it's just plain Kiss), and so forth) and has now expanded to hip-hop and rap being the targets of nearly identical claims as those made regarding heavy metal in the 80's (yes, including the whole "backwards masking" claims of secret Satanic messages hidden in metal albums). In fact, it's a common claim even today by "deliverance ministry" preachers that ALL secular music, and even music by "crossover" "Christian contemporary" artists like Amy Grant or by "Christian metal" artists like Stryper or Bloodgood, are in fact Satanic and "open doorways for Satan"; the Christian artists are generally condemned for having too much of a "rock beat" or being promoted in secular media (Stryper, not surprisingly, got both, seeing as they were a Christian metal band that became a crossover band to secular artists towards the end of their careers and always had some of the best popularity of any "Christian" artist in the type of music they performed), and the definition of "Satanism" gets very loose indeed (Tina Turner, for instance, was condemned as a "Satanist" for studying Buddhism, and the Beatles were similarly condemned). Hence the only music that people can listen to in these groups is old-time gospel or--surprise, surprise--artists like Carman et al. (Yes, this is a big part of what keeps the "Christian Music" industry alive--people are literally taught in dominionist churches they will go to hell for listening to anything else!) (Very interestingly, and as a personal aside, my first breakings-away from dominionism came when my youth pastor accused the band Stryper of being Satanic. I actually owned albums from Stryper and knew they held altar calls at their concerts, and were about as far as you could get (even in dominionist terms) from being Satanists. I later found out that they'd lied about Ozzy Osbourne's "Suicide Solution" and the house of cards started to tumble down after that; not uncoincidentially, some of my first work in fighting dominionism was specifically with groups fighting censorship of rock music by "deliverance ministry" groups like Bob Larson Ministries. Quite a bit of crossover there, and at least for folks in my generation, the fight against dominionism really started with the fight against groups like the PMRC (which, while lead by Tipper Gore and Bob Dole's wife, had a lot of support from dominionists and used quite a bit of reference material from dominionist groups), Bob Larson, the Christian Coalition and the like.)
As if we didn't have enough issues with "faith-based coercion" in the prison system, they encourage kids to visit prisoners to annoy the hell out of them literally:
33. JAIL MINISTRY The scary thing is, as evidenced by both the type of churches that the "RIOT Manual" would be promoted in (those with a very, very heavy emphasis on the "spiritual warfare" aspects of dominion theology) and based on the very kinds of groups that promote "faith based coercion" (very often the same groups promoting to adults the concepts of "spiritual warfare") it's probably likely that they would find someone sympathetic in the prison system who'd gleefully let a mess of young God Warriors in to prosyletise to the convicts. This is, of course, not considering the fact that increasingly (outside of "scared straight" programs--and even those are passing out of fashion) minors are increasingly not being permitted to tour jails and prisons. County jails have in past had more lax rules regarding visitation (and in fact this is why they were targeted in the flyer--at the time of publication of this booklet, "scared straight" visitation put on by DARE groups was still somewhat common and done with authorisation of sheriff's departments). Increasingly, though, prisons occasionally even prevent visitation by minor relatives of prisoners, and Michigan's state statute is fairly typical (visitation only allowed for minor children or grandchildren of inmates, must be accompanied by an adult relative, prisoners in certain categories (multiple drug-related offenses or termination of parental rights) not allowed minor visitors at all (and in fact substance-abuse related offenses can lead to no visits save by clergy and attorneys for upwards of two years). Utah has similar regulations, including requiring filing a specific form for minor visitation. Sauk County Sheriff's Department in Wisconsin has similar regs prohibiting non-related minors from visitation, as does Williamson County, IL Sheriff's Office, and Worchester County Sheriff, MA; Alachua County, Florida doesn't state a flat ban on non-relative visitors but requires that minors be in the custody of people on a list of four pre-approved visitors (and also further requires that "prison ministry" be done only by ordained or legally authorised ministers) and San Diego County Sheriff has similar restrictions. The same goes for juvenile facilities; Portage County, WI juvenile hall prohibits visitation by minors other than children of inmates. This is in part due to tough new laws regarding sex offenders and drug-related offenses and persons who have committed those offenses generally being required to stay away from minors. (In the case of sex offenders, generally there are specific regulations due to Megan's Law that state that certain levels of sex offenders cannot legally be within a certain number of yards of children.) It is far from uncommon to have sex offenders in both juvenile and adult custody in county jails; in fact, a search of Louisville in the Kentucky State Sex Offender Registry shows quite a few sex offenders in the county jail right now, and so do the county jails in Bullitt County (a rural county just south of Louisville) and even Whitley County (a rural county near Cumberland Falls, notable for being the home of the SBC-run University of the Cumberlands which recently kicked a student out for revealing on his MySpace page that he was gay--and may lose a chance to gain a pharmacy school from it, both because of protests by Fairness advocates in the state and because the planned accreditation board (Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education) explicitly prohibits discrimination against LGBT persons in its regulations and has stated it will not be willing to accredit University of the Cumberlands' proposed school of pharmacy if the school maintains its present policy of expulsion of outed LGBT students). The section concludes with telling people to stick to a single tactic per person--in other words, at least a minimum of four targets are recommended. And lest one doubt that Teen Mania is the ringleader, the resources page is particularly telling in that fully half or more of it is adverts for Teen Mania--and includes an application form for Teen Mania. (Mars Hill and Gospel Films, the two producers of "Scared Saved" movies, are given major props as well, as is Carman (the "Christian Contemporary" artist used to hawk this in the beginning) and a secondary group called "Impact Productions". Impact Productions seems to be associated with Real Impact Missions, which is apparently a group that promotes teen ministry as well as sending kids on "missionary trips" (a la Youth With A Mission), and is so poorly run that it received an F on transparency and is close to the bottom of every category it's ranked in at ministrywatch.com--largely because it refuses to give any info on its organisation. (To give a comparison, the only groups with similarly poor transparency ratings are almost uniformly name-it-and-claim-it preachers, and the only groups with similarly poor sector rankings are all televangelist groups.) The group has links not only with Ron Luce but many other dominionist groups including Ted Haggard's New Life Church, and at least one of the board of directors is an honest-to-God flaggellant who has made a small career of wheeling around a 12-foot cross. Impact Productions' website seemed to be down at the time of this writing, but a Google Archive of the homepage hints that they are also a major producer of religiously oriented films. A further Google search turned up connections between Impact Productions and promotion of "Passion of the Christ", and is apparently also the primary company behind the movie "End Of The Spear" and also makes other films promoting targeting Native American groups in South America, when they're not making religiously oriented films for children. Quite interestingly, Impact Productions also has documented links to Hollywood, thus being possibly one of the major conduits by which Ron Luce is contacting secular promoters.
The scary thing is, the contents I've just described are typical of Ron Luce's groups, and of "spiritual warfare" groups in general (being a survivor of one of those groups, I can vouch for this).
Ron Luce's "stealth evangelism" guide exposed (part 3) | 60 comments (60 topical, 0 hidden)
Ron Luce's "stealth evangelism" guide exposed (part 3) | 60 comments (60 topical, 0 hidden)
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