Teenage Holy War

At Acquire the Fire, Luce tells the kids to make lists of secular pleasures they'll sacrifice for the cause. Hanneh starts with Bow Wow and Usher, bites her pen, and then decides to go big: "Music," she writes, then "Friends" -- the nonfundamentalist ones -- and "Party." This, she explains, is a polite way of saying "sex." Not that she's had any, or knows anyone her age who has, but she's learned from Luce that "the culture" wants to force it upon her at a young age. "The world," he tells her, is a forty-five-year-old pervert posing as another tween online.

Luce sometimes brings a garbage truck onto the floor to cart the lists away, but this is a relatively small event, so Hanneh and Mallory trot over to one of the trash bins stationed around the arena and drop theirs in. "I feel so much better," Mallory tells Hanneh. Hanneh nods, smiling now. "I feel free," she says.

Later, one of Luce's PR reps takes me backstage to sift through the bins of rejected affections. Most kids mention music, movies, girlfriends and boyfriends, sex or, surprisingly often, just condoms, but a number of new warriors are oddly precise about their proposed abandonings. They cast into perdition Starbucks (multiple votes), Victoria's Secret (ditto; Luce encourages kids to confront the managers of lingerie stores), cereal (Special K and Cap'n Crunch), hip-huggers, "smelling amazing," "vengeance," "medication" and A&W root beer. "I would say it's ridiculous what they are doing to root beer," wrote the boy who will drink A&W no more.

"This is a real war," Luce preaches. When he talks like that, he growls. "This is not a metaphor!" In Cleveland, he intercuts his sermons with videos of suicide bombers and marching Christian teens. One of the most popular, "Casualties of War," features an elegiac beat by a Christian rapper named KJ-52 laid over flickering pictures of kids holding signs declaring the collapse of Christendom: 1/2 OF US ARE NO LONGER VIRGINS, reads a poster board displayed by a pigtailed girl. 40% OF US HAVE INFLICTED SELF-INJURY, says a sign propped up over a sink in which we see the hands of a girl about to cut herself. 53% OF US BELIEVE JESUS SINNED, declares the placard of a young black man standing in a graffiti-filled alley.

Luce lays out cooked statistics, images, assertions. He doesn't explain -- he warns. To the crowd of watery-eyed teens he recites letters he says their peers have sent him, souls lost to what he calls, over and over, the "pigpen" of secularism. It's a reference to the sorry fate of the prodigal son in the Gospel of Luke, who wound up tending hogs until he submitted to the authority of God and was restored to his riches. There's an unnamed girl who left Jesus and then "got date raped." There's "Emily," who dated a non-Christian boy -- "now she works in pornography and lives a bisexual lifestyle." Luce sneers: "pigpen." There's "Heather," who wrote to Luce to complain that "my father is passive, and my mom is controlling." "Pigpen," Luce says, his voice filled with sorrow for the girl with the sissy dad...

>>This is an excerpt from the new issue of "Rolling Stone," on newsstands until April 19th, 2007.

>> See it now! Judge America's crusade yourself: Watch footage from a recent BattleCry rally and see one teen's haunting testimony.