If there is one thing I greatly detest, it’s the hijacking of good causes and good people for awful intent. And yet, it’s something that has plagued my life for ages. More specifically, I’ve watch some of the best people I’ve known victimized by absolute monsters all in the name of noble intentions.
As many of my readers know, I grew up cult-adjacent and as a teenager, I was trafficked by a ring that used the BITE model to keep us in line. So, this kind of thing hits me close to home in a way that is deeply, deeply personal.
That’s precisely what I am such a huge fan of the makers of Happy Shiny People. They’ve been showing how Evangelical Christian preachers have been driving the massive movement towards fascism, political extremism, and the current political climate we have today.
Recently, they made a sequel to their smash hit movie (which I reviewed here), Happy Shiny People 2: A Teenage Holy War. This mini-docuseries rips off the mask of one of the largest teen-centric Evangelical ministries in the country…and what it shows is downright chilling.
The story all starts with Y2K culture.
The 2000s and late 1990s was when I was a preteen and teen. It was also the era of Y2K. For mainstream audiences, the Y2K “Millennial” era was one marked by excess. Sex, drugs, and music were all foisted in our faces 24/7.
Women in media were scantily clad, flirtatious and always ready to fool around. Victoria’s Secret Angels were the mavens of the runway, grabbing the attention of both men and women alike. Pam Lee, Britney Spears, JWOWW, and Playboy bunnies were the ones women wanted to be like.
Cosmo was in its heyday, with absolutely terrible sex advice that encouraged women to be crazily sexual. I still remember, as a teen, cracking open women’s magazines to get more information on how to be better at threesomes and blowjobs. That was the era that I grew up in and honestly, it had an effect on me. It had an effect on all of us.
What most people didn’t know was that there was an entire, massive subculture that absolutely shunned everything that was being jammed down our throats by mass media. Unlike the cultures I ended up tied to (anime, rave, goth cultures), this culture wanted it all squeaky clean.
It was the Christian Contemporary Music culture, or CCM.
A lot of Christian groups weren’t happy about all the sexuality and drug use touted by the media.
I mean, I can’t blame them. Looking back, a lot of that media had a bad effect on people. It kept pushing women to be more sexual than they felt comfortable with, and honestly, it was a large reason as to why there are so many women like me out there, still dealing with sexual trauma.
In Christian households, teenagers often felt alienated from their peers. They weren’t comfortable with the media offered to them. They also had their own communities—often church groups where they would be able to hang out with their likeminded friends.
Speaking as someone who actually had a short period of being a fundie, I know a lot of teens of the time felt like mainstream media was harmful. There were many well-meaning Christian groups out there who just wanted to help the world get better, safer, and overall nicer—at least through their eyes.
CCM was one of the ways they tried to do that. Christian music geared toward teens was meant to give them an alternative to mainstream music. There were so many teens I knew who were idealistic individuals that just wanted to be good people in their own right.
Unfortunately, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Happy Shiny People 2 takes a look at how Teen Mania Ministries ran an organization designed to create Christofascist soldiers.
If you were a fundie, you likely heard of Teen Mania Ministries. This “ministry” preached through banger concerts that acted like “the Coachella for Christian teens,” where it was all Christianity, all the time. Every concert came with its own over-the-top ministry moment where a preacher would preach something about obedience.
At first glance, it sounds like a good, wholesome idea. Then, it got weird. The documentary goes on about how Teen Mania was…
Requiring people to quit dating in order to go to “Honor School,” a school specifically for Christian teen minister types.
Hiding how the “Honor School” had bootcamps that required military-style practices, talks about obedience, and caused injuries bad enough to require stitches.
Forcing teens to work call centers, sometimes for as long as 100 hours a week…and none of it was paid.
Buried teens alive in a coffin to prove a point.
Using intimidation and shunning as away to encourage students to stay in their program.
Like a frog in a pot of boiling water, Teen Mania slowly funneled well-meaning, naive Christian kids into a program that literally turned them into mini-paramilitary groups with the hope of getting them to act as soldiers for the now-present fascist right.
And some of the stuff you’ll see in this series? It’s scary because it gets more and more and more demanding of teens who should honestly just be worried about whether or not their parents catch them smoking…
Clips of the “programs” involved children, actual teenagers, talking about how they wanted to die for God, kids laying in the mud for 90 hours, and having breakdowns from the brutality they were put through. As the narrator said, it was “Navy SEAL Hell Week” for teens.
By the end of the series, the ties to Project 2025 are set up for everyone to see, clear as day. The teenagers who dealt with the now-defunct Teen Mania Ministries are now adults, many of whom have both physical and emotional scars from their days trying to serve their god.
What really stood out to me about this were the teenagers who were exploited.
You know, there are very few groups of people as vulnerable to radicalization as teens. It’s a time in life when you are trying to figure out who you are as a person. The Christian right knew that and used the most innocuous, innocent messaging to hurt teens.
If you really think about it, most teens tend to want something to believe in. Many, if not most, teenagers I’ve met had a certain adventurous, idealistic streak in them. In the 2000s, it was normal for Millennials to feel like we could change the world.
We wanted to change the world.
We wanted to fix what we felt was wrong with it.
And it’s amazing at how far Teen Mania Ministries was able to push these kids into doing insane amounts of work, tolerate crazy levels of abuse, and also control their day-to-day lives without batting an eye. And the kids did it because they thought they were helping a higher good.
This docuseries is really important right now, for all the most important reasons.
Having been in a cult before and having grown up cult-adjacent, I see so much of myself in them. Right now, there are a lot of people wondering how so many people couldn’t see the culty behavior that was drilled into them.
We often say that Trumpism is a cult, and that’s because a lot of Trumpers act like cult members. Even though that statement has basically become a meme at this point,
It’s because of normalization—something currently happening throughout our country right now. Everyone acted like it was normal, so it was normal. As one former Teen Mania Ministry member said, “No one told me I shouldn’t get into a coffin while I was alive…”
One of the alumni explained that it eventually dawned on her that they were “Raising murderers and they were recruiting children,” as she wiped away tears. This is what the far-right is doing, and it’s no longer just a cult thing.
While Teen Mania might be gone, the mentality is alive and well. And we need to make it stop before it’s too late.
