Actor Stephen Baldwin Takes Christian Indoctrination to the Xtreme

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http://www.alternet.org/story/146033/actor_stephen_baldwin_takes_christian_indoctrination_to_the_xtreme


Original investigative report: How a media-savvy, tough-talking duo are putting their knowledge of youth culture in the service of the paranoid Christian Right.


Actor Stephen Baldwin has a message for the millennial generation: Jesus is cool, Jesus is rad, Jesus will kick your butt, Jesus will help you kick the butts of secular liberals. Yet while Baldwin seeks to be the hip new face of evangelicalism, promoting the Jesus of skateboarders and cool kids, beneath his radical chic is the ideology of the old men behind the Cold War-era John Birch Society and Christian Crusade.

Together with Christian activist and radio host Kevin McCullough, Baldwin launched a youth-targeted for-profit Christian media company, Xtreme Media, LLC, and the radio program Xtreme Radio with Stephen Baldwin and Kevin McCullough. The aim of Xtreme Media, according to Baldwin, is to create "a content reality we want to utilize to fire up the conservative movement to stand up and push back louder and more ferociously."

Addressing a 2008 religious-right conference, the annual Values Voter Summit sponsored by FRC Action, Baldwin -- the baby of the Baldwin brothers acting family first put on the Hollywood map by brother Alec -- explained that he uses "extreme sports" to recruit young evangelicals "because I believe the way to ensure a better America in the future is make more Christians." At religious right conferences across the nation, Baldwin struts before young and not-so-young audiences, deploying his uber-masculine Christianity as a rebuke to the Hollywood liberals he claims are ruining America.

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Packaging Paranoia for a New Generation

While Baldwin is the better-known face of Xtreme Media, Kevin McCullough is the brains behind the enterprise, as Baldwin readily admits. Clad in jeans, a backwards baseball cap and sunglasses, McCullough strutted through the XPAC lounge at last month's Conservative Political Action Conference, where a few dozen young people mingled in conversational groupings of sofas and arm chairs. Others played video games -- Guitar Hero, XBox and Wii were all available -- or took advantage of the "blazing fast" wi-fi. The CPAC crowd included a sizable contingent of younger activists, thanks to the heavily subsidized $25 admission fee for college students (compared to $175 for everybody else).

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McCullough's outreach to millennials at CPAC demonstrates how Christian right education organizations, particularly XPAC cosponsor Summit Ministries, have created generations of warriors against the "worldviews" of communism, socialism and secular humanism that compete, they say, against a "biblical Christian worldview." Summit offers conferences to high school and college students "to counteract the alarming trend" of Christian youth "adopting the false humanistic philosophies of our day," as described in its promotional DVD distributed in the XPAC lounge. McCullough, who speaks at Summit's youth-focused conferences, personally solicited Summit's sponsorship of the XPAC lounge, according to John Stonestreet, Summit's executive director.
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the religiously insane are dangerous - keep your kids away from them

[OHdem10]

1. When are Progressives/Liberals going to be just as active in offering

young people something different from the Righties?

[sufrommich]

2. I don't think we will ever have to worry about

Stephen Baldwin becoming the epitome of cool to the younger generation.

[Blue Owl]

3. Maybe someday he'll find out that his jammin' 4 Jesus

Is really just blazin' 4 Beelzebub...

[YOY]

4. Poster child for born-again fuck-ups.

He fucked-up.

Found "Jesus"...or whatever crutch version of Jesus the people who found him face down in the gutter serve.

Now everyone else including kids need it whether or not they are fuck-ups.