‘Shiny Happy People’ Returns To Examine the Christian Culture War Pioneer Teen Mania

(RNS) — In 1999, a man in his 30s, dressed in a red button-down shirt, stood in front of some 73,000 Christian teens and invited them into battle. “Do we have any fighting men and women in here ready for a fight for some souls?” Ron Luce, founder of Teen Mania, demanded of the crowd crammed into Michigan’s Pontiac Silverdome, to roars.

At that moment, Teen Mania was perhaps the most consequential Christian teen ministry in the world. Millions of earnest evangelical Christian youths had shown themselves ready over the previous 13 years to inscribe their hearts and not a few checks to change the world. Luce enticed them with a combative “us vs. them” approach to mainstream American culture. In the Silverdome, those militaristic undertones were made explicit, supercharging the youth movement for a new century.

What that century brought, in the now familiar story of many a supercharged ministry, were accusations of abuse from former members and outlandish fear tactics employed to mold the ministry’s teen interns, a gnarly underbelly that is the subject of the second season of Prime Video’s “Shiny Happy People: A Teenage Holy War.” The three-part docuseries, following the success of “Shiny Happy” season one’s 2023 examination of the prolifically pro-natalist Duggar family, rides the fascination with Christian subculture in exploring Teen Mania’s birth and seemingly inevitable demise.

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What makes the Teen Mania story more than a rehash of evangelical overreach is watching how, as revealed at “Day One” at the Silverdome, Luce stoked the flames of the culture war still playing out on a national stage today.

When Luce and his wife, Katie, founded Teen Mania in 1986, it was envisioned as an international missionary movement. Global Expeditions, its first major initiative, would transport a group of teens and their leaders abroad for a few weeks, where they would win as many souls for Jesus as possible.

The group’s primary tactic involved Jesus skits, a youth group staple. Often accompanied by music, but no words, the teen missionaries typically acted out variations on the dangers of the temptations of youth — lust, greed, drugs, etc. — that most often end with a confrontation between Jesus and Satan, with Jesus emerging the victor.

But in the 1990s, the organization’s own events back home became emotive, high-energy spectacles in churches and arenas. Called Acquire the Fire, the events employed pyrotechnics, evocative music, intense lighting and stirring altar calls to convey the gospel message.

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Carrie Saum in “Shiny Happy People: A Teenage Holy War.” (Courtesy of Prime Video)

“They weren’t appealing to our intellect. They weren’t appealing to our common sense. Looking back at it now, they weren’t even really appealing to our spirits,” Carrie Saum, a Teen Mania alumna featured in the docuseries, told Religion News Service. “They were appealing to our emotions. And that was a really powerful drug.”

April Ajoy, an influencer and author of “Star-Spangled Jesus: Leaving Christian Nationalism and Finding A True Faith,” remembers attending Acquire the Fire events as a kid. Luce’s rhetoric, which she describes as very “black and white,” had a lasting impact.

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“You leave so fired up, and you have this deep sense of purpose that there’s no higher calling than for you to give up your entire life to spread the gospel, to save souls,” Ajoy said in an interview. “Because you literally believe that if people do not have your beliefs, that they do not believe in Jesus the way you do, that they will die and go to hell.”

Liz Boltz Ranfeld, the daughter of former Christian musician Ray Boltz who appears in “Shiny Happy People” with her brother Phil, said, “There was the pressure of, I have to get this right, because I have to get these people saved.” But she and her brother don’t discount the intense messaging as a motivator for their evangelism.

Acquire the Fire events were also used to enlist interns enrolled in the Honor Academy, an intense, on-site gap-year program that included everything from janitorial work and groundskeeping to promoting Teen Mania events. Rather than being paid for these duties, the interns were charged hundreds of dollars a month for the experience, which included early wake-ups, mandatory physical training and adherence to strict rules. No dating or secular music was allowed. Violations, former interns recall, could result in immediate ejection from the program.

Some of the most troubling elements of the program, such as ESOAL — Emotionally Stretching Opportunity of a Lifetime — were designed to push teens to their limits. A boot camp-like experience involved sleep deprivation, mud crawls, wearing military-style fatigues and, some recall for the camera, rolling down vomit-strewn hills.

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According to its alums who talked to “Shiny, Happy People,” the manipulation and unpaid labor directly contributed to Honor Academy’s booming success.