A Controversial Video Game

Religious groups and individuals from both the left and right have protested the sale of "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" and a growing coalition has called for a consumer boycott of the game, but those are moral objections and, rightly so, have no legal force. So, this video game - that depicts religious warfare in New York City and in which players can command fundamentalist Christian paramilitary forces with the mission of converting to fundamentalist Christianity or else killing the residents of the Big Apple - is on store shelves, waiting to take its place under festive Christmas trees.

Teenagers who play "Left Behind:" Eternal Forces" will learn that the act of playing out and imagining religious war has the sanction of their parents and the enthusiastic endorsement of powerful religious advocacy groups such as Focus On The Family. Teens who play the game will understand it to be a wholesome, moral enterprise that has the endorsement of authority figures they love and trust.

They will learn that the immorality of killing can be cleansed by going through the motions of ritualized prayer as if saying a few "Hail Mary's" or mumbling some religious incantation. Imagine the outcry if the Harry Potter series described a magical incantation murderers could intone to make the moral and legal onus of their crimes vanish ?
Lots of killing to do ? No problem. Press the "prayer button" as necessary.

"The people who have come into (our) institutions (today) are primarily termites. They are into destroying institutions that have been built by Christians, whether it is universities, governments, our own traditions, that we have.... The termites are in charge now, and that is not the way it ought to be, and the time has arrived for a godly fumigation." - Pat Robertson, to New Yorker Magazine, 1986

Finally, it is important - crucial even - to recognize that there is a wider societal context to the phenomenon of "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" ;

The game is no cultural anomaly but part of a general pattern in which many parents on the Christian right are socializing children with the vocabulary of violence and the expectation that they will wage religious warfare, against specified societal groups, within their lifetimes. That was the context for the recent documentary Jesus Camp and "Jesus Camp" is part of a much wider societal phenomenon ( see: Kids In Combat )

Further, such efforts to socialize children towards religious warfare mesh with a pattern, in American public discourse, of prominent religious, political, and media figures employing demonizing and eliminationalist rhetoric against targeted societal groups and even calling for the use of nuclear weapons against civilian populations ( see: Enough hate speech to stun an ox and Dave Neiwert's writing on hate speech at Orcinus, and Hatecrime.org as well as the  work of the Southern Poverty Law Center in monitoring hate and extremist activity in the US  

Conditioning people to commit acts of mass violence, research has shown, doesn't happen overnight - it tends to be a gradual process. People can be habituated to commit mass violence quite easily, especially of the conditioning is incremental. So, why not start with kids ? It's easier.

( for more on the socialization of violence, see:

How Average Humans Can Be Conditioned To Carry Out Acts Of Mass Violence
for further analysis on how the "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" game may condition and socialize game players towards violence, see Virtual religious, ethnic, and cultural cleansing in "Left Behind: Eternal Forces"
for more on the ideology behind the "Left Behind" book series that the vieo game is based on, see Chip Berlet's eight part series at Talk To Action.

"The conversion of socialized people into dedicated fighters is achieved not by altering their personality structures, aggressive drives or moral standards. Rather, it is accomplished by cognitively redefining the morality of killing so that it can be done free from self-censure. Through moral justification of violent means, people see themselves as fighting ruthless oppressors" - Albert Banduras