"Shiny Happy People" sequel highlights Christian boot camp that traumatized a generation

Teen Mania promised salvation but delivered shame, suffering, and spiritual abuse to tens of thousands of kids

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Two years after Prime Video premiered the docuseries Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets, the producers are back with a sequel: Shiny Happy People: A Teenage Holy War (affiliate link).

The three episodes, all released last Tuesday, focus on Teen Mania, a ministry founded by Ron Luce with a goal of getting children to turn to Jesus and reject temptations like sex, drugs, and alcohol. At its peak, Teen Mania events like “Acquire the Fire” drew an estimated 73,000 people representing over 3,000 youth groups from around the country.

While the goal of abstinence from sin might be laudable, the docuseries made very clear just how problematic these events and the ministry were. There was rampant abuse, according to former members. There was a culture of fear—that criticizing Teen Mania or Luce meant turning your back on God. There was an Us vs. Them mentality drilled into everyone’s head telling them Christians were inherently good while non-Christians were inherently evil. Interns ended up doing menial labor for which they had to pay for the privilege. There were hard-core military-style boot camps, too, for members of the “Honor Academy.” (How sleep deprivation and “rolling in vomit” bring kids closer to God is anyone’s guess.)

As one commentator notes in the series, “How do you know you’re in a cult if that’s your normal?” That statement cuts even deeper as you get through the episodes. It’s not hard to imagine why brainwashed missionaries like John Allen Chau made such irresponsible decisions when you see how tens of thousands of children are being told that lying and physical harming themselves for Jesus is a worthy way to walk through life. As author Jeff Sharlet says in episode two, these kids are being taught “you’re expendable” and “the most valuable thing you could ever do is die” for your faith. (If this were a docuseries about Islam, not Christianity, it’s not hard to predict what Southern Baptist preachers would be saying about it.)

Religion News Service spoke with April Ajoy, who was featured in the series:

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.

“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.”

To be clear, those beliefs aren’t unique to Luce. It’s a message that’s standard in just about every megachurch. But when your brain isn’t even fully formed, to be told that your only purpose in life is to play a part in this (fictional) eternal war is deeply disturbing, and many of those victims are only now coming to terms with how fucked up their childhoods were because of men like Luce.

Of course, all of this quickly became political. Luce impressed upon children that if they were True Christians™, they would be on the right side of all kinds of culture war issues. They would reject marriage equality, oppose reproductive rights, etc. as if those things were required by God in order to achieve salvation.

I had a chance to speak with April late last week about her reaction to the series now that she’s had a chance to watch it. She told me she was grateful it tied Teen Mania to today’s Christian Nationalism so that people might see more clearly how “radicalized teens turn into radicalized adults.” Even if people like her managed to escape the grasp of Luce and his ministry, many of their loved ones didn’t—and still haven’t.

Teen Mania finally came to an end about a decade ago. Cause of death? Financial concerns were at the top of the list, but it didn’t help that former interns and members began speaking out against the abuse they suffered, leading donors to withhold their support. (There were also legal problems involving Luce not showing up for a court date after Teen Mania didn’t pay one of its partners.)

When you watch the full series, one of the biggest elements that stands out is how the biggest fears Ron Luce and his acolytes had—MTV, alcohol, premarital sex—all seem so damn quaint in light of what those same evangelical Christians have become today. After all, what’s a bigger concern today: Kids who vape or conservative Christians who reflexively defend a president who’s a race-baiting, bribe-loving, wildly ignorant sex predator? If you see the former as sin that must be overcome but the latter as acceptable for the greater good, your moral compass is irrevocably broken.

As the series points out, Teen Mania went from telling kids to reject mainstream culture to telling them they needed to take over that culture. Even though the ministry is no longer around, the ideas that inspired it have more power than ever before, and the country is worse off because of it. But Teen Mania itself was defeated by the people who saw the light. Maybe there’s hope, then, for defeating the disastrous legacy that ministry left in its wake.

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