The media is beginning to sit up and take notice of citizen concerns about the first Christian instructional video on religious warfare for children.  This morning the San Francisco Chronicle had a front page story describing citizen concerns about the video game Left Behind:  Eternal Forces, which is based on Tim LaHaye's Left Behind series of novels.  The story is titled: 'Convert or die' game divides Christians: Some ask Wal-Mart to drop Left Behind. This was followed today with a well attended press and blogger teleconference hosted by DefCon, (the Campaign to Defend the Constitution) which featered comments by Clark Stevens of DefCon, Tim Simpson of the Christian Alliance for Progress, and Frederick Clarkson of Talk to Action.

Beginnning with Jonathan Hutson's ground breaking series exposing the hate-based agenda of the game, Talk to Action has done considerable reporting on and in-depth analysis of the game and its underlying ideology.  Here is a brief anthology of Talk to Action posts that can serve as a back grounder on the game.

At a press conference today in Phoenix, Arizona, a coalition of progressive Christian groups called for the recall of the hate-based video game Left Behind:  Eternal Forces. Talk to Action's Jonathan Hutson's ground-breaking series posted at Talk to Action, Political Cortex, and elsewhere, remains the definitive critique of the game. Chip Berlet's series on  Tim LaHaye, the author of the series of novels on which the game is based, explains the games' underlying ideology.

CrossWalk America, the Beatitudes Society, Christian Alliance for Progress and The Center for Progressive Christianity will also urge consumers to boycott the video game, which is being released "just in time for the holidays," according to the manufacturer.

Talk to Action co-founders, Bruce Wilson and me, issued a statement at the request of the organizers of the event; posted below.

For a generation, the notion of the secular; secularism, secular humanism, the secular left, and most recently (and oxymoronically) secular fundamentalism, and other variations, has become the bogeyman to be opposed. For this, we can thank the works of such religious right theorists as Frances Schaefer, R.J. Rushdoony, and Tim LaHaye,

This is part of a central framing of the nature of what some consider to be a war going on in society: a war between religion and non-religion; between Christianity and religious pluralism; between the once and future Christian Nation and those in league, wittingly or unwittingly with the forces of Satan. All too often secularists, secularism, secular humanism, the secular left, and secular fundamentalism, are synonymous.  This is because the underlying concepts are seen as Satanic in origin, and so the terms are literally terms of demonization.  

Welcome to my more-or-less weekly round-up of interesting and signficant posts about the religious right.  

As the election season rapidly ramps-up, we are likely to see a lot of posts about the religious right, pols and electoral politics. This week, they started to emerge -- and I suspect that it is just the tip of the iceberg.

It was just a matter of time before mainstream media started to pick up on the controversies surrounding the video game, Left Behind:  Eternal Forces.

A nationally syndicated story by Religion News Service sumarizes the critcisms of the game raised by conservative Christian attorney Jack Thompson, who is a prominent critic of violence in video games.  While this was certainly newsworthy, there are many more major concerns about the game.