Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

This video game is aimed primarily at the children of evangelical Christians whose theology is already compatible with Tim LaHaye and the underlying ideas of the game. When my colleague Chip Berlet wrote about the game, he noted that:

When White supremacists post websites demonizing Jews and gay people, they are condemned for the hatemongers they are.

When leaders of the armed citizens militias and their allies in the Patriot Movement in the 1990s urged their followers to form anti-government underground cells and battle global cooperation and the United Nations, they were condemned as dangerous guerrillas spreading divisive conspiracy theories.

When Timothy LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins write the Left Behind series of novels containing the same type of bigotry, they sell 70 million books and are interviewed by clueless journalists who use a double standard by not confronting LaHaye and Jenkins for spreading hate and conspiracism as well as promoting religious violence as a heroic duty.

As Americans, we have been turning a blind eye to some of the most serious threats to constitutional democracy, by ignoring or being dismissive of the truly extreme ideolologies being marketed under the guise of Christian entertainment.  These are also, as Berlet noted, foolishly passed off as kinda cute by some reviewers. (And as if all this were not enough, the game is riddled with spyware.)

We have noted that other reviewers have joined us in seeing some of the major problems with this game and the underlying ideology.  Most recently, a reviewer at the Toronto Star newspaper joins us in recognizing the essential character of the game.

Here is an excerpt:

Players roam a ruined New York City 18 months into Armageddon in command of a pious commando outfit called the Tribulation Force, attempting to convert the "faithless" before their souls are forever lost to the Antichrist (he's Romanian, bizarrely) and his Global Community Peacekeepers. Prayer is the main weapon, but when conversions fail and no other option is available, out come the guns.

Hence the complaints from within and without the Christian community that Eternal Forces promotes a "convert or kill" ideology akin to that of radical Islam. That the "rebels" are fighting a thinly veiled U.N. army composed of demons and non-Christians also leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth.

Anyone who doesn't subscribe to the evangelical-Christian idea of the Rapture might be somewhat put off by this sort of content. But the harshest criticisms have come from fellow believers.

Tireless anti-videogame advocate Jack Thompson, a conservative Christian lawyer from Florida, has blasted the game for promoting "killing people for their lack of faith in Jesus."

Jonathan Hutson of the Talk To Action group publicly declared himself "offended by a game that allows children to rehearse mass killing in the name of Christ or the Antichrist" and he eventually engendered the resignation of a director at another advocacy group, Purpose Driven Ministries, who had served as business adviser to Left Behind Games over his "endorsement by association" of the game.