By now, most people have seen the video out of Lexington, Kentucky of children chanting “take him out, blow him up” while grown men in tactical gear march down a church aisle and gun down a man pretending to be Satan. Air rifles, sound effects, an explosion cue at the eight-second mark. Some kids cheer while parents laugh along with them. Others cover their mouths and eyes in horror as the actor playing Satan writhes while multiple armed men empty their magazines into him — in the house of God, where Jesus teaches “thou shalt not kill.”
Religion has never been a stranger to violence. The Bible is riddled with it. Rape, murder, genocide ordered directly by God. There’s a story where God sends bears to maul two boys to death because they mocked a prophet’s bald head. That’s in the actual book. I grew up watching crucifixion skits, and even those kept the violence implied — the effects stayed soft, the horror stayed at a distance appropriate for a child audience. What happened in Kentucky doesn’t do that. It’s a different category of thing entirely. Disturbing isn’t even strong enough.
If you haven’t seen the video, here it is:
TRIGGER WARNING - contains mock firing squad.
This is Mt. Olivet Baptist Church’s Vacation Bible School run by Pastor Dewayne “Get ‘em while they’re young” Walker. Pastor Dewayne claims they’ve run this skit, “Commandos for Christ,” for over thirty years. Thirty years of indoctrinating children that the correct response to evil is by violence – gun violence to be precise.
The video didn’t land the way the Pastor assumed it would and when there was public outcry and backlash, he didn’t pull the video or apologize. Instead, he posted a video of himself to Facebook explaining this was “the gospel gun,” that the kids were learning to “hate the devil,” that it’s all part of making church “a fun place, a happy place.” None of that explains why “killing evil” in his church looks like a man on the ground getting repeatedly shot while children chant for it. Somebody choreographed that shit. Somebody picked the soldiers, came up with the chant, decided explosion sounds would really make it feel real, and then chose to end it with a body being drug out in front of a room full of elementary aged children. Thirty fucking summers of that, for a new crop of kids each time, young enough to think it’s a happy place.
Mind you, these same children are taught, in the same building, by the same adults, that they are born sinners. Who Satan is supposedly using. Doesn’t take much to see where the firing squad training goes once “the devil” stops being a costume and starts being someone they’ve already been taught to fear. You don’t have to claim the church meant it that way. You just have to notice they built the muscle memory and handed it over to a room full of eight-year-olds.
That’s not a coincidence of bad taste, and it isn’t generic to religion — it’s a specific white supremacy American political theology showing its work. Christian nationalism. The same movement that talks about Christian schools as “boot camps for winning back America,” that traces straight back to “muscular Christianity,” the turn-of-the-century push to recast Jesus as a soldier and faith as armed conquest. That lineage is why a pastor can stand in a sanctuary nicknamed “the gospel gun” and not blink, why “commandos for Christ” sounds aspirational instead of deranged to the adults in the room. In this version of the faith, violence isn’t an oopsie. It’s a goddamn delivery system. And it is white American evangelicalism’s invention, not the Bible’s — nothing about a man who told his followers to turn the other cheek, who disarmed Peter in the garden and healed the ear his own disciple cut off, gets you to a pageant where the climax is a body on the floor and a crowd chanting for the kill shot.
These aren't kids who needed the introduction to gun violence. It's everywhere already. I remember Columbine like it was yesterday, and America hasn't done shit about gun violence in schools in the 27 years since. Instead, white pastors are in their churches glorifying it. Take your thoughts and prayers and cram them up your ass until you can taste them. I don't want your thoughts and prayers. I want you to stop teaching white kids to be violent in the name of your fucking God.
The kids in the video are the generation already doing lockdown drills in their own classrooms. Active shooter drills have been documented to spike depression, anxiety, and physiological stress in children as young as five, and that’s when adults are actively trying to make it feel less real. Paster Dewayne did the opposite on purpose. He gave already traumatized kids a more polished version of the exact scenario their schools are bracing them for. And that was supposed to be fun? On what fucking planet? We are supposed to protect our kids from violence, not glorify it and rewire their brains to believe it’s fun.
It’s no secret that in America, most school shooters are white, male, and raised in a culture that hands boys guns before it hands them language for rage or grief or isolation. Researchers studying mass, rampage-style school shootings going back to the year 2000, put white perpetrators at roughly 58 percent of cases. That’s the majority, not the exception. And that statistic isn’t sitting in a vacuum next to a church that just taught a room of elementary schoolers to fucking cheer while men in tactical gear executed a target.
It’s the same cultural script, performed twice: once as theology, once as massacre.
A boy raised in a tradition that frames violence as righteous is being handed a justification before he’s old enough to even need one. Nobody’s saying Mt. Olivet is manufacturing shooters in Sunday school. But they’re sure as hell rehearsing the same grammar that keeps showing up in the manifestos.
These kids were elementary age. At this stage of life, the developing brain doesn’t have the blueprint yet to reliably separate “this is theater” from “this is real” the way an adult does. That’s well established in the child trauma literature, which is exactly why specialists flag staged or simulated violence as a risk for kids this young even when they’re told it’s pretend. This isn’t new knowledge. It’s documented and has been for decades. And these children weren’t passive witnesses. They were active participants. They were encouraged to chant for it, and cheer when the body hit the ground, conditioning a young nervous system to pair the sound of gunfire and a body falling with celebration and the approval of every trusted adult in the room. While their school already taught them that combination means danger, their church just spent vacation Bible school teaching the opposite lesson.
So what do the children of Mt. Olivet think happens to evil now, after thirty years of this? And what happens the first time one of them decides they know, personally, who’s standing where Satan stood?
Know better, do better, dammit.
If a paid subscription isn’t in the cards right now, I completely get it — truly. But if you’ve ever read something here and thought “damn, she needs to keep doing this,” you can throw a few bucks in the tip jar over at Buy Me a Coffee.
No pressure. No guilt. Just me, asking nicely, with my hand out like a very earnest raccoon who writes controversial essays.
☕ buymeacoffee.com/eeviebateman
Thank you for being here. Seriously. You make this worth doing.
It's mind blowing. I saw this clip going around yesterday and couldn't believe what I was seeing. These are the same people, no doubt, that have family Christmas cards depicting every member with an AR-15. Disgusting.
Omg. What a mess we’re in