“Take him out! Blow him up! Take him out! Blow him up!” the children chant during a vacation Bible school program at Mt. Olivet Baptist Church in Lexington, Ky. With eerie music looming over the scene, the viral TikTok video shows an armed soldier dressed in black on the church stage peering out at the kids. Three additional armed soldiers in camouflage walk a man in a hoodie down the center aisle and drop him on the stage.
As the victim cowers on the auditorium steps, the soldiers surround him.
“Take him out! Blow him up! Take him out! Blow him up!” the children and adults demand as their bloodthirsty anticipation for violence builds.
Suddenly, the soldiers open fire. Three automatic weapons shoot for 10 seconds straight as the victim’s body convulses and shakes. Their pastor later identified the guns as “air rifles that are basically paintball guns.”
“As the bullets are flying and children are cheering, an adult picks up the chanting again.”
As the bullets are flying and children are cheering, an adult picks up the chanting again.
“Take him out! Blow him up! Take him out! Blow him up!”
The soldiers grab the victim by the ankles and drag him out the side door.
Mothers are seen laughing. Children are smiling and jumping in delight. A man repeatedly yells, “Yeah!”
The pastor walks over to the side door.
“Gotta love this,” he says as he listens for the explosion. “I’ve been thinking about this all day.”
The kids quiet down to listen, while the pastor begins to count.
Some of the children press their hands against their ears, apparently hoping to muffle the sound of the body blowing up outside.
“What’s after four?” The pastor asks, inviting the kids to join in.
“Five!” They all yell.
Then when they say “eight,” an explosion goes off outside the door, kids begin screaming, and the video ends.
The independent Baptists behind the ‘assassination’
Pastor Dewayne Walker
Mount Olivet Baptist Church in Lexington is part of the independent Baptist world of fundamentalist Christianity. Independent fundamental Baptists are the people who thought Al Mohler was a compromising liberal during the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention during the 1980s and ’90s.
Dewayne Walker, Mount Olivet’s pastor, is an instructor for Independent Baptist Online College, which is “unapologetically fundamental, Baptist, unaccredited and King James only.”
He started Mount Olivet Baptist Church in 1992. His IBOC profile says the church offers bus routes, a Patch the Pirate Club, a Christian school, a nursing home ministry and addictions ministry.
People commenting online have claimed the church has been doing violent skits like this during VBS since the 1990s. One person claiming to be a former member of Mount Olivet said they remember as a child when the church would have men in military garb dragging in the devil to shoot and kill him while the children chanted, “U-G-L-Y! You ain’t got no alibi! You ugly!”
The church’s response
Due to the firestorm of response to their assassination cosplay, Walker released a video statement.
“I’m quite frankly befuddled,” Walker said. “The misinformation out there is sad. And I guess it’s a part of what this generation has become. … It’s so odd to me, after 32 years of doing this, now this comes up.”
“It was nothing more than a small part of our vacation Bible school,” he continued. “We have characters every year that represent good and right and God. And we have characters that represent evil, and wrong, and that which should be avoided. We, every year, through skits and songs and games and just a lot of fun, we make church a fun place, a happy place, a place where we hate sin, but we love the sinner, a place where we exalt Jesus and we hate the Devil.”
The group of soldiers are known as the “Commandos for Christ” who use “the Gospel Gun.”
Just as the online commenters have claimed, Walker confirmed the person being “assassinated” was supposed to represent the Devil. “The clip you saw was simply killing the Devil,” he explained. “If I could kill the Devil every day and raise him up and kill him again, I’d do it.”
He said the group of soldiers are known as the “Commandos for Christ” who use “the Gospel Gun.”
While he says the skit wasn’t intended to encourage murdering non-Christians, he admitted it was meant to be a picture of the ultimate reality: “There’s such a thing as spiritual warfare, a battle going on behind the scenes that we can’t see with physical eyes. We’re painting a real picture to kids visibly what’s going on invisibly.”
As is often the case when conservatives try to explain something offensive they said or did, Walker blamed critics for taking things out of context. He said, “If you had been here, you would’ve saw the building up to that point, that boy they had it comin’ to ’em.’”
Fundamentalist violence becoming mainstream
Most people who watch the video will consider it an extreme form of fundamentalist glorification of justice as violent retribution. And when they find out it’s coming from the world of KJV-only independent Baptists, it’s easy to conclude they’re a fringe group. But nothing about the theology they’re pointing to is fringe.
Most mainstream white evangelicals today believe the Devil is the enemy and Christians are fighting a spiritual warfare against evil. In their worldview, the Democrats are the Devil’s puppets. In his video response, Walker specifically names the government as one of the contexts for today’s spiritual warfare.
This is the mindset the New Apostolic Reformation tapped into as they fueled the January 6 insurrection.
A growing network of worship leaders are identifying as an army and waging worship as a weapon of spiritual warfare.
And unfortunately, worship long has been used as a way for white evangelicals to raise up child soldiers. In my upcoming book, Weapons of Worship: How the Songs of Evangelicalism Form the Soundtrack of Extremism, I have an entire chapter dedicated to this theme in children’s contexts like Sunday school, vacation Bible school and the after-school care programs that Christian nationalists are attempting to push in public schools.
“Worship long has been used as a way for white evangelicals to raise up child soldiers.”
“1-2-3. The Devil’s after me,” one song says.
The solution is to enlist in God’s army as child soldiers. “I’m in the Lord’s army!” the popular kids song declares.
At the independent Baptist churches I grew up in, we sang a “Mexican” version of the song that mentioned eating cheesy tacos, riding slow donkeys and wearing sombreros. An “African” verse mentioned going on elephant rides and shooting rhinos. An “Indian” verse whispered about scalping the enemy. And a “Maori” verse talked about paddling in a wake, eating kumari and throwing spears at the great Moa. Each verse climaxed with violence.
In her book Singing the Congregation, Baylor University professor Monique Ingalls talks about how the “Jesus in the City” parades she studied enlisted children as worship warriors, dressed kids in camouflage,and sang the lyrics, “We’re taking territory, fighting unseen enemies.”
And as Catherine McNiel remembers in her book Fearing Bravely, the children’s songs she sang growing up in church were filled with lyrics “gleefully announcing” people dropping dead. She said the songs celebrated “choosing the deadliest weapons” and “playfully incorporated hand motions and ended with a giddy pronouncement of death.”
One example includes a children’s song about David and Goliath. The children rejoice: “Whizz, bang went the rock on his head. Whizz, bang, boom, fell down, he’s dead. Whack, whack, sword cut off his head.”
Fighting invisible enemies? Giddy pronouncements of death? Why are kids singing about decapitation?
This is the theology not merely of the independent Baptists in Kentucky, but of mainstream white evangelicalism today.
Moral clarity
Pastors like Walker decry the “moral decay” of the nation and claim anyone who rejects their inerrant Bible has lost their moral compass. But atheists tend to have far more moral clarity around these stories than the defenders of VBS assassination cosplay ever will have.
As Hemant Mehta of “Friendly Atheist” wrote: “Baptist churches like this one routinely tell children that LGBTQ people are sinners. And doctors who perform abortions are sinners. And people who vote for Democrats are sinners. What’s the line between murdering Satan-In-Human-Form and committing real acts of violence against whoever your pastor tells you is evil?”
“Just imagine if a drag queen reading a book at a library staged a scene like this to destroy an avatar of ‘bigotry,’ while children in the room (and their parents!) cheered it all on,” Mehta said.
And that’s precisely the problem here. Walker may claim he doesn’t intend for kids to take up arms and shoot their neighbors. But he doesn’t seem to realize that what you celebrate becomes easier to imitate.
It doesn’t seem to cross his mind to wonder how young children might be influenced when they grow up chanting, “Take him out! Blow him up!” to the sight of soldiers shooting up a convulsing body wearing a hoodie on the church stage.
“I don’t remember this scene in the Gospels,” Mehta wrote. “So much for Jesus being the Prince of Peace.”
Rick Pidcock
Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and is the author of a forthcoming book, Weapons of Worship: How the Songs of Evangelicalism Form the Soundtrack of Extremism. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.