Actor Stephen Baldwin Takes Christian Indoctrination to the Xtreme

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Actor Stephen Baldwin has a message for the millennial generation: Jesus is cool, Jesus is rad, Jesus will kick your butt, Jesus will help you kick the butts of secular liberals. Yet while Baldwin seeks to be the hip new face of evangelicalism, promoting the Jesus of skateboarders and cool kids, beneath his radical chic is the ideology of the old men behind the Cold War-era John Birch Society and Christian Crusade.

Together with Christian activist and radio host Kevin McCullough, Baldwin launched a youth-targeted for-profit Christian media company, Xtreme Media, LLC, and the radio program Xtreme Radio with Stephen Baldwin and Kevin McCullough. The aim of Xtreme Media, according to Baldwin, is to create "a content reality we want to utilize to fire up the conservative movement to stand up and push back louder and more ferociously."

Addressing a 2008 religious-right conference, the annual Values Voter Summit sponsored by FRC Action, Baldwin -- the baby of the Baldwin brothers acting family first put on the Hollywood map by brother Alec -- explained that he uses "extreme sports" to recruit young evangelicals "because I believe the way to ensure a better America in the future is make more Christians." At religious right conferences across the nation, Baldwin struts before young and not-so-young audiences, deploying his uber-masculine Christianity as a rebuke to the Hollywood liberals he claims are ruining America.

"We are the hands of the Lord Jesus in this realm," he told the Values Voters. "And I don't know about you -- I'm not tryin' to be dramatic -- I'm puttin' some boxing gloves on mine."

Packaging Paranoia for a New Generation

While Baldwin is the better-known face of Xtreme Media, Kevin McCullough is the brains behind the enterprise, as Baldwin readily admits. Clad in jeans, a backwards baseball cap and sunglasses, McCullough strutted through the XPAC lounge at last month's Conservative Political Action Conference, where a few dozen young people mingled in conversational groupings of sofas and arm chairs. Others played video games -- Guitar Hero, XBox and Wii were all available -- or took advantage of the "blazing fast" wi-fi. The CPAC crowd included a sizable contingent of younger activists, thanks to the heavily subsidized $25 admission fee for college students (compared to $175 for everybody else).

McCullough, who Baldwin says inspired him to become a Christian, is a celebrity in his own right within his own sphere. A prolific writer and sought-after speaker on the Christian right and Tea Party circuits, his radio show, now co-hosted with Baldwin, is syndicated by Fox News Radio, the American Family Association and Christian media giant Salem Communications, which also owns Townhall.com, where McCullough blogs. (Just before CPAC, Salem acquired HotAir.com from Michelle Malkin.) McCullough is also a Fox News contributor, and was a keynote speaker at the 9/12 Tea Party march on Washington. He is the author of two books, MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking and The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be: Taking a Stand for True Masculinity.

In the XPAC lounge -- a made-over meeting room in Washington, D.C.'s Marriott Wardman-Park hotel, where CPAC took place -- McCullough told me that he and Baldwin hatched the idea for XPAC "on the back of a napkin" at last year's CPAC. "[In] about five minutes," he said, "we drew up the whole concept." The concept being a place for CPAC attendees under 30 to get "plugged in and have some fun." And, apparently, to get some "worldview" education in the process.

McCullough's outreach to millennials at CPAC demonstrates how Christian right education organizations, particularly XPAC cosponsor Summit Ministries, have created generations of warriors against the "worldviews" of communism, socialism and secular humanism that compete, they say, against a "biblical Christian worldview." Summit offers conferences to high school and college students "to counteract the alarming trend" of Christian youth "adopting the false humanistic philosophies of our day," as described in its promotional DVD distributed in the XPAC lounge. McCullough, who speaks at Summit's youth-focused conferences, personally solicited Summit's sponsorship of the XPAC lounge, according to John Stonestreet, Summit's executive director.