Former Tea Party leader's journey to becoming a Democrat started when she blew the whistle on Teen Mania

When a longtime Tea Party activist helped upend Christofascist youth ministry Teen Mania, it started her on a path that eventually led her to shake off her conservative roots.

Cindy Mallette watching herself on “Shiny Happy People” (image courtesy Mallette’s Twitter)

Two years ago, Amazon Prime Video released a docuseries that represented one of the deepest dives into the religious right in recent memory. “Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets” represented the most extensive excavation to date into America’s most infamous babymakers, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar. Among other things, it examined the retrograde belief system that also made them America’s most infamous unfit parents.

In July, Amazon Prime served up another season of “Shiny Happy People.” This series, subtitled “A Teenage Holy War,” focused on an outfit that for a time was one of the most influential youth ministries in the country, Teen Mania. Under the leadership of Ron and Katie Luce, the charismatic/Pentecostal oriented Teen Mania became a fixture in the evangelical world. At its height from the 1990s to early 2000s, its “Acquire the Fire” rallies attracted tens of thousands of kids.

Then, almost as fast as it rose, it fell. In 2015, Teen Mania shut down under the weight of massive financial woes. By the time it filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy that December, it listed assets of -$5.2 million, and was over $2.1 million in debt. Its revenues crested in 2006 at $35 million and declined every year afterward.

On the surface, it seemed that Teen Mania was dragged down over Luce’s increasing willingness to turn the kids touched by his ministry into foot soldiers for the religious right. According to “A Teenage Holy War,” Luce had become a member of the Arlington Group, a secretive group of prominent religious right organizations. It was also around that time that he launched Battle Cry, a campaign to recruit evangelical kids for social conservative causes. Those rallies received unflattering portrayals in separate investigations by MSNBC and CNN.

But a bigger factor undoubtedly was the unearthing of a litany of financial irregularities. Many of them were unearthed by its own communications director, veteran Tea Party activist Cindy Mallette. She had been brought in to help Teen Mania weather a torrent of criticism by former members over its theology and practices, most of which predated its overtly political turn in the early part of the new millennium. But she caught Luce in a blatant lie about just how bad things were getting for Teen Mania. She unearthed the true extent of Teen Mania’s woes, hastening its collapse. As it turned out, it was the start of a major shift for Mallette—which eventually led her to cast off her conservative roots and become a Democrat.

I first ran into Mallette in 2022, when she happened to like one of my posts on Twitter. Her bio on her Twitter profile jumped out at me—a former Tea Party leader who was now a radical lefty Christian Dem. Quite the leap, to put it mildly. She detailed it in a 2018 op-ed for Vox, a month after that year’s Democratic tsunami.

Mallette and I are both college-trained journalists—me, the University of North Carolina, her, the University of North Texas. However, even though she is five years younger than me, our backgrounds were so different that it might as well have been 50 years. I grew up in Charlotte as a typical middle-class big-city Black kid. Early on, like most Black North Carolinians of my generation, I identified the Republican Party with men like Jesse Helms. Learning how the GOP had forsaken its antislavery roots—and worse, thrown its doors open to segregationist Democrats—had a profound effect on me. I also learned to identify the GOP as the party that served the interests of the rich and powerful. By Bill Clinton’s first run in 1992, my loyalties were baked in. At the same time, though, I learned the value of sitting and talking with others who disagreed with you. It may seem quaint in this hyperpolarized era, but it’s really the only way to get anything done.

Mallette, on the other hand, grew up in rural East Texas, an area that had all but completed its transition from Solid South Democratic to rock-ribbed conservative Republicanism. Some counties in the area where she grew up, near Tyler, haven’t supported a Democrat for president since Harry Truman, though conservative Democrats held a decent number of state and local offices well into the 1990s. Her father was part of the Jesus Movement of the 1960s, the proving ground for many of today’s religious right leaders.

Like other Generation X and Xennial evangelicals, Mallette was taught early on to believe that Democrats were evil baby killers who wanted to snuff out our religious freedom. It led her to absorb all manner of scurrilous conspiracy theories floating around about Democrats during Bill Clinton’s era. For instance, in her first journal entry, written around the time she was 13 years old, Mallette expressed fears that Clinton had already begun persecuting Christians. It led her to mature into, as she once told me, a young—and brunette—version of veteran conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly. While most Democrats of our generation saw Schlafly as America’s original loathsome right-wing granny, she was a heroine in the circles where Mallette moved.

By 2009, while I was coming into my own at Daily Kos, Mallette was leading Tea Party rallies. Her worldview centered around “limited government, low taxes, and Christian values at all levels of society” as the cornerstones of “freedom and opportunity”—and she saw Barack Obama as a threat to our foundational values. She worked for Americans for Prosperity as a field organizer in her adopted hometown of Austin.

This was the experience she took to Teen Mania in 2012 as communications director. She described her experiences in Episode 3 of “A Teenage Holy War.” She’d briefly told me about time there not long after we met, but this was the first time I’d heard her describe it in detail. Mallette arrived at a rough time for Teen Mania. Four years earlier, Mica Marley Ringo, a graduate of Teen Mania’s internship program, the Honor Academy, launched a blog called “Recovering Alumni” which detailed stomach-churning anecdotes about life in the Honor Academy. As Ringo put it, a lot of what happened there was “over the top, over the line abusive”—shooting kids with paintball guns, locking people in confined spaces, the lot.

Many of them were left with permanent mental and physical scars. Ringo hoped to get Dave Hasz, the operating head of the Honor Academy, to address it privately, only to get blown off. She and others took their story to the press. Mallette was brought in to help Teen Mania weather the ensuing criticism.

In her interview for “Shiny Happy People,” Mallette said she saw working for Teen Mania as a continuation of what she’d been doing for the last half-decade as a Tea Party activist— “to speak boldly and to live boldly for Christ.” She initially saw Recovering Alumni as “an attack from Satan,” and told Luce that she could help them fend off what amounted to “persecution.”

To that end, Mallette crafted a detailed “crisis communication plan” to respond to Recovering Alumni’s claims, centered around a litany of positive testimonies from Honor Academy graduates, pastors, and politicians. She also had people carpet-bomb review sites with positive testimonies. It didn’t work; by 2012, if you searched for Teen Mania on Google, Recovering Alumni was one of the very first sites that popped up. Eventually, a number of parents balked at sending their kids to the Honor Academy after reading Recovering Alumni.

The beginning of the end came in 2014, when Luce announced Teen Mania was moving its headquarters from Garden Valley, Texas—not far from Mallette’s hometown—to Dallas. Luce claimed it was part of an effort to streamline operations and be closer to a major airport. To that end, Luce claimed he was giving the Garden Valley campus back to the bank.

Mallette subsequently told me that Luce announced this plan at a staff meeting. However, not long after she issued the press release announcing the move to Dallas, Teen Mania’s finance director showed her a bank statement that showed the Garden Valley campus was actually in foreclosure. According to Mallette, the campus had once been owned by the ministry of Christian singer Keith Green, and his family had donated it to Teen Mania. According to Mallette, Luce had taken out a mortgage on the property during Teen Mania’s headier days. In a harbinger of things to come, Teen Mania had already taken such a severe financial hit that not long after Mallette arrived, it had to choose between making mortgage payments and meeting payroll. Luce opted to meet payroll—one of several times, as it turned out, that he merely kicked the can down the road.

By 2014, Teen Mania was so far behind in mortgage payments on the Garden Valley campus that the bank had finally lost patience with Luce. The bank statement was the first indication Mallette had of the extent of Teen Mania’s woes. Although Mallette was a line-drawing conservative, she believed in truth and integrity. She was very upset that she had blasted out a press release that she now knew was false, and feared her reputation would be in jeopardy if the truth came out. She begged Luce to tell the truth, but he flatly refused.

Soon afterward, at a meeting to discuss Recovering Alumni, Mallette mentioned seeing a post in which an Honor Academy student passed out from exhaustion, only to have his leader think he was possessed, Rather than get the student medical attention, the “leader” tried to cast a demon out of him. Mallette thought this was too ludicrous to be true, but when she asked if it really happened, the others in the room responded with blank stares before changing the subject. According to Mallette, it was at that moment that the scales started falling off. She realized that story was probably true—and other stories on that blog were true as well.

The final straw for Mallette came when she saw that Luce was essentially stealing money from youth groups and prospective missionaries. By this time, Acquire the Fire events were being canceled left and right. Youth groups had booked trips to those gatherings, and never got refunded when they were canceled. As well, kids were raising money to be missionaries under the umbrella of Teen Mania’s mission arm, Global Expeditions. However, those mission trips were getting canceled as well, and the kids never saw a penny of the money they’d raised. Mallette subsequently told me that Luce was skimming off the money for Acquire the Fire trips and Global Expeditions missions, essentially turning Teen Mania into a Ponzi scheme. It wasn’t the first time he’d feathered his own nest; he’d won a marathon and used the money to redo his office despite squalid conditions at the Honor Academy.

The news that Luce was essentially stealing from kids was too much for Mallette to bear. Working with a number of people inside and outside the ministry, she gathered a tranche of evidence of Teen Mania’s financial woes and deceit. She later told me that a lot of people were willing to help, since Luce was not well-liked in the office. She had a friend at World magazine, the evangelical version of Time and Newsweek, and took the story to him. She was fired soon afterward, but was vindicated the following year when Teen Mania closed up shop.

Granted, Teen Mania was already in a death spiral due to the combined weight of Recovering Alumni’s efforts and the devastating investigations from MSNBC and CNN. With social media coming into its own by this time, it was only a matter of when, not if, Teen Mania would fold. After all, many kids and parents weee balking at attending even before the news of Luce’s deceit came to light. As any student of history knows, when an army can’t replenish its troops, it’s done. But it’s no coincidence that it collapsed altogether within a year of Mallette blowing the whistle. Once she went to World, there was no way to spin this as an attempt to tear down the kingdom.

As it turned out, this was the start of a shift in Mallette’s outlook on life. She told me that for a time after leaving Teen Mania, she had to go on public assistance. Like most right-leaning evangelicals of our generation, her image of people on welfare was of the “welfare queens” who were frequently attacked by Ronald Reagan. However, she now realized that most people on welfare simply need help to make ends meet. It reminds me of something Peter Jennings said about welfare; it’s not really a handout, but “a hand up.”

Soon after that, she read the Bible from cover to cover in one year—and it completely upended her outlook on “good, godly living.” She’d grown up believing it meant “hetorsexual marriage, abstaining from vices, obeying the law, and not being a financial ‘drain’ on society.” But it now became clear to her that God really cares about “how those of us with power, privilege and means” treat those in need. Partly because of this, she recoiled in disgust at Trump and wouldn’t even consider voting for him. She denounced Trump’s “Muslim ban,” and even organized a winter clothing drive for Iraqi refugees. It led her family, who to a (wo)man are still ardent Republicans, to call her “a social justice warrior.” They were also suspicious when she began questioning the legitimacy of young-earth creationism.

Although Mallette was a never-Trumper, her outlook was still not too far removed from evangelicals who, then as now, had MAGA hats firmly glued to their heads. She still believed Democrats were evil at bottom. For her whole life up to that point, she had believed it was unthinkable for someone to be a Democrat and a Christian. She once told me that she’d once run into a number of churchgoing Blacks who were ardent Democrats and remembered thinking they were misguided at best. Had we met around 2014, she probably would have said the same about me.

But that changed when she started driving for ridesharing companies and ran into people who turned her worldview upside down. For instance, a devoutly Christian gay couple cried in Mallette’s car over being shut out of family holiday gatherings. Their relatives believed the old shibboleth that gays are out to “recruit” kids into their lifestyle. Mallette also met a Planned Parenthood counselor who had numerous clients who felt there was no way out other than abortion. While they feared burning in hell, the financial stress was more than they could handle. She also ran into a number of immigrants who worked long, hard hours for mere pennies and yet still sent money back home.

Mallette now realizes that for most of her life, she had felt “the weight of fear” of being judged, and also felt fear that people weren’t going to heaven because their “immoral behavior” was keeping them from God. She now realizes that the opposite is true, that “fear separates people from God.” Ultimately, that realization caused what was left of her Republican upbringing to melt away. In 2018, she changed her registration to Democratic. That election was the first time she’d voted for a Democrat at any level, ever; she’d voted third-party for president in 2016.

Something else Mallette told me during our many chats over the years explains the religious right’s mentality all too well. She told me that she also realizes that right-wing evangelicals care more about “purity of belief rather than purity of faith.” It’s why they are willing, for instance, to “elect the devil himself if he promises to end abortion.”

Suddenly, a lot of what we’ve seen from the religious right over the years makes sense. For instance, James Dobson of Focus on the Family rose to be one of the most influential voices in the right-wing evangelical world even though he has essentially been bragging about animal cruelty for almost as long as I’ve been alive. Snark, you say? Well, he begins one of his seminal books, The Strong-Willed Child, with an account of him taking a belt to his dog.

This book was published in 1978, around the time I was born. The account of Dobson beating his dog has remained unchanged through five editions, most recently in 2017. Never mind that there is ample evidence of a link between cruelty to animals and cruelty to people.

I’d wondered how Dobson could get away with this for so long. But hearing Mallette explain the evangelical mentality gets to at least part of the answer. Rank-and-file evangelicals are wired to accept all manner of outrageous conduct just as long as you check the right boxes on the issues dear to their hearts.

Suddenly, the religious right’s otherworldly loyalty to Trump makes more sense. If right-wing evangelicals have been programmed to overlook what any reasonable person would consider to be animal cruelty, it’s not all that surprising to see how they have been convinced to bow and pray to the orange god that Dobson and other so-called moral guardians helped make. I’m reminded of a billboard I saw not too far from the North Carolina-South Carolina line ahead of the 2020 election. It said simply, “Democrats. Support. Abortion. Republicans. Oppose. Abortion. Vote Republican in 2020.” So even after Trump tried to strongarm a foreign country into joining a politically-motivated investigation into Joe Biden, even after he utterly mishandled COVID, all that mattered was abortion. You can’t make this up.

I’m also reminded of my introduction to evangelicalism in its most unacceptable form. As many of my longtime followers know, I was chewed up and spit out by a hypercharismatic campus ministry in my freshman year at Carolina. Even when I told them that their church had once been part and parcel of Maranatha Campus Ministries, a notorious “campus cult” from the 1970s and 1980s, they didn’t care. All that mattered to them was that people were being saved through this ministry. Never mind that their so-called pastor, Ron Lewis, had been lying to them almost from day one. They not only condoned Lewis’s deceit, but were willing to be complicit in it.

Contrast this with how Mallette reacted when she found out Teen Mania was, as they say in Australia, on the nose—and yet wasn’t willing to come clean about it. She refused to go along with it. When she first told me about this two years ago, I remembered how flabbergasted I was when my friends at Carolina had no problem with Lewis’s deceit. Mallette reacted exactly how I thought my friends at Carolina would have reacted. In a world that seemingly sees others around them as potential notches in their Bibles rather than actual people, it looks like Mallette was an outlier—and a massive one at that.

Ultimately, it appears that Mallette’s integrity, as well as the inquisitive nature that we journalists have, led her to drive the final nail into Teen Mania’s coffin. It also ultimately led her to do something she previously thought was unthinkable—walk away not only from the movement she helped build, but from the GOP altogether.