Shiny happy confrontations
The second season of Shiny Happy People reminds me of my year as a Teen Mania intern—and our efforts to become the standard of holiness for the world.
“My first memory of you,” Farrah said with a half-smile, “is when you told me my shirt didn’t pass the dress code.” I felt the heat rise in my face. The rodeo stadium hosting the barbecue dinner was air-conditioned, but I might as well have been outside in the blazing Texas sun. “You told me my shirt was too short,” she explained, passing a basket of cornbread to Jenna. “You were right.” (Names have been changed to protect people’s privacy.)
“I’m so sorry,” I said, squeezing my paper napkin in my lap. This was our last dinner together at Honor Academy, a 12-month internship program designed to form Christian youth to be “the standard” of holiness for the world. I guess its leaders felt that a quintessentially Texan event—eating charred meat and watching men lasso cows—would be a suitable celebration of our impending graduation from “the most important year” of our lives.
The Honor Academy was run by Teen Mania, an organization, now defunct, that is the subject of season 2 of the Amazon documentary series Shiny Happy People. I arrived with 700 other young adults at its Edenic campus in rural Texas, where we woke at 4:30 a.m. to run laps in the in the Texas humidity, attended classes on how to be world changers, climbed mountains, and cried in each other’s arms at a spiritualized, military-inspired retreat designed to teach us how to control our emotions. The Honor Academy delivered on its promise to push us to our limits, providing a formative experience that we’d each carry into adulthood.
