Jesus Camp

I saw this eye-opening film last night at a screening put on by People for the American Way. Filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady visited a summer camp for evangelicals in North Dakota, where Pastor Becky Fisher indoctrinates children as young as 6 to be warriors for God. Early in the film Fisher is asked why she is so focused on bringing children to Christ. She bascially says that children are grat because once you teach a kid at an early age they retain the information for life, and they are generally easily led. The movie goes on to show this through.

The kids are there to get attention from the adults, to share a spot in the limelight, because they're told this is fun and necessary and right by their parents and their elders and they want to please. The parents and elders, on the other hand, are carrying out a clear political agenda, dedicated to returning America to godliness. There is an amazing scene where the children are asked to pray in front of a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush. There's another where the children are instructed to take a hammer and break ceramic cups with the word "government" written on them.

Interestingly, the filmmakers mentioned in a Q and A after the screening that the participants in the film screened it and were very happy with it, planning to use it as a tool to show their project to the nation. Because the filmmakers take a fairly even hand, allowing the subjects to speak openly without editorializing, I can imagine this is true. But it displays such a profound ignorance, because the film is little more than ritualized child abuse. These kids are plucked out of school, taught a perverted kind of authoritarian religious doctrine at home, sent to camps to pray and speak in tongues in displays that come right out of Islamic madrassahs, put on shows where they where camouflage and march in lockstep for Christ, hear speeches of a specific political bent, get sent to Washington to anti-abortion rallies, and are basically completely isolated from the real world. There's a heartbreakingly poignant scene with one child, maybe 10, who starts crying about how it's so hard to keep the faith and how he doesn't really believe in the literal word of the Bible but he wants to please his family. The boy literally breaks down crying and everybody else in the room is weirded out by him, astonished that anyone would even question the dogma fed to them all this time.

It's a very powerful story and you should look for it in your area, because we don't often hear about the footsoldiers in this Christianist movement in the traditional media. There are 80 million evangelicals in this country, and it's important to understand what at least some of them (not all) are doing.