The compassionate god of love so evident in the Sermon on the Mount is nowhere to be found in the documentary JESUS CAMP. It’s a frank, troubling, and cautionary examination of how fundamentalist Christianity closes the minds of its children while indoctrinating them in a belief system of intolerance, bigotry, and hate, all in the name of saving souls, theirs and the unbelievers around them. Kids from toddlers to teens are regularly preached to there with language more suited to warfare than redemption, and railed against for all their sins, warned against Satan’s ever present and deeply personal machinations, and threatened with hellfire and damnation for making the wrong choice. That many are seen bursting into tears is no surprise. That such emotional abuse is allowed by loving parents, however, is. Can this really be what Jesus meant by the word “suffer” when he said “Suffer the little children to come unto me”?
Children’s pastor Reverend Becky Fisher is the focus, and the framework is one summer session at the Kids on Fire Summer Camp sited, in an irony apparently lost on everyone, on the shores of Devil’s Lake that she runs. It’s also the summer of arch-conservative Samuel Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court, nicely tying in the reason for the camp itself, including a talk by a pro-life activist to the kids that reduces them, once again, to tears. Fisher is effusive, bombastic, and much addicted to hairspray when getting ready to preach. At one point, she shows off the props she uses to help her in getting the message across, including Barbie and Ken re-imagined as Adam and Eve in tailored fig leaves to a life-sized scythe, one hopes made of plastic, of which she is very proud. As Air America host Mike Papantonio interviews her over the phone during his radio show, he elicits from her the statement that democracy is a good thing, but equal protection will be what ultimately brings it down. In another bit of irony that is lost on her, she paraphrases Stalin when claiming that if she can get to these kids before they are 7, she has them for life. Even Papantonio, a seasoned journalist, shakes his head in disbelief at what he has just heard and the absolute conviction with which it was stated.
He has come smack up against the perfection of willful ignorance that refuses to be confused by facts, a phenomenon that puts these kids, mostly home-schooled, into the bubble of unreality and conformity, insulated from diversity of any kind and, most especially, even a whiff of critical thinking skills. Recalling that the daily rhetoric of their lives is of damnation, rife with the imagery of blood and warfare, there is an awful inevitability when two of the kids that the film has followed, thoroughly likeable on the surface, Rachael and Levi, are seen discussing the merits of martyrdom and pronouncing the concept “cool”. Couple that with Levi earlier in the film saying that being around unbelievers makes him uncomfortable because there’s something not quite right about them. To be absolutely clear, at no point do any of the adults speak of picking up weapons and inflicting physical harm, but to young minds using the logic of children and brought up in a conditions of absolutism and fear, it doesn’t take the gift of prophecy to see the writing on the wall.
The film unfolds without narration, letting everyone speak for themselves with only a few, well-chosen captions to give context to the proceedings. The subjects, adults and kids, reveal themselves with a proselytizing zeal that is generally just short of wild-eyed fanaticism. What is most unnerving and infuriating isn’t the limited worldview colored by a narrow and selective interpretation of scripture, it’s that these fundamentalists from toddlers on up have confused a genuine impulse to do good in the world and to love their fellow human beings with imposing their view of morality on them and damning them to Hell if they disagree. It’s a morality that involves mixing church and state, the state being George Bush, who, in one scene straight from the theater of the absurd of the damned, is presented at the altar as live-sized cardboard cutout to a group of kids who are then asked to pray over him. That those six and under might have a bit of trouble working out that the graven image is not intended as representation of divinity is a perfectly valid concern. As is the concern that, perhaps on some level, that’s exactly what is intended.
The film does not dwell on the line where the sincere believer, such as Reverend Becky, who has so much drive and zeal that she has nothing else in her life personally or professionally, gives way to the cynical manipulations of politicians using religion for ends that are strictly secular, but the all too brief clips of Ted Haggard, the leader of a mega-church in Colorado Springs with regular weekly access to President Bush, make a powerful statement as he comes across as far as less saintly than he might have wished to the un-indoctrinated eye.
H.L. Menken once famously described the Puritans, the people who founded this country and whose cultural heirs we are, as people who are worried that someone, somewhere was having a good time. The fundamentalists depicted in JESUS CAMP differ from that definition in a vitally important way. They want to define what a good time should be, and then, using an army indoctrinated from childhood as to what that is, to force everyone, everywhere to fall into line with them. Echoes of the Weimar Republic politely ignoring the rise of fascism come to mind. And you know what they say about a people who forget the past.
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