Not long ago, the intellectual Left realized that there are places in this country where children are encouraged to aggressively defend their religious beliefs. And just as they were getting over their shock at discovering that these “church” things are allowed to exist, along came even more bad news: there are actually summer camps where the exact same things happen. So disturbed were they that two of them – directors Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing – went out and made an expose about it. The film is called Jesus Camp, and it debuts on September 7:
A growing number of Evangelical Christians believe there is a revival underway in America that requires Christian youth to assume leadership roles in advocating the causes of their religious movement. Jesus Camp, directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, directors of the critically acclaimed The Boys of Baraka, follows Levi, Rachael, and Tory to Pastor Becky Fischer’s “Kids on Fire” summer camp in Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, where kids as young as 6 years-old are taught to become dedicated Christian soldiers in “God’s army.” The film follows these children at camp as they hone their “prophetic gifts” and are schooled in how to “take back America for Christ.” The film is a first-ever look into an intense training ground that recruits born-again Christian children to become an active part of America’s political future.
Oh, it’s horrible. Just horrible. If we don’t do something about these camps soon, an entire generation of devoted Christian Americans will be put on the track to becoming an active part of America’s political future. There’s a good chance that one or two might even become lawyers!
Listen, it’s not like we support these things. They actually sound like a kind of crappy thing to do to your kid: “Mommy, how come Janey gets to play in the lake but I have to read about the United Nations and the Beast of Babylon?” But who cares? So two decades from now there’ll be a couple more lawyers trying to overturn the separation of Church and State. It’s not like they’re going to get on the Court – you know that Ted Kennedy will still be alive, and you know that he’ll have himself wheeled to the podium so he can filibuster.
On the other hand, what would be nice is if we could get talented American filmmakers to make audiences aware that the Palestinians have religion-based summer camps too. Like the Christian camps, the Palestinian camps also teach children to be “soldiers in ‘God’s army’”. Unlike the Christian camps, they mean ‘army’ in a very literal way:
“Summer camp, where children traditionally participate in sing-alongs and color wars, has been warped by the Palestinians into a sickening display of hatred and intolerance,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. “We are extremely concerned by these reports, particularly since they detail that some of these camps were funded by UNICEF, an organization that has traditionally sought to improve the welfare of children. Therefore, it is imperative that UNICEF scrutinize the camps it sponsors and immediately withdraw funding from those whose only service is to provide an education in terror.” At the summer camps, children were encouraged to learn how to play a role in terrorist attacks, learn how to shoot guns and were given instruction in how to blow up Israeli buses and settlements. Suicide bombers were also glorified with a number of camp groups being named for them.
We understand why filmmakers aren’t talking about this though – it’s impossible for anyone to track both Palestinian and Christian summer camps. Choices have to be made and resources have to be allocated. And filmmakers seem to have decided that they’re going to make a real difference by exposing the Christian camps. So instead of powerfully conveying how Palestinian children are being taught that their highest goal should be to die in a particularly violent and horrific way, American filmmakers are on the front lines alerting us to the coming tidal wave of over-eager prepubescent Christians. Good thing too, because now we’ll know what’s going on when we see kids going door to door in our neighborhood, asking people to make “donations” so that African children can “eat”.
UPDATE: Oh, this movie is obviously going to be not at all smug or condescending::
“I think they captured the beautiful concepts of what we represent,” [camp director] Fischer told indieWIRE… when asked about a particularly inflammatory scene that involves a life-size standup photo of President George W. Bush and a large American flag in the background – with the crowd raising their hands towards the Bush effigy in prayer – she added, “I didn’t realize how the secular world viewed what we were doing… When we took out [an] image of Bush, it turned political, but to us, it’s not political – it’s Biblical.”
We’re not from that side of the religious aisle so we’re only guessing, but without seeing the movie we’re willing to bet that the camp members were asking God to give President Bush insight and strength. In other words they were not praying to Bush’s cutout as this article, through omission, comes dangerously close to de facto asserting. As opposed to praying to Bush, the campers were almost certainly doing something that (we’re given to understand) is pretty common among Christians: they were praying for him.
But listen, this scene by scene analysis is largely beside the point. Maybe this movie is spectacularly balanced, split right down the middle. Maybe these are two of the very few filmmakers on the planet who, when they say they want to start an open discussion, actually do want to start an open discussion (we’ll ignore how the suggestion that there is something of concern that evangelicals and secularists need discuss already stacks the deck). But let’s play the thought experiment out: maybe these two filmmakers really see a need for public deliberation about religious encroachment into secular life. The question then remains exactly the same: how can a reasonably informed, reasonably logical person look around and pick out American evangelicalism as the most pressing and dangerous theocratic trend?
Rather than being concerned about American evangelicalism, secularists ought to be focusing their energies on opening up discussions about the growing influence of political Islam. Within whole orders of magnitude, there’s simply nothing that’s even close to as great a threat to progressivism. It is a threat both because of its explicit anti-woman and anti-gay commitments (we can hear it now: ‘so are Christians’… hold on) – it’s a threat both because of its explicit anti-woman and anti-gay commitments and because many of its adherents have demonstrated a remarkably low threshold for committing acts of violence when they’re offended by non-Muslims around them. Already in this country, CAIR is regularly making not very veiled threats when it finds the work of certain artists to be offensive.
A brave filmmaker genuinely concerned about creeping (and creepy) theocracy could start a national dialogue about the tactics used to indoctrinate Palestinian children into Islamism. There would be a film about a kind of religious fanaticism that is dangerous in the near-term both in its intents and in its capabilities. A filmmaker who produced something about Islamist brainwashing in Palestinian summer camps would be well-placed to turn the movie into an index to all kinds of local and global reactionary Muslim movements.
The downside is these filmmakers need to be able to make small-talk when they go to their Manhattan cocktail parties. And in that sense, it’s much easier to get everyone laughing and smirking about ‘that one scene’ where ‘those people’ were ‘praying to the cardboard Bush’. And so it goes.
