Let's Talk about Camp

Jesus Camp, that is.

We watched the first half of this film, an Academy-award-nominated documentary by A&E, last night. And if it hadn't been nearly 11:00, and if I hadn't had to get up to teach this morning, we'd have watched the whole thing. After Melissa and I turned it off, Hillary turned it back on and stayed up to watch the end.

At first, all I could say was wow.

And I'm still not sure exactly what to say, but I suppose that's why I'm sitting down now to write: to figure out what I might have to say about it.

The film is about Kids on Fire, a summer camp for kids run by a lady named Becky Fisher.

And I know what I was thinking before seeing this film: ok, it's a religious camp. Big deal. I twice went to a summer camp as a kid that was run by the church where one of my best friends went. And the camp counselors talked about God a bit, and Jesus, and being saved. But mostly, we played some wicked ping-pong, flirted (ineptly and unsuccessfully) with the girls, and complained about the bad food in the dining hall.

But that's not what Jesus Camp is about.

According to Becky Fisher's comments about the film,

The time people need to be seriously discipled is while they are still children, not when they are teens. If we wait till they are teens, it's too late!

Note the use of disciple as a verb. This camp is about training kids to be devout evangelical Christians, with a great deal of emphasis on controlling the direction of the United States politics. Another observation from Fisher:

You tell them to believe and they just do it.

Fisher readily admits that she wants to work with kids because it's possible to mold their way of thinking in a manner that would be difficult or impossible to do. Barring, she says, some "catastrophic" event in their lives.

She comments that Catholics and Communists both had this idea figures out, and what's striking there is not that she recognizes that both of these ideologies have worked hard to do just what she's doing--to indoctrinate young people--but that she equates Catholicism with Communism.

This points to the larger agenda, I'm afraid: to reclaim America for evangelical Christians.

That use of the word reclaim has always stuck me as interesting. Not all of our country's "founding fathers" were Christian, and if they were Christian, chances are that it wasn't this brand. This group seems to have missed the entire Age of Reason, during which the idea of intelligent design was entirely reconcilable with faith in God. (Deism, anyone?) And they seem to forget that our Puritan New Englanders would have hanged you (or at least banished you to Rhode Island) if you spoke in tongues, behaved erratically, or had the audacity to claim a personal relationship with God.

At this point, I'm not going to explore the ties of groups like this one to many politically influential people.

But I'm left wondering, yet again, about where it is that we're going.