Jesus Camp

I don't intend to be a movie reviewer, I just like to comment on things I find interesting or that need to be talked about more. So, The Carvinator and I love watching documentaries. In fact, in trying to brainstorm about things we have in common besides our children…watching documentaries was 50% of our list. Eh, it works for us, anyway.

So Jesus Camp. I had actually heard a lot about this documentary before I put it on my Netflix queue. After watching it, though, I find it's not as "bad" as I had been warned. The film was not bad in the least, in fact, it was very well-done and unbiasedly presented. I mean "bad" in the sense that the subject it covered was supposed to be horrifying or something. I'm coming from a Catholic background with a family steeped in the DFL tradition, so I guess the Fundamentalist Right-Wing ideas presented in the film could have been shocking to me. I found, though, that there wasn't a lot I haven't been exposed to before, and there wasn't much "shock factor" there. On the one hand, part of me says that okay, I guess as a Christian anything that brings people to Christ can't be bad…

But…

There were some things that made me cringe and/or made me want to stick my head under a rock, however. For illustrative purposes:

1. Speaking in tongues. Now, if the Holy Spirit really is coming upon these people and making them speak gibberish, then fine, great. Who am I to deny them the Holy Spirit? But I'm skeptical. I mean, they are Fundamentalists—they should know the Bible and its history inside and out. But what no one seems to get is that at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit is given to the disciples (Acts 2:1-13, but especially 2:4) it actually says they "spoke in other tongues," and in almost every Bible's footnote, it translates it as "speaking in other languages," which is stated outright again in 2:11. The outcome is that they were able to speak to each other in each other's native language without having previously known other languages. The point is not that they spoke gibberish because they were overcome with the Holy Spirit, the point is that He enabled them to communicate what they were experiencing with each other. I don't really get how this translates into what they are doing when they speak in tongues, but maybe I'm missing something

2. It illustrates perfectly how a few can ruin an image for many. Seriously, some of the parents just seemed plain dumb. Especially the homeschooling parents, which is a hot button for me. These people "prove" that homeschooling parents are out to shelter and indoctrinate their children in hating Darwin, idolizing our Founding Fathers ("reclaiming America for Christ"), and "proving" that global warming is a myth. I feel bad for those kids because they are just regurgitating everything the parents say, without being able to see both sides of something and make informed decisions. Which comes directly from the fact that the parents seem to have not ever figured things out for their own selves. I doubt any one of them would have read Origin of the Species in preparation for teaching Darwinism is wrong. I doubt they have ever looked into how our founding fathers were actually Deists and not Christian (in our sense of the word) or tried to find out exactly what a 1°F temperature change in the last 100 years means.

3. I know there's more, but I'm getting tired. The biggest thing that made me sad about this film was the burden being put on the children. I think they are much too young to have this pressure put on them that they are the generation who must "Reclaim America for Christ." They are told that the fate of spirituality is being set square on their little 9-year-old shoulders. I'm thinking they are so busy on their mission as adult-like God Warriors that there's not a whole lot of room left for childhood wonder.

Matthew 18:2-4 "And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, "Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven."