As part of pre-Oscar screening, we saw "Jesus Camp", which is nominated for Best Documentary.
I wasn't as crazed by the film as some were, I imagine. Pentecostals don't frighten me I guess. I'm more or less nonplussed by people crying, speaking in tongues, crying out "Hallelujah!", dancing in the pews, singing "Kick it for Jesus", or pledging their lives publicly, in ways that frighten the Christians that, say, C.S. Lewis wrote to. I don't care if people denounce Harry Potter as a non-hero Warlock (although I do wish that even children can develop the ability to handle such challenges without resorting to merely shutting them out because everyone else in their community says so).
I loved the scene in which the kids are wanting to tell ghost stories - kids are kids. Wasn't that brain mold just a superb teaching idea?
However, for me, what is deeply disturbing are the aspects of false ministry, the linking of political with religious teaching in ways that are deeply misguided. Foremost was the teaching for children that they are a special generation that are meant to recover the American Nation. I found that belief not to be scriptural in the least (ALL generations are 'special' and called similarly). Weighing on these children a burden that they have to stop abortion, say, or they will not have been powerfully faithful is a deeply misguided teaching.
What if abortion doesn't come undone according to the Conservative masterminds systematically taking over the evangelicals with this kind of false ministry? These kids are all going to feel like they failed, that their faith wasn't strong enough, or that the world is all the more evil than even they were told that it was. It may be a terrible reckoning to saddle upon a kid.
Putting up pictures of George Bush in a religious context, yelling out for "righteous judges", and using hammers to smash mugs and symbolically crush out the evil (liberalism?) in America is also deeply misguided theology.
All told, I came away firmly with the belief that what is wrong within the Evangelical movement is squarely with a leadership that has adopted, not the ordinary fundamentalism with which we might be familiar from days past, but a unqiuely new and false ministry, crassly and sinfully geared toward a political agenda that is spiritually misguided to its very core. We are only lucky that it is nonviolent, so far.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Jesus Camp
