Jesus Camp
C4 Tues 6 May 2008; rpt More4 Tues 27 May 2008 10pm
Kids on Fire is a summer camp where American children are taught to become Christian soldiers in God's army – to lay down their lives for religion and pray for George W Bush. Sam Jordison reports.
‘Muslims train their children from the time they’re five years old,’ says Becky Fischer, director of a Pentecostal Christian children’s summer camp in the USA. ‘I want to see young people as radically committed to Jesus Christ as they are to Islam. I want to see them laying down their lives for the Gospel.’
The Oscar nominated documentary Jesus Camp provides an insight into the US evangelical Christian community that will shock many viewers in the UK. Becky Fischer hopes it will have ‘extreme liberals … quaking in their boots.’
Extreme tactics
Becky Fischer is a member of the influential US Pentecostal group, Harvest International Ministries (or HIM, for short). She believes that she and Christians are fighting ‘a war’ against liberalism, secular society, abortion, Islam and any number of ‘anti-Christian’ targets. And because it’s war, she believes that they have to employ extreme tactics to win: namely, the dedication of an entire generation of US children to her religious crusade, since children ‘are so usable in Christianity,’ she says.
The serious training for ‘God’s army’ takes place at Fischer’s annual summer camp in unsuitably named Devil’s Lake, North Dakota but, as the filmmakers show, for many of the children taken to the camp, indoctrination begins at home. Like almost two million others in the USA, many of the parents of these kids believe that the US public school system is too liberal and too secular, so they teach them themselves.
There are unsettling sequences in the film. Nine-year-olds are told that global warming is ‘not really going to hurt us’ because the average annual temperature has ‘only gone up 0.6 degrees’. A young girl is seen fretting in her bedroom because, when she dances to her ‘Christian heavy metal rock and roll’, she sometimes dances ‘for the flesh’ rather than for Jesus.
Technological fix
When the camp begins, though, things start to get truly disturbing and somewhat bizarre. Just before the 170 children arrive, Fischer blesses the camp’s main conference room: ‘Father we pray over the electrical system. We speak over the Power Point projectors and say Devil we know what you like to do in these meetings… In Jesus’ name you should go out…’
Then she starts to intone in a strange language, incomprehensible and untranslatable. She is speaking in tongues – a practice common in the Pentecostal community, where it is believed to be a way of talking directly to God in a form of ancient Aramaic that only He (and not even the speaker) can understand. Hundreds of thousands of Americans do the same thing every week, but to outsiders, the practice looks more like magic than anything connected to a supposedly educational establishment. When the children are later made to follow the same practice, many of them weeping and in a trance-like state, it makes uncomfortable viewing.
Welcoming the president
‘You don’t have to feel sorry for our kids, they’re gittin’ it,’ says Fischer, but many of the children seem deeply disturbed. They are old before their time, but strangely pliable and ignorant too, mindlessly repeating the chants set up by the camp elders and believing everything they are told as – well – gospel truth.
It is worrying that they accept the teaching so blithely, since much of it seems so clearly wrong. Sometimes this is funny, like when they are told not to read Harry Potter because ‘warlocks are enemies of God’. Sometimes it is infuriating, as when they are given inaccurate models of foetuses with fully formed features and facial expressions and are told that’s what embryos look like when women go for abortions. Sometimes, it is terrifying, particularly in scenes where they are made to raise their hands to a cardboard cut out of US President George W Bush.
Unsurprisingly, scenes like these caused huge controversy when the film was first released in America. Many critics claimed that the children were being made to pray to George Bush. This particular objection is not strictly valid, since the raising of hands is a common form of healing rather than worship for Pentecostals, but the fact remains that the children are being led towards the Republican Party. In her defence, Fischer has later claimed that the pro-Republican propaganda is a matter of ‘faith’ not politics. However, that only brings to mind the similarly fanatical political faith of National Socialism, and many will see the camp as containing disturbing parallels to the Hitler Youth.
Americans split
Not everyone will be worried by the film, however, which, aside from a few interjections from a more liberal radio announcer, leaves viewers to form their own opinions. It’s a measure of how divided America is that on its release it was used by both the liberal and the evangelical community to support their worldview. Fischer herself has endorsed the project and used it to advertise her ministry, even though the revelations within it outraged so many others that she was forced to close down her summer camp.
One thing is certain, though, no matter how diverse the reactions to the film might be, it’s compelling and eye-opening viewing.
The author
Sam Jordison is the author of, among other books, The Joy Of Sects. He is an online feature writer for More4, an occasional goatherd and lives in Oxford with his girlfriend, the novelist Eloise Millar.
