Saturday, September 30, 2006

Got Jesus Camp?

A few days ago, Fiend mentioned Jesus Camp, a documentary about an evangelical Christian "education" camp for children in which 9 and 10 year olds are drilled for their future role in "spiritual warfare", including, reportedly, praying to a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush. (Wikipedia entry here; official site here but apparently malfunctioning; distributor's site here.) Shortly afterward I heard it mentioned on the radio.

From the New York Times:
“Extreme liberals who look at this should be quaking in their boots,” declares Pastor Becky Fischer with jovial satisfaction in the riveting documentary “Jesus Camp.” Ms. Fischer, an evangelical Christian, helps run Kids on Fire, a summer camp in Devils Lake, N.D., that grooms children to be soldiers in “God’s army.”

A mountainous woman of indefatigable good cheer, Ms. Fischer makes no bones about her expectation that the growing evangelical movement in the United States will one day end the constitutional ban separating church and state. And as the movie explores her highly effective methods of mobilizing God’s army, that expectation seems reasonable.

Ms. Fischer understands full well that the indoctrination of children when they are most impressionable (under 13 and preferably between 7 and 9) with evangelical dogma is the key to the movement’s future growth, and she compares Kids on Fire to militant Palestinian training camps in the Middle East that instill an aggressive Islamist fundamentalism. The term war, as in culture war, is repeatedly invoked to describe the fighting spirit of a movement already embraced by 30 million Americans, mostly in the heartland.
Unfortunately, it looks like it's not being shown in any theaters in Michigan at the moment. The distributor indicates that it will play in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, on October 6. (I also note that it's scheduled to be shown in Grand Rapids in early November. I wonder what kind of reception will await it there?)

Has anyone seem the movie? And can anyone provide any more details or reactions?

(Added note: the user-created list of "liberal-friendly" and "liberal-unfriendly" places that supplied the page about Grand Rapids cited above makes for interesting perusal in its own right.)

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