1 post tagged “jesus camp”

    I am not the first to point out the link between religious zealotry and acts of war and terror.  Here we are waging wars to allegedly defend & protect our lifestyles from the grip & oppression of 'terror'.  Meanwhile, in this country, things on the religious front are starting to get a little bit scary.  With ideas like intelligent design threatening to infest our public schools & the line between politics & religion getting blurrier by the day, a Jesus themed park should come as no surprise.  The Holy Land Experience, in Orlando, claims to be "a living, biblical museum that takes you 7000 miles away and 2000 years back in time to the land of the Bible" and attempts to recreate the Jerusalem experience.

     If a "Holy" Theme park doesn't set off your fanaticism alarm, than perhaps the information put forth in the documentary, Jesus Camp, will.  The film "follows a group of young children to Pastor Becky Fisher's 'Kids on Fire Summer Camp', where kids are taught to become dedicated Christian soldiers in God's army and are schooled in how to take back America for Christ."   In other words, we watch as these children are indoctrinated with ‘gods message’ and manipulated into executing ‘his’ political agenda.
    Over the course of the last 6 years of W. Bush’s presidency I have winced every time he has said “one nation under God” and mentioned Jesus in his speeches. My fears, mounting daily, that the freedoms set in motion by the founders of this country are being re-written by the President, & his puppeteers; the religious right.  At one point in the film, Becky Fisher, the Pentecostal children’s minister, says that George W. Bush has “brought credibility to the Christian faith”, moments later she insists “you’ve got to stand up and take back the land” from the liberals & sinners.
    The documentary presents the viewer with alarming statistics, such as:

• 43% of Evangelicals become Born-Again before the age of 13      

• 75% of the home-schooled kids in the US are Evangelicals

(being taught intelligent design, and to disregard science and ‘notions’ like global warming)

• 25% of Americans declare themselves as Evangelicals (Nearly 80 million people)

    The frightening thing about that last number is its ability to grow.  Ted Haggard, head of the New Life Church, the largest Evangelical church in the country, proudly claims that another Evangelical church opens every two days in America.  This man, the film points out, “meets with President Bush every Monday.”  He says to the camera, with conviction,  “if the Evangelicals vote, they determine the election.” The US government, I grew up believing, was designed to balance power.  Each state was entrusted with it’s own government in order be the voice for it’s people & ensure democracy.  It was designed to be it’s own watchdog.  But it fails when the people it represents begin to quote from the bible in political battles, rather than the Constitution.  It is a sure sign that the government we built is failing when outside organizations need to be monitoring one faction or another.  The People for the American Way is a group designed to protect & sustain the democracy “that is now threatened by the influence of the radical right and it’s allies who have risen to positions of political power.”
    However, the immediate political repercussions of this kind of religious righteousness & zealotry make up only half of my concern.  When children are being held to their young promises “to take back America for Christ” and participate, in the name of god, in marches that will over turn abortion; when the children themselves say that they feel they are being “trained to be warriors” and talk with reverence of being a martyr & dying for a cause, it is clear indication that we will soon face a generation that won’t respond to logic or reason and won’t hesitate to go to extremes in the name of Jesus and of their cause.  It is this similarity to the terrorists we are hunting, that I fear; that in a matter of decades, the country to which my immigrant parents came to seek refuge from political oppression, will be run by people indistinguishable from street-bombers and blind to justice.
    Until very recently I felt that, as long as I stayed in the bigger cities, the tyranny of the religious right wouldn’t affect me.  My civil liberties would be protected by the influx of culture and the Constitution.  I believed that here in the ‘real world’ those wacky fundamentalists couldn’t hurt me.  But those days are gone.  They are now in the media, the government, the Supreme Court, The White House; 'they' are the (American) ‘real world’.  So, while I'm not too keen on the fire & brimstone stuff, and I am not afraid of God's wrath, I am FUCKING terrified of the strength of "god's army."  And, Jesus Christ, I’ve had enough!