Never has my faith in having no faith been so reaffirmed as when I was watching Jesus Camp. Jesus Camp is a documentary about evangelical pastor Becky Fischer and her attempt to assemble, via her Christian summer camp, an army of adolescent God warriors, who she hopes will one day take control of the United States, vanquish the non-believers and secularists from the government, return prayer to schools, outlaw abortion, and advance the aims of evangelism.

Here she is talking about how she wants to fight radical Muslim fanaticism with radical Christian fanaticism:

Even scarier than that is when Fischer takes a page from the US military and begins her brainwashing by breaking down the kids and reducing them to tears in a scene that seriously raises the question of whether these children are being mentally abused. Fischer then cleanses the red-eyed, repentant children with a store-bought Nestle® brand bottle of water.

To me, the tragedy in all this is that the parents are depriving their kids of a happy childhood by filling their heads with religious gobbledygook. For example, take Tory, a 10-year-old girl who likes rocking to Christian heavy metal and can bust some mean break dancing. She admits that sometimes she “dances for the flesh,” and “really needs to get over that.” Somehow I don’t think she came to those conclusions on her own.

I saw the film in Hillcrest, the homosexual hamlet of San Diego. The crowd seemed to be a liberal bunch and laughed in terror throughout the screening. At one point though, a line was crossed and a woman in the audience felt the need to speak directly to the screen. This is the scene that pushed her over the edge. Right when the name of this fictional character was brought up, she yelled out, “Don’t you dare!”

Youtube has many clips from the film, but sadly it’s missing one of my favorite moments. Becky Fischer is shown furiously spraying hairspray into her do, which I have to point out here is a hairstyle most favored by women who drive pick-up trucks and could fix a jetski, if you catch my drift. In the next scene she starts her sermon to the kids by asking coquettishly, “Do you like my hair?” She gets an applause break and fishes for further approval, “How ’bout my eyebrows?” I was at a loss when she said this. There was nothing significant about her eyebrows, save for the fact that she had two. Nevertheless, she still received applause. She then waved a hand over her obese body and said, “and all this..” Amazingly, she then segued into a conversation about sin.

Despite the fact that every edit, musical cue and visual metaphor belies the filmmakers’ impartiality, I have to recommend this film. Because the footage they shot is so mind-blowingly scary/funny/scary again, there’s really no way they could have fucked it up.

Let’s give Becky Fischer the last word on this post since she accurately sums up many people’s opinion of her, yet completely fails to understand the reasons why they’d feel that way.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 9th, 2006 at 1:43 pm and is filed under videos, crazy christians. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.