Almost a year ago, I wrote about the movie, Jesus Camp. The film must have taken the proverbial "slow boat" to get to S'pore because Milady and I only got our first chance to watch the movie at the theater this past weekend.
The movie was more or less everything I expected. The scenes with Ted Haggard were unintentionally amusing due to his hypocrisy, revealed by his scandal last year involving the gay prostitute. I could sympathize somewhat with the main characters; theologically, there are some similarities between what these evangelical Christians believe and what we Muslims believe.
I came away from the movie somewhat saddened, though; here is a group of people who have, IMO, debased a religion, saddling it with nationalism, militarism, sedition against their own government (the cup breaking scene), but also praising the President to the point where it bordered on idol worship. (I thought I saw a scene where the kids were bowing down to the cardboard image of President Bush; perhaps that was in the trailers. I expected to see it in the movie but didn't.) And then, of course, there is the politicizing of the children, the adults using them as pawns with regard to issues they don't necessarily understand.
Becky Fisher, the woman whom the movie revolves around, loves her American culture yet realizes that things there aren't right. And while there are many problems in American culture, I have to wonder if most of her discomfort was brought upon by herself.
The past two weeks or so, I've been reading Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy, subtitled, "The peril and politics of radical religion, oil, and borrowed money in the 21st century." (When he refers to "radical religion," he's not talking about Islam but protestant Christianity in the mold of the Southern Baptist Convention, and other fundamentalist and evangelical Christian churches.) The book is a very sobering indictment of American politics and culture, suggesting that a convergence of three problems that face the U.S. (and that the Republican party have embraced) may very well lead to America's "fall from grace," a fall which is largely avoidable but that Americans have set themselves up for.
The following passages came from the last chapter of the book.
One can only imagine the private conversations - the blunt economic language - in the conference rooms of Asian financiers and exporters, each group as confident of its contingent's coming hour as executives in Manhattan and Chicago circa 1919 were of America's: "Why don't the Americans take care of their industry and invest in it? Why do they dither over primitive and antiscientific religion? Why are their children so far behind our own students? Why can't they cut back on their foolish and unaffordable overconsumption of oil? How far can we - should we - support them?" p. 360
To policy makers elsewhere in the world, Washington's espousals of these priorities in the American South is one thing; pushing them globally is something else. These gender and sex-related postures have gone hand in hand with opposing the Kyoto Protocol, embracing a concept of unilateral preemptive war, declining to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, and appointing as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations a man such as John Bolton, whose previous attacks on the world body - some admittedly justified - bore a more polished resemblance to the name calling in the Left Behind series.
Realistically, these events and circumstances hardly encourage foreign central bankers, diplomats, or political leaders to buy and hold U.S. Treasury bonds, support American energy profligacy, join U.S. ventures in the Middle East, or believe that young people unskilled in mathematics, addled by credit cards, and weaned on so-called intelligent design instead of evolution will somehow retool American science for another generation of world industrial leadership. Dismissing global opinion is easy in Idaho or suburban Houston, but in the world beyond the GOP core constituencies, such attitude keep exacting a price. pp. 370-1
First, put in one column the earlier estimates as to when China might or might not start to catch up with and even pass the United States in gross domestic product [various estimates mentioned in the book place China passing the U.S. by the years 2034-2040]. Next to that sequence put a middle-range forecast for several decades - the 2010s, probably - when global oil production outside OPEC might peak. In the next imaginary column, visualize two related trend lines - the cost of oil per barrel and the annual expense of the growing amount of oil and gas the United States will have to import. The adjacent column should list the prospects over the next fifteen years for the U.S. current account deficit - and one column beyond that, the reader can mentally jot down the unfolding prospects for the U.S. dollar during the same stressful and high-powered time frame.
Beyond these, of course, it will also matter what happens to Social Security, Medicare, the federal budget deficit, and the various tabulations of U.S. public, private, and total credit-market debt. The 2010s could easily be a very troubled decade, and the 2020s after them. Many cautionary time frames are converging just at a time when the political leadership of the United States - much like that of past leading economic world powers in their later days - is not in the most competent hands. p. 382
There's a rather funny/scary account of a Polish teenager who spent some time in North Carolina as a foreign exchange student. The problem was, the host family was an extreme Christian fundamentalist family. How extreme? Check out these passages:
"...every Monday my host family would gather around the kitchen table to talk about sex. My host parents hadn't had sex for the last 17 years because -- so they told me -- they were devoting their lives to God. They also wanted to know whether I drank alcohol. I admitted that I liked beer and wine. They told me I had the devil in my heart.
"My host parents treated me like a five-year-old. They gave me lollipops. They woke me every Sunday morning at 6:15 a.m., saying 'Michael, it's time to go to church.' I hated that sentence. When I didn't want to go to church one morning, because I had hardly slept, they didn't allow me to have any coffee.
"One day I was talking to my host parents about my mother, who is separated from my father. They were appalled -- my mother's heart was just as possessed by the devil as mine, they exclaimed. God wanted her to stay with her husband, they said.
"...the religious zealots finally brought up a subject which had clearly been on their minds for a long time: They wanted me to help them set up a Fundamentalist Baptist church in my home country of Poland. It was God's will, they said. They tried to slip the topic casually into conversation, but it really shocked me -- I realized that was the only reason they had welcomed me into their family. They had already started construction work in Krakow -- I was to help them with translations and with spreading their faith via the media."
I've come across the trailer for a new documentary, Jesus Camp, from a link at Daily Kos, and have looked up some more information about the film. The film has not yet been released, although it comes out in the US in 8 days (15 September). The trailer portrays in part how American Evangelical Christian fanaticism is mixing religion with militarism and right-wing politics, a brainwashing of American kids that anyone who isn't Christian (and, more likely, anyone who doesn't believe in their type of Christianity) must be defeated.
The following excerpt from a review at IMDB describes the film fairly well:
"Jesus Camp" revolves around a pentecostal minister who hosts a summer camp for children in North Dakota, and the sectarian Christian conservative families who send their children to this camp. Directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady wisely chose to avoid the polemical tone of most politically-motivated films, and instead opt to present a mostly unfiltered glimpse of this odd subculture. But through carefully selected images and the use of talk radio commentary as a framing device, they construct a subtle, yet damning narrative about a religious movement that isolates its children from mainstream culture, indoctrinates them into right-wing causes, and uses them as political props.
At Jesus Camp, the daily activities include standard camp fare such as spelunking and go-karts, but they also include speaking in tongues and smashing coffee mugs emblazoned with the word "government". Children learn that "science doesn't prove anything," and learn to consider themselves part of an Army of God. They are compelled to pledge that they will fight to end abortion. They are even pushed into publicly confessing their impure thoughts, and many of them cry and wail charismatically.
The camp director explains that she admires the way Islamic cultures raise children so devoted they will risk their lives for their faith. When we ultimately see several of the campers being placed by their parents on the steps of the Capitol with tape over their mouths, protesting abortion, the real purpose of this camp is driven home.
But the most touching scenes are the ones where the children are alone, and we see the ways that this indoctrination creeps into the most innocent elements of childhood. 11 year old Tori loves dancing to Christian rock, but frets that it's not always easy to dance for God instead of "dancing for the flesh." On an outing to the bowling alley, 9 year old Rachael feels compelled to walk up to strangers and awkwardly evangelize to them, without being prompted. A roomful of boys telling ghost stories after dark are interrupted by an adult who warns them about stories that don't glorify God.
No doubt some viewers will accuse the filmmakers of the dreaded liberal bias. But this is not a work of fiction, nor is it slanted reporting. These are real people and real events, captured on film. If the evangelical movement comes off badly in this film, the people on screen have no one but themselves to blame.
I've linked to a Youtube presentation of the trailer below (run time: 2:09). Some interesting quotations that I transcribed from the trailer:
"I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag..." (A boy and girl reciting a "pledge.")
"There are two kinds of people in the world: people who love Jesus and people who don't." (An adult woman.)
"I really feel that we're a key generation to Jesus coming back." (Levi O'Brien, a young boy attending the camp.)
"How many of you want to be those who would give up their lives for Jesus?" (An adult man; perhaps the most disturbing part of the trailer as you see perfectly innocent and naive children - especially the blond girl - who jump up and down, waving their hands, and not understanding in the slightest what the man is really asking of them.)
"We're being trained to be God's army." (A second young boy.)
"This means war! This means war! Are you a part of it or not?" (Pastor Becky Fisher, who runs the "Kids on Fire" summer camp, shouting.)
One of the two videos has an interview with Becky Fisher. It's rather sad and typical (and wrong) to see how she views political conflicts in the Middle East (Palestine in particular) as dying "for the cause of Islam." She hopes to instill a fanaticism among the children to the point where they're willing to kill themselves "for the gospel":
"Where should we be putting in our efforts? Where should we be putting our focus? I'll tell you where our enemies are putting it, they're putting it on the kids. They're going into the schools. You go into Palestine, and I can take you to some websites that will absolutely shake you to your foundations and show you photographs of where they're taking their kids to camps like we take our kids to Bible camps, and they're putting hand grenades in their hands, they're teaching them how to put on bomb belts, they're teaching them how to use rifles, they're teaching how to use machine guns; it's no wonder, with that kind of intense training that [garbled], that those young people are ready to kill themselves for the cause of Islam.
"I want to see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as the young people are to the cause of Islam. I want to see them as radically laying down their lives for the gospel as, as they are, uh, over in, in Pakistan, in, in Isreal, and, and Palestine, and all those different places. You know, because we have... excuse me, but we have the truth!"
Milady and I had a good laugh over the following Daily Show clip on the apocalypse (run time: 5:15):
This clip made me wonder, the American news industry has been stupid for a long time, sure, but just how completely retarded has it gotten since I left home? Then again, when I read about what's going on at the White House...
Asked what "types of people" have offered the White House advice on the Middle East, [White House Press Secretary Tony] Snow said, "Again, at this point, I really don't want to do it." Asked if "religious leaders" have been part of these meetings, Snow said, "Again, I'm just not going to go any further."
Why all the secrecy? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that White House recently invited a Christian apocalyptic fiction writer to chat about biblical prophecy.
The Washington Post's Dan Froomkin spoke with Joel C. Rosenberg — who recently told CNN that the rapture may be near and it'd be a good idea for people to start taking care of unfinished business — who explained that he was invited last year to "speak to a 'couple dozen' White House aides in the Old Executive Office Building — and has stayed in touch with several of them since."
And who is Joel Rosenberg?
Rosenberg — like Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, the authors of the phenomenally popular "Left Behind" series — writes fiction inspired by biblical prophecy about the apocalypse. The consistent theme is that certain current events presage the end times, the Rapture, and the return of Jesus Christ. Rosenberg's particular pitch to journalists is that his books come true. ...
Rosenberg told Froomkin that a White House staffer contacted him and said, "A lot of people over here [in the White House] are reading your novels, and they're intrigued that these things keep on happening…. Your novels keep foreshadowing actual coming events…. And so we're curious, how are you doing it? What's the secret? Why don't you come over and walk us through the story behind these novels?"
So, why should I be surprised that this particular administration has an interest in the apocalypse? After all, there's little understanding at the very top about certain critical distinctions. You know, like the evil "Moozlems" are all the same, right?
Former Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith is claiming President George W. Bush was unaware that there were two major sects of Islam just two months before the President ordered troops to invade Iraq...
Galbraith, the son of the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith reported that he and an (unnamed) Iraqi American "...spent some time explaining to Bush that there are two different sects in Islam — to which the President allegedly responded, 'I thought the Iraqis were Muslims!'"
Now I know where the news industry's getting their cue from.
I found this little gem on a Baptist website, Ethics Daily, through the political blog Crooks & Liars. It makes me wonder, who is really a Christian? Men like Parham who appear to follow the majority of Jesus' (pbuh) teachings as presented in the New Testament ... or men like Pat Robertson and Franklin Graham, who appear to be "cafeteria Christians," picking and choosing what teachings they want to follow and what they want to ignore.
Robert Parham of the Baptist Center for Ethics said neither Robertson nor Graham "show much familiarity with the largest bulk of Jesus' moral teachings which are found in the Sermon on the Mount."
"If they would hear and follow Jesus' teachings, then they would halt their anti-Islamic diatribes," Parham said. "The Sermon on the Mount is crystal clear about peacemaking, loving enemies, doing good to others, striving after God’s kingdom and practicing discernment. Regrettably, fundamentalist Christians ignore the Sermon on the Mount, because it is not a manual for war-making, which is at the heart of Christian crusades."
...
The Nashville, Tennessee-based BCE [Baptist Center for Ethics], Parham said, has a clear record of "stepping up often to speak against demonizing Muslims and to speak for following the Sermon on the Mount."
Parham said the Christian community "needs to hear the deep concern and perception within the Islamic and Arab communities about American Christianity" not doing enough to counter inflammatory comments that degrade people of other faiths.
"Perhaps American Christian clergy should speak this Sunday about another way, away from Robertson and Graham toward the Sermon on the Mount," Parham suggested. "Perhaps clergy should include in their pastoral prayer a reminder of the kind of talk about which the Apostle James wrote—civil, controlled, constructive speech."
