By JIM WHITE, TELEGRAPH
Added: Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:00:00 UTC

Thanks to Ian Griffiths for the link. I know we've posted about 'Jesus Camp' before, but this review is from today. Is there a new release of it in the UK?

Reposted from:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/11/05/do0504.xml

As the nights lengthen and the mist swirls, as the first frost crinkles and the bones begin to chill, we are entering the season of scary movies. The sides of buses right now are decorated with pictures of severed heads and disgorged entrails by way of promotion for the latest offering of slasher porn.

But never mind Saw, Hostel or Texas Teenaged Chainsaw Killer Prom Queens (I may have got that one wrong) — if you want to see a really terrifying film this autumn, one that will leave you gasping for air at its underlying horror, then catch a new documentary called Jesus Camp.

Like all scary movies, this starts innocently enough. We see half a dozen kids arrive at an evangelical Christian summer gathering somewhere in the American Midwest. A sweet-natured, polite, well-scrubbed bunch, they look eager and ready for a month of fun and games.

Instead, we watch in gathering alarm as they are subjected to weeks of systematic brainwashing, turning them away from harmless youthful activities like snogging each other behind the bike shed and transforming them into foot soldiers of fundamentalism.

That is the only word: what is being taught on this camp could not be more fundamentalist if it were taking place in Finsbury Park and featured a mad mullah with a hook instead of a right hand. And the fact is that this particular camp is by no means unusual; in certain parts of the US it is a mainstream activity to send your children off for the summer to be reprogrammed into religious warriors.

We really have no idea in this country what is happening in the heartland of our greatest ally.

No inkling of quite how much the world is, inexorably, being polarised between orthodoxies. Just because the word "Jesus" is in the title, don't for a moment be confused into thinking that what is being reported by this film is the kind of gentle, fuzzy, socks-and-sandals equivocation we are used to from the C of E.

There is no love here. No turning to your neighbour and exchanging a sign of peace. This is not Christianity as we know it. What we see in the movie is children in their hundreds being indoctrinated by nutcases, encouraged to hate and fear and ready themselves for ultimate war.

And if that is not worrying enough, wait till the sequence in which a slick, clever, politically ambitious preacher tells his 2,500-strong congregation of impressionable young people that they should have no use for democracy since all the law they need is in the Bible.

No point voting on gay rights when the Bible says it's bad; no point voting on abortion when the Bible says it is murder. The Bible, not democracy, has all the answers. This is sharia law by another name. And whatever your view on these issues, it is scary.

The preacher is interviewed after his sermon and cheerily boasts that at the next presidential election, his take on the world will be supported by sufficient numbers to swing the decision. He suggests, in other words, that there will be hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of Americans like him voting for the proposition that voting is ultimately pointless.

The absurdity of the concept that the Bible — rather than a common consensus reached by democratic accountability — should be our only legal guide is evident from the moment you try to apply it. Say, for instance, football were run by biblical edict. What happens if a volatile centre forward reacts to an aggressive tackle by chinning his opponent? What does the referee do?

In the technical areas, the two team managers concerned brandish their bibles, each certain what the next move should be.

In one a tall, cerebral French boss insists the offender should be sent off: he quotes from Luke 6:27-31 that, if assaulted, a player should turn the other cheek.

Alongside him his red-faced Glaswegian rival says this is nonsense. The player should be allowed to retaliate. After all, as it says in Exodus 21:23-27, an eye for an eye.

The man in charge is obliged to refer the issue to the official in the stand, the so-called liturgical ref who, after several months of doctrinal study, comes to the conclusion that it doesn't much matter as a predilection for fast cars, fast money and dodgy facial hair means the player in question will be red-carded to hellfire soon enough.

Frighteningly, no such absurdity seems to occur to those featured in this film.

Instead, they continue preaching an ever-more popular doctrine of hate, fear and war-mongering. In fact, after seeing it, after discovering what's happening in America's Jesus camps, you head off home thinking that maybe now might not be a bad time to start stockpiling that tinned food.

TAGGED: ABUSE, CHILDREN, MOVIES, RELIGION