The Other Side of Jesus Camp – 1 of 30

So the German and I just watched Jesus Camp. And it’s really, fucking creepy. Also rather sadly hilarious, in that it pictures Pastor Ted Haggart telling his audience congregation that homosexuality is a sin, just a few months before we discovered that he really is an enormous hypocrite (the movie was released before the scandal). But mostly, it’s just damned creepy.

When I was a kid, I lived in two (different) fundamentalist communities. When I was really young, I lived in Salt Lake City, which is more dilute than it was 25-30 years ago – it was great fun *cough* for what the Mormons rather comically term “gentiles” at the time. As in “get beat up at school” and “have local teenagers flip the bird at your 7-year-old form on the way to school” kind of fun. We had our housed egged once or twice. It was the best display of wholesome family values ever.

(At least it gives me a good story to get the missionaries to back off with.)

Then we moved. Salvation, at last!

Well, not quite. We moved to rural South Carolina. And there, in the first week of class, my parents found out I was having to pray before lunch in the local public school. And my father, having grown up persecuted for not being a Mormon, was not about to let the local Southern Baptists make his daughter pray. He came to the school and mentioned “separation of church and state.” Let me tell you, those are words they just love down there, right along with “the Civil War is over – you lost.” I got to sit down while everyone else prayed in class after that, and as you might imagine, this made me wildly popular with both teachers and students. I distinctly recall, in 5th grade, Michael Grishaw telling a friend and I that his mother said we worshipped the devil because we didn’t want to take copies of the New Testament the Gideons had kindly brought in bulk to reading class.

Fine, upstanding members of society, these fundamentalist evangelical kids. Always giving the other kids a nice, Christian welcome. I wonder if their parents ever think, “hrm, I wonder… maybe telling my kids that these kids are scum and deserve scorn is not a way to win souls for Jesus.” Nah, wait, I don’t wonder. Clearly they don’t.

It was such a relief to move to Milwaukee, I tell you. It was the first time in my life where the question “What are you?” was reserved for charades rather than used as a question about what religion you were. Since then, I’ve managed to avoid insular communities where every day is like Jesus Camp, but movies like this are a reminder that it’s all still out there. It’s nothing new. And it sends chills up my spine.

And dear God, these poor kids. When they finally get to the age where they have to figure out who they are, it’s going to be a rough ride.

N.B.: As part of my 30 in 30 rules, I said I’d admit to whatever I was listening to when I wrote the posts. Right now, it’s nothing but the laptop fan.