Reasonable Dissent

Jesus Camp and Science Prejudice

I recently watched the documentary Jesus Camp again. First of all, if you haven’t seen this, I would recommend renting it some time. It is really a well done movie, and I’ve seen it at most of the movie rental stores that I’ve been to, even in relatively religious midwest areas. I actually picked up a copy to own at one Blockbuster because the price to own it was only a couple of dollars more than renting.

Anyway, just watching this movie floods my mind with topics that all deserve their own post, so I want to single out one aspect that I feel is the most crushing issue that faces children in this country. As a little bit of background, in case you haven’t seen it, the movie documents some evangelical Christian families during a few seminars. The focus of this aspect of evangelical Christianity is how they indoctrinate their children. There are, in my opinion, graphic scenes of children who are, at most, ten years old looking up through streaming tears and babbling nonsense words to “let the holy spirit come out”. Other scenes depict these poor children reduced to sobbing heaps on the floor because they’ve just spent the last hour hearing about what terrible, horrid people they have been. They’re told to cleanse themselves to be worthy of being in God’s army. One of the children that the movie follows more than the others tells us how he was “saved” when he was five years old. Yes, at five years old, he was of sound mind and judgement, enough to devote his life to preaching the good word. I could go on.

But that isn’t the worst of what happens. A statistic quoted in the movie states that of the home-schooled children in the United States, 75% of them are evangelical Christians. This is where the damage is done. I think a couple of quotes will do more justice to the problem than I can:

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Mother: How would you like to go to a school where a teacher says, “Creationism is stupid, and you’re stupid if you believe it”

Son: I wouldn’t like that.

Mother: How about if you went to a school where a teacher says, “Evolution is stupid, and you’re stupid if you believe that.”

Son: I probably wouldn’t mind that, haha…

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Mother: And how much has the global temperature risen?

Son: About 0.6 degrees

Mother: That’s not very much is it? Doesn’t sound like a very big problem, does it?

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Preacher: You are not just some blob of protoplasm… Whatever that is, heh heh

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These children are taught to mock science and dismiss it before even learning what it’s supposed to mean. The last example makes my blood boil just thinking about it. This man immediately gave these kids the idea that it was stupid to believe that anything that sounds as weird as “protoplasm” could have any bearing on reality. They also watched a movie on creationism where a guy said something like, “We’re supposed to have come from a pile of goo?”. And he looks disgustedly at some green slime that is all over his hands. This tactic is despicable, and it works amazingly well for young children. There is immediately a mob-mentality that sucks up all of the kids learning this crap, because children love to ridicule. Now, instead of sharing ideas with other children, teachers or learning from books, they can immediately band together and laugh at the mockery that’s been made of very real scientific results.

I grew up in 12 years of Catholic school. My fiance spent her childhood in camps and youthgroups just like this, and none of it is insurmountable. I strongly believe that nobody is so indoctrinated that they cannot come out of it. But don’t for a second tell me that these preachers don’t know what they are doing to these kids. They are building up walls to free thought, and it will take years for these kids to undo it. That’s if they are exposed to anything but their evangelical Christian community. This community is nearly 25% of the American population, so you had better believe that they get heard. One particular evangelist in this movie was reported to have weekly meetings with the president. This agenda is a political powerhouse. I can be disgusted that states are pushing intelligent design into public school curriculums, but I honestly can’t be that surprised.

Tags: Christianity, Jesus Camp, science