Last night we watched Jesus Camp. It’s been out for a while, but recently I saw this clip on google video and immediately moved it to the top of my netflix queue.
The documentary focuses on the “Kids on Fire School of Ministry” Bible Camp, a summer kids camp for charismatic Evangelicals, run by Becky Fischer in Devil’s Lake, ND. Three pre-teen kids are followed in particular; Levi (a preacher-in-training), Rachel (a completely-indoctrinated loner who likes to hand out tracts to strangers and has already distinguished between “churches that God likes to go to [charismatic] and that He doesn’t like [non-charismatic]“), and Tory (who likes to dance to Christian goth bands but tries to be careful to dance for God, and not because she enjoys it).
This film reminded me of my own upbringing. I grew up in a non-charismatic, very evangelical church: no dancing, no drinking, no gambling, some female members of the church didn’t cut their hair and wore dresses all the time. My dad is a minister; although after we moved to MT he took a circuit-preaching route and did not preach at the local church we went to. I went to three summer camps a year and ended up going to a Christian college. I knew kids who were like the kids in this documentary. Basically the only difference between my upbringing and this film is that we didn’t speak in tongues.
Even though my upbringing was very persistently religious, as a young kid I was always questioning God and faith and religion. This was always frowned upon; I was told that I needed to have faith and once (at a summer camp) I even had a demon “exorcised” from me.
I wonder what has happened to all the kids I knew, that went to those camps along with me. Kids who believed that they were soldiers being trained for a holy war, kids that seemed to have an easier time of believing in the absolute truth of what they were being taught.
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lisak says:
one really good thing came out of all those camps – our friendship!