This Pentecost weekend I saw the documentary about Becky Fischer's camp for shaping young evangelicals into the righteous army who will take back America for Christ. I don't think I was bothered so much by the religious aspects which, to be frank, were not that different from some of the indoctrination I received in Catholic schools and retreats as a kid--it's the politcs that should worry us. Becky Fischer could very well be a nun of the old school, had she been raised in the Catholic system. That being said, I never felt harmed by by my upbringing and education, and learned to distinguish what was nonsense from what had the ring of truth, and I have no regrets or resentment about it. I'd prefer it any day to the textureless, amorphous culture of narcissism that my high school age son is growing up in. He has a far more difficult set of issues to deal with than I ever did. My guess/hope is that the three kids profiled in the film, particularly Rachael, will be fine. They have too much spirit to be crushed by the system--what doesn't kill you, etc.
I look at the kind of religiosity depicted in "Jesus Camp" as the product of a subculture that has taken tried-and-true methods to acculturate its young into the tribal lore, and as with any acculturation process, parts of it can be pretty crude. And as in the army, the process is designed to insure that the least intelligent and least gifted get banged into minimally acceptable shape while usually rewarding the gifted with a more sophisticated and complex understanding of how things work.
That's at least the way it used to work with the Catholics. So as Catholics we had our boot camp drill sergeants like Becky Fischer, but we were also exposed to people who were genuinely good and wise, people who inspired you not just because every thought came out of the manual, but because they absorbed the manual and transcended it. They saw the limitations, had a sense of irony about them, but understood their necessity in order to maintain a sense of group cohesiveness and identity. I suppose if I hadn't been lucky enough to meet such good and wise people, I would have been far more resentful of my upbringing. But I see the crude stuff as the least significant element in my education.
I don't know a lot about the evangelical world, but I imagine its a lot like the Catholic world--at least how it used to be when it was a world. Such a world when it functions as something apart from the mainstream culture, usually gets stereotyped by its worst representatives rather than its best, and that's the way it will always appear to those outside of it. I didn't find any of the adults in this film particularly attractive or admirable, but it would be unfair to think that a creepy guy like Ted Haggard, or James Dobson, or Jerry Falwell, or Pat Robertson are as good as it gets within this world. But unfortunately they are its public face. And they are pretty loathsome from everything I've observed about them, and I wish that their repudiation by the saner, wiser, evangelicals got more publicity. Maybe that will come in time as the emerging church movement more fully emerges to replace the corrupt Christianist structure that now seems so dominant. But in the meanwhile we live in an age where the worst are full of passionate intensity, and the best, well, they're kind of in shocked confusion seeing what's happening while having no effective program to counter it.
I'd think of Becky Fischer as just an interesting American character, if it were not for her political agenda. I can understand why someone like her would freak secular types out, but I didn't see anything about her that would make me think she's not a basically decent person. Sure, she's got power issues. And she's delusional about the righteousness of her cause. But there's nothing particularly evil about that. A lot of people are--just think about some bosses you've had.
The disappointing thing about Becky and the other adults was that they represent a kind of religiosity that is all will and no wisdom or discernment. They don't appear to have transcended the manual, nor do they seem capable of any sense of irony about its limitations. And so their kind of religion is stunted in it's being so scripted and simplistic. And when you combine that with a toxic combination of willfulness and lack of discernment, it doesn't matter how righteous the cause in theory, it leads to a destructive end.
Their project is no different in its social psycholgoical essence than that of the Revolutionary Guard in China during its cultural revolution or the sans-culottes during the French Revolution. Nothing has more potential for destruction than an undiscriminating, rigid, political idealism, no matter what its underlying justifying myth, no matter whether it leans right or leans left, or whether it is religious or secular. The Becky Fischers of the world are not frightening because of their religion. The ideational superstructure is far less significant than the fear, resentment, and willfulness from which her politicized theology has arisen and which impassions it. And secularists, and all the rest of us, are quite justified in being at least a little freaked out by it.