Sunday, October 05, 2008

Jesus Camp

I went to see Religulous last night. I'll blog a bit about it later. I mentioned to my friend J. this afternoon that I'd gone to see it and he brought up another documentary about religious fundamentalism that he said had really had an impact on him. Jesus Camp lost out to An Inconvenient Truth for the Academy Award in 2006, they say. It's about the "Kids on Fire School of Ministry", which holds summer camps for born again kids to teach them all about taking back America for Jesus Christ. It's probably one of the spookiest things I've seen in a long time. Here's some info on it.

And here's the thing itself:

4 comments:

J said...

Jesus Camp was really scary - I mean really scary. I am admittedly an athiest, and I grew up that way - I've just never really had much exposure to religion, and what I have has really turned me off to it.

Jesus Camp was also filmed here in good ol' Missouri where I live. We can claim Monsanto and Jesus Camp here - we are doing good!

M said...

I've been discussing it with some Christian friends who all seem to agree that the sort of thing that went / goes on there is tantamount to brainwashing and is emotionally / psychologically abusive.

Missouri can't be all that bad if you've managed to come out the way you are. :-)

Unknown said...

Oh man...that movie scared the hell out of me. That part where they're basically worshiping a cardboard cutout of W? That's a good definition of exactly what is wrong with this country. I was on my way out of the Mormon church at the time and that movie really explicated for me a lot of what my struggle was as a religious person. Thank...um...something that I'm done with it all.

M said...

A friend of mine pointed out that if we viewed people in a country deemed repressive doing this to kids, we'd call it brainwashing. Because it's being done in the US, it's called "religious freedom".