There's one scene that gets me. At a family summer camp in North Dakota, boys are huddled in their bunks during a thunderstorm and making ghoul faces over the beams of their flashlights. They're giggling and goofing around in that wonderful, completely un-self-conscious kid way, all big teeth and freckles, and one of them starts to tell a ghost story. It's not a particularly good one, and much is lost in the boy's feverish rote recitation, but suddenly someone's dad throws open the door to the room and stands there in his slice of light and says, in a nerdy, pedantic dad-voice, "Boys, I'm not particularly fond of ghost stories, OK? Do you think those honor God? Hmmm? Now I need everyone to get in their beds, 'kay?"
And then the whole rest of the movie, these same kids are subjected to daily prayers invoking the blood of Jesus to come down and cover their church seats and their dirty, dirty hands and wash everything clean. On the first day of camp, the preacher, a big fat woman who looks like she's full of good intentions, brings all the kids to tears by sternly warning them that God doesn't want phonies in his army, meaning kids who think about swear words and aren't ready to give up their lives for Jesus. Then a man shows up to pass out red plastic bracelets and teeny tiny plastic fetuses and tell the children, "one third of your friends would have been here with you today, but they couldn't make it because their mothers killed them in their wombs." Later, the kids put together a solemn dance routine with rhythm sticks to Christian rock. The boys are wearing fatigues and war paint; the girls are wearing black leotards with black lightning bolts painted on their faces and glitter in their hair. None of them smile.
I'm all for a parent's right to raise their children within whatever belief system they choose, but this struck me as a uniquely ironic way to introduce a child to Christian principles.
I was raised in a secular household. By that I mean we were never regular attendees at a church, and for the most part, we didn't talk openly or often about God. Both of my parents were raised with religion, but for whatever reason, they didn't baptize my brother and I-- we both chose this later in life, well into our twenties, at different times and for different reasons. When I was a kid, I saw my parents' choice to abstain from church membership as yet another way they were conspiring to keep me separate from my wealthier, church-attending classmates.
After watching this movie, I think their choice makes a lot more sense to me. Not that my folks would have gone in for terrorizing me with their politics, but Jesus Christ, whatever happened to letting a kid explore the world and form his own impressions? What happened to modeling compassion, charity, and tolerance just because that's the way you should treat people? I think what bothered me most of all was the insistent co-opting of war metaphors. What place does a battlefield ideology have in a kid's life, where the stakes of someone agreeing with your own particular world view are life and death?
Over and over, the various adult figures in charge of the ministry in the movie talk in tones of awe about the children's faith. What I couldn't help thinking, seeing interviews with each of these kids where they break down in tears and take their air in gulps in between phrases that sound like chants, like recitations more than individual thoughts, is that they look scared to death, like they've been told one whopper of a ghost story and no one ever turned on the lights.
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