A few nights ago I and a bunch of Michigan grad students went to see Jesus Camp, a documentary about a summer camp that trains 9 and 10 year old children, many of them home-schooled, to become good young religious fundamentalists. The subjects of the documentary, with only one exception, were happy about how they were portrayed, and that didn't surprise me. The film wasn't heavy-handed with its view of the events, and the participants are probably the proudest of some of the events that struck me as the most dangerous. (The one exception is disgraced megachurch pastor Ted Haggard, filmed long before his scandal broke. He and the anti-abortion activist who comes to speak to the kids are probably the two creepiest characters in the film.)
Many of the movie's most striking moments involve its central character, children's pastor Becky Fischer, who runs the camp and is open about the fact that she's trying to create a new generation of voters and activists who will increase Christian dominance of our country. She warns the children away from Harry Potter, telling them how in the Old Testament, warlocks would be put to death. There's a scene where an adult leads a bunch of kids in a strange version of the Pledge of Allegiance -- not to the American flag, but to the "Christian Flag". In another scene, churchgoers worship a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush.
To me, the most memorable characters in the movie are the kids. Jesus Camp shows us the beginnings of lots of stories -- the rat-tailed boy whom the camp is grooming for a job as an evangelical leader someday, the 10-year-old girl into Christian heavy metal who talks about how she tries to dance for Jesus and not for "the flesh", and the small boy who tearfully admits in front of everyone that it's hard to believe in God because there isn't any real evidence of his existence. Since the camp only lasts a summer, and the movie ends somewhat abruptly, we really can't get a good idea of how these stories play out. Perhaps they'll make a sequel in twenty years and we'll know the answer.
In the meantime, I'm going to be including the argument from design and the problem of evil in the introductory philosophy classes I teach. The philosophy classroom is a unique place in the world, a place where reason and open discussion have the opportunity to dissolve indoctrination of all kinds. Becky Fischer has made her move, and it's my turn.
Neil Sinhababu's philosophy and politics blog, 2004-2015 ‡ neiladri, at gmail dot com
My other blogs
I've blogged in many different places. Here are some of them:
I'm very proud of War or Car, where I posted a new thing you could buy for the price of the Iraq War everyday, for 121 days. This was during the 2008 elections, and I was glad that the antiwar candidate won. The site got its name because you could buy every American household a Toyota Prius for the $3 trillion price of the war. Or you could buy the Irish their annual beer intake, in Guinness, for a millennium. Or you could buy all the world's pandas their own personal stealth bombers!
Probably my greatest era of internet awesomeness was guestblogging for Ezra Klein long before he achieved his current superstardom at Vox. My posts there are pretty scattered, so they'll be hard to find. My work for Ezra catapulted me into other opportunities like filling in for Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly. After that from 2008 to 2015, my friend Nick Beaudrot and I wrote a blog called Donkeylicious. As the name suggests, it was largely about Democratic politics.
During the 2012 elections, I created a little blog called VoteSeeing that tabulated election predictions and graded predictors on how well they did. The folks at Daily Kos Elections won the prediction contest, with Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight a close second. Shortly afterward, a group of philosophers at a blog called NewAPPS got me to put up a few posts for them.
This post at the Philosophers' Cocoon has more about my job at the National University of Singapore, where I'm a philosophy professor.
3 comments:
I have a cardboard cut out of Russell if you think it will help.
A humble suggestion for your courses: Check out for stuff on the design argument, and for stuff on the problem of evil.
A humble suggestion for your courses: Check out for stuff on the design argument, and for stuff on the problem of evil.
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