Jesus Camp Fundamentalism and its Impact on Children
We are engaged today in a culture war, says the voice of an evangelist among the radio snippets played at the beginning of the film. It is a rather accurate description. But this is not just a culture war, the fundamentalist movement is essentially at war against science and civilization, and it will not rest content till we give up the wicked ways of the modern civilization and go back to the medieval times or the dark ages. (A chapter in Steve Bruces book Fundamentalism is titled Modernity the Great Satan.) We want to reclaim America for Christ, continues the voice but I will argue in this essay that it will not and cannot stop there. To ultimately establish a Christian society in America and all over the world, so that the Word of God can reign supreme on earth, the entire framework of science and reason on which our civilization is based has to be thoroughly undermined. There is no alternative. This is what Becky Fisher, the preacher running the summer camp, calls fixing the world the sick old world as it were.
Fundamentalism is not a wave that has risen just because of favorable political circumstances, i.e., Bush administration. It is not just a wave that will swell and froth for a while and then ebb away. In the short term it may go up or down unsteadily depending upon many social and political factors, but during this whole time it is just incubating to become a strong enough force to eventually take over America and the world. Future generations depend on us, says another voice among the radio snippets. This is so true, the future of humanity is indeed at stake here. Fundamentalism is like a deadly virus that has so far only been endemic in certain parts of the country and across the world, but it is just biding its time to rage forth and become an epidemic and then spread into a pandemic. Jesus Camp makes us seriously ponder on our chances of being able to contain this virus before it gets out of hand.
The statistics are alarming as of 2006, nearly 50 percent of Americans consider Genesis as the true account of the creation of the world, while there are many who still do no believe in the heliocentric model of the solar system. An overwhelming 75 percent reject Darwins theory of evolution, and 40 percent believe in the existence of angels (Jones, 503). In other words, fundamentalism has been sweeping the nation.
The secret of the power of fundamentalism lies in carrying out effective indoctrination. And the most effective form of indoctrination is taking hold of childrens minds at as early a stage as possible. The younger the children the more pliable they are, the more open to absorb in and assimilate any kind of nonsense fed into their minds. Becky Fisher points out that children in certain parts of the Islamic world are being given intense training right from the age of five, to get ready to kill themselves so why not adopt that model in preaching the Bible too Fisher and her fellow fundamentalists would be interested in training the children not to kill themselves or others, of course, but only to kill their minds and extinguish all possibility of rational thinking among human beings.
Evangelical Protestants make their children accept Jesus as their personal savior. Not all, but a significant fraction of them are thorough fundamentalists and a majority are supporters of fundamentalism (Green 30). Accepting Jesus might seem innocuous to some degree, it might appear to be just a matter of ones personal belief system. Throughout the history and throughout the world, people have held various mythological and metaphysical beliefs, and they continued to do so even after the scientific revolution began in the 18th century. But science and technology went on developing and progress happened regardless of peoples personal beliefs. While this is true, believing in Jesus in the way a fundamentalist is required to do is a totally different proposition. It is not just a question of faith which can remain on the sidelines and which can coexist with an otherwise reasonably mature worldview. For a fundamentalist, belief in Jesus is the central truth of his or her existence and it colors and influences everything else that is part of their beings and lives.
To accept Jesus as savior means to accept the truth that one needs to be saved, in the first place. The punishment for sin is death we notice in a banner under preparation in the documentary. The word death here seems to be a euphemism for eternal damnation. But where did this enormous sin that is liable to get us consigned to hell fires of eternity come from Of course it comes from Adam, because he and Eve ate the apple. To really believe in such juvenile stories as literal truths of cosmic importance demands a radical deadening of common sense and basic human intelligence. However, there is much more to it.
To believe that Adam transgressed Gods command and therefore all his descendents have incurred mortal sin, one would have to believe the entire account of Gods creation and the Garden of Eden as provided in the Bible to be historical facts. But science has different theories on how we came to be here and science has tons of evidence to back its theories. Therefore fundamentalism is at war with science and the entire scientific worldview. About 14 minutes into the documentary, the first thing they show when they start focusing on individual children, is the boy watching a creationist program which ridicules the theory of evolution. It says that the world was created 6000 years ago, and the concept that we have all emerged from green goo is laughable. Creationism vs. evolution is the core issue in the context of fundamentalism. Once a child is made to accept that the entire universe came to be all at once around 4000 B.C., his mind is totally programmed now he can readily take in any absurd theological belief without the least intellectual resistance. That is the reason why fundamentalists are so keen to get the theory of evolution and anything related to it out of the way, and to establish Biblical theology in their place. The primary agenda of the fundamentalists in America today seems to be to push the doctrine of creationism and suppress the theory of evolution. Once this is done, Jesus can easily find his way into the hearts of millions.
For the fear that their children would learn about evolution if they are educated in a nonreligious setting, among other fears of general moral corruption, evangelical Christians are resorting to homeschooling the children. The boy in the documentary is learning science from his mother, and his science textbook is called Learning about Creation through Physical Science. His mother emphatically asserts that science does not prove anything. An interesting thing here is that we see the mother also teaching the boy that all the hullabaloo about global warming in the recent years is just nonsense. There has only been 0.6C increase in temperature which is nothing to worry about. We must note that the fact of global warming does not go against anything said in the Bible, so why this opposition Could it be politically motivated or is this just another expression of pure contempt for all that science says The program itself offers an interesting explanation in this connection, to which we will come shortly.
Christian fundamentalists seem to very much relish denying anything associated with science. And they are also creating a great deal of confusion over the fact that evolution is called a theory and it is not a fact. No scientist or non-creationist doubts that evolution occurred, though there could be some uncertainties about how exactly it happened. Biologists do not deny the fact of evolution. We do, however, debate its mechanism and tempo. (Berra 131) (Italics in the original.)
But the fundamentalists have to deny evolution in toto. The only logic they have to support their stance is that evolution is normally called a theory, and a theory is not a fact, and that which is not a fact is not true. However, evolution is an absolutely irrefutable fact for one thing there are millions of fossils available to prove it. To accommodate the problem of fossil evidence, some sections of the fundamentalists have resorted to a compromise, although a reluctant compromise the theory of intelligent design. Intelligent design proponents try to find weakness of the current theory of evolution, but their arguments really do not hold water. Every objection they have raised so far has been demolished by mainstream scientists. Then there are other fundamentalists who in a desperate bid to save face claim that all the fossils dug up by scientists are planted there by the Devil in order to try to tempt the believers away from the true path. Or there is another version which says that the fossils are planted by God himself to test the strength of the true faith (bibleandscience.com). Obviously these fundamentalist Christians can have no hope of convincing any person possessing an iota of reasoning power with their crackpot interpretations, resorting as they do to the devil for everything that cannot be explained by them. (For Becky Fisher, if there was a power cut during the seminar, it would be the doing of the devil) That is why the focus of their strategy is to catch hold of the tender minds of growing children and deeply impress upon them the infallible veracity of the Bible. They have to catch the children when their discriminative powers are totally undeveloped.
The fundamentalists have a typical cult psychology in the way they go rabidly against the whole mainstream world. But their threat to humanity arises from the fact that they are by no means content to rest there. They have every intent to become the mainstream world themselves, and they received a huge fillip to move in this direction during the Bush era. The Bush administration encouraged faith-based schools, and promoted fundamentalist beliefs through such activities as prisoner rehabilitation and charity (Jones, 503). After Bush, they may have lost an important ally, but their momentum is still gathering. The fact that President Bush was re-elected for the second term is itself an indication of the strength of the devoutly Christian base of voters in America. Though only 9 percent of the total votes that went for Bush in 2004 came from the fundamentalist community, it was decisive in bringing about his victory (Green 30). The fundamentalist bastion in the southern parts and in the American Midwest is still very much consolidating itself, and under the surface is insidiously growing in its power. They wield considerable political clout already.
Thus it is clear that Christian fundamentalism can be a considerable political force as it remains to this day in the United States where the back of the Evangelicals may have proved decisive in securing victories for both Reagan and George W. Bush. Fundamentalism a literal approach to the interpretation of the Bible is strictly speaking, a purely theological doctrine and not equivalent to a belief in the political supremacy of the Church. Some fundamentalists would endorse a strict separation of secular and religious matters, but where they are in a majority this distinction often ceased to be of practical importance. (Tansey Jackson, 82)
We must not forget that up until the 17th century the whole Western world was in the clutches of the Vatican Church, which had a staunchly anti-science disposition, and which put in a great effort to quell scientific thinking from taking off. The Vatican recently accepted the existence of intelligent life on other planets (Associated Press), whereas 400 years ago, it burned Giordano Bruno at stake for claiming that there could be many planets in the universe which harbor intelligent life. Today, Vatican is not a significant opposition to science and reason, but Protestant fundamentalism is. It is poised to become the next Church and inaugurate the second Dark Ages, given half a chance.
The Church of the medieval times could maintain so much power for so many centuries because of the military might it could muster. Today, the fundamentalists too have a great weapon on their side children. One of the biggest things we have learned in the 20th century is the power of indoctrination of children. In Soviet Russia and China, in the Nazi Germany, and Hirohitos Japan, in the Islamic world, in so many places during different periods, we have seen again and again the indoctrination of children being used with stunning results. Indoctrination is the basic modus operandi of sustaining a totalitarian regime. In our modern, affluent and democratic world, advertisers too realize the power of effective indoctrination, and much of the advertisements in our advertisement-soaked culture are directed toward women and children.
But advertising is a haphazard kind of indoctrination. They have to make much appeal to emotion, and at least some sense to reason. The efficacy of advertisements can vary widely. However, the kind of indoctrination fundamentalist Christian parents carry out is a thorough and systematic one. Although they may use the word reason from time to time, they do not really try to appeal to reason in any plausible manner. For instance, earlier in this essay we have wondered why the boys mother was dismissing global warming so lightly when its effects can be seen everywhere, and all the experts agree that it is happening and that it is a gravely worrying issue although some may not concede that it is anthropogenic. Mike Papantanio, a radio host and the only voice of sanity featured in the documentary, says in his radio program that because fundamentalists believe in the imminent second coming of the Christ, they do not feel responsible for earth and its future they have therefore no particular qualms about devastating the planet in every possible way for as long as we can for our temporary gains. But if this is so, the fundamentalist parents and teachers could still teach their children that global warming is happening and just add a clause that it does not really matter because the Christ is going to land one earth very soon anyway. This would make more sense, rather than outright denying something the signs of which are going to become more and more visible in the coming years. But it would seem like these parents are so confident about the efficacy of their indoctrination, they simply do not bother about causing avoidable clashes with reality in the minds of their children. And so they do not feel any compunction in telling their children that global warming does not exist at all.
One wonders, can anything be implanted into the minds of children, anything at all, without needing to worry that the beliefs so implanted may collide with reality one day and be shattered Today they are teaching that evolution did not happen, tomorrow can they be teaching that earth is at the center of the universe The Genesis and the entire Bible would only make sense if the earth is at the center of the universe, and not just a dust particle lost in a billion billion solar systems.
The fundamentalist groups in America are only fighting for the subject of evolution to be dropped for school textbooks, as of now. From Jesus Camp, we gather (through the radio host) that in Kansas State they have succeeded in getting a modified version of creationism, the theory of intelligent design, taught in the schools, affecting around 600,000 children. It is difficult to say whether the fundamentalists will ever go beyond these relatively modest gains and get an upper hand over science in this matter, but it cannot be ruled out and if they do succeed in achieving an edge over the current mainstream knowledge, then that would be the beginning of the end. It is certain that they will not stop short of reversing the whole progress of the past 400-500 years.
The concept of evolution is a big pain in the collective neck of Christian fundamentalists, but it is not the only one. Once evolution is cleared from the way, they will most probably attack gravity. Science cannot really exist in parts.
The rise of modern science began in the 15th century with Copernican revolution. The Church fought bitterly to suppress the Copernican heliocentric theory from gaining prevalence. The Church forced Galileo to retract his assertions about earth moving around the sun, and put him under house arrest. The first chapter of the Bible, Genesis, clearly says the God created the sun and the moon for the sake of day and night on earth heliocentric theory clearly goes against the Bible. But beyond that, the Church clearly knew if it allowed a scientific view of the world to take hold, its own power and influence would be vastly diminished. But the telescopes were invented by then, and the Church could not do much to stem the rising tide of science. The next great revolution to happen in science was the Darwinian revolution in biology. Today the Christian fundamentalists are fighting the Darwinian revolution, and it would seem to many that they do not have much of an issue with the rest of science. But if they win this battle in any significant way and rise to power, it is very much conceivable that they will target the Copernican revolution. Because the simple logic here is that, Darwinian revolution followed the Copernican revolution, and is bound to follow in the very logic of things, because they both have emerged out of the same scientific way of looking at the world. It is not possible to let the Copernican revolution and its products be, without the fear of creating a Darwinian revolution.
In fact we already see the signs of this. The creationist program shown to the boy in Jesus Camp makes mockery not just of the fact that we have all come from green goo but also the fact that the universe was born in an explosion. The word explosion, obviously referring to the Big Bang, is used twice in a brief snippet that hardly lasts a minute. Although fundamentalists are focusing their struggle against the Darwinian revolution for now, they have already set their sights on the Big Bang, which is a direct product of the Copernican revolution. While the former deals with the evolution of life on the planet earth, the latter deals with the birth and evolution of the cosmos itself. The fundamentalist beliefs go against one as much as they go against the other, it is only that for now these people are concentrating on one of the aspects. To go against the other would mean coming into a clash with the whole of physics and the whole of science, and the fundamentalists need to be in a much stronger position in the society to wage their final war against science.
There is a slow chipping away between the church and the state, laments Mike Papantanio of the documentary. One day the church could have become the state. Papantino calls it the Thief in the night effect. If we do not do something really very effective and definitive about it, one day we are sure to wake up and find that the thief has not only taken away our children from us, but he has also taken the future away from humanity.
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