The Canadian® got hold of a copy of Jesus Camp. From the film’s website:

A growing number of Evangelical Christians believe there is a revival underway in America that requires Christian youth to assume leadership roles in advocating the causes of their religious movement. Jesus Camp follows a group of young children to Pastor Becky Fischer’s “Kids on Fire Summer Camp”, where kids are taught to become dedicated Christian soldiers in God’s army and are schooled in how to take back America for Christ. The film is a first-ever look into an intense training ground that recruits born-again Christian children to become an active part of America’s political future.

Here’s the trailer: It is no longer available.

And a “get it while you can” heads-up, here is the entire film in several parts on YouTube:
It is no longer available, due to copyright issues.

This film should be viewed, especially by those of us outside the Evangelical cult community — or those of us without children with whom we can journey to the Kids on Fire Summer Camp to see this stuff first-hand. Give copies to your family, friends, and neighbors.

Generally, the first realm of socialization for an individual is the family. Thus the film begins by taking the viewer into the homes and lives of several Evangelical families, most of which home-school their children. While Evangelical home-schooling is something worthy of investigation itself, this portion of the film is especially frightening — even for us non-educators — due to the amount of brainwashing and misinformation being passed on to these children under the guise of education.

For example, Levi’s mother can be seen using Exploring Creation with Physical Science, a textbook which “begins with a detailed discussion of the world around you and what makes it work. It will then take you out into the universe so that you may learn the majesty of God’s Creation”, from which she reads:

“One popular thing to do in American politics is to note that the summers in the United States over the past few years have been very warm. As a result, global warming must be real. What’s wrong with this reasoning?”

Levi replies, “It’s only gone up 0.6 degrees.”

His mother, apparently a climatologist, says, “Yeah, it’s not really a big problem, is it?”

The beginning scenes are not the worst, however, as we follow the families to their week at the summer camp. To say that these children are shamed, guilted, and otherwise emotionally beaten into religious submission would be a nice way of putting what we see happening on the screen. I cannot believe this shit is legal.

Children, according to Pastor Becky Fischer,

are so usable in Christianity. If you look at the world’s population, one-third of that 6.7 billion people are children under the age of fifteen. One-third. Where should we be putting our efforts? Where should we be putting our focus? I’ll tell you where our enemies are putting it: they’re putting it on the kids. They’re going into the schools — you go into Palestine, and I can take you to some websites that will absolutely shake you to your foundations, and show you photographs, of where they’re taking their kids to camps like we take our kids to bible camps, and they’re putting hand grenades in their hands, and they’re teaching them how to put on bomb belts, they’re teaching them how to use rifles, they’re teaching them how to use machine guns — it’s no wonder, with that kind of intense training and discipling, that those young people are ready to kill themselves for the cause of Islam. I wanna see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as the young people are to the cause of Islam. I wanna see them as radically laying down their lives for the gospel, as they are over in Pakistan, in Israel, and Palestine, and all those different places. You know, because we have — excuse me! — but we have the truth!

I think it’s time for a nation-wide intervention.

Your thoughts?