I watched the documentary Jesus Camp the other night. The part of my brain that makes me say words like "obfuscate" and "esoteric" when I really mean "hide" and "weird" is suggesting that I construct some sort of justification wrapped around the unassailable notion of encountering Evangelical Christianity on its own terms. Yeah, I'd watch it primarily for that saintly and academic motivation…if throbbing outrage wasn't such a sweet, sweet high. The aspect of my soul that's become bitter and angry, the…um… part I don't like all that much, wanted to watch in order to see rubes. You know, avid Fox news fans shuffling around with NASCAR hats on, muttering half coherently about "dem HoMoSEXuals" and the dark, desperate underground war on Christmas (Other Side: liberal lizard aliens).
As I watched the final credits ooze to the top of my screen, I was hoping to feel that wonderful combination of outrage and superiority that has fueled oh so many letters to the editor and *heh* blog entries. After all, I put good money into this DVD and the least the filmmakers could do is make me want to throw a chair through the window.

In reality, I felt sad.
You see, I attended bible camps when I was young. The sanctuary reclined warm and accessible, somehow smaller, by its' weekday nap. Smiling bearded patriarchs wearing my mother's bathrobe walked around rocky landscapes in small textbooks with paper covers. Of course, what bout of summer religious education would be complete without a young boy's first tender and hesitant experience of glitter glue based vandalism (I firmly believe that experimental arson should happen only in the confines of the senior high mission trip.)
Mostly, though, I remember the adults. The vast majority were volunteers who had little qualification for the job they were being asked to do beyond a willingness to follow a curriculum decked out in primary colors and a desire to nurture children…a desire to suggest something of the tangible reality of God's love through smiling faces, attentive ears and presence.
Though my young mind would never construct words for it, I left with a sense of hesed (Hebrew, loving kindness, loyalty, devotion. This term describes God's nature, the people's obligation towards God, and, in the Book of Ruth, the very stuff of cohesion in a godly community). I left with a feeling of holiness defined by that loving kindness, that willingness by imperfect people in a regrettably imperfect world to spend time with a handful of young children, most of whom likely refrained from causing too much damage to church property.
I'm sad because the several bright, talented and thoughtful young people I saw in Jesus Camp seemed to have none of the wealth inherent in my childhood experience of Christianity. An hour and a half of film and no youth pastor, no youth worker, and no community adult of any stripe whatsoever expressed the merest hint or whisper of a desire to nurture the children God trusted them with! These delightful kids were a commodity, a means to an end, raw materials to be refined into a disturbing form of weponized Christian! All of them were ready to spend a lifetime attempting to revivify a fictional and naïve American theocracy.
At the end of the film, the head youth pastor speculates smugly how terrified people like me will be when we see a movie like this. I guess I'm supposed to have the same sensation one might experiance standing on a beach while a tsunami rolls into shore. Someday, these kids will have to leave their contrived, objectifying soap bubble world. At least some of them will realize they were lied too their entire childhoods about American, about Christ and about the rest of us. God help the adults of their community then, and God help us all in the meantime