Fridae

There is something awfully eerie seeing children as young as six possessed by the spirit, speaking in tongues, with tears rolling down their cheeks. Yet one sees this again and again in the film Jesus Camp... with many different kids.

How have they been brought to this? Award-winning documentary filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady follow Becky Fischer, a preacher to kids, at her 'Kids on Fire' summer camp that she runs in North Dakota, USA. There, amidst activities like go-karting and cave exploring, the children, whose ages seem to range from six to 13, spend an inordinate amount of time being preached to.

They also get a chance to try their hand at preaching to their peers, for Fischer's mission is to train these kids to be "Christian soldiers" to wage war against unbelievers.

The services she presides over are no ordinary ones. They are highly charismatic, hyper-expressive affairs with weeping, jumping and trance-like adulation of "God" and "Jesus" - names invoked again and again like talismans.

As one nine or 10 year-old points out, what they have is not a "dead church" with more sedate practices. In her mind, God does not visit his favours on those Christians who participate in dead churches.

What more of non-Christians? Indeed, one hears Fisher speak about Muslims, for example, in combative tones. "Our enemies," she says in the film, are putting efforts into training their children, and so Americans must be "as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as [Muslims] are to Islam."

She sees children as a "usable" resource for the cause of Christianity. "Studies have shown that a person's moral values in life are set in place between the ages of seven to nine years of age and will change very little after that."

She speaks of morality, but as the film shows, it's hard to miss the political objectives. At one point, a cardboard effigy of President George Bush is trundled into the chapel and the children are asked to pray and ask God to bless and protect him from his opponents.

These children aren't exposed to such indoctrination - for there is really no other word to describe what goes on there - at just the summer camp. They come from homes that have primed them since they were infants. Twelve-year-old Levi O'Brien is home-schooled by his mother, and in the scene we're shown, the lesson is about the truth of creationism.

In another home, the whole family has to recite a code of loyalty to the Christian doctrine before what looks like mealtime. Saying grace may be too effete for these future warriors, both boys and girls.

Not a cult

One is tempted to think that what we're seeing is a cult. But "cult" is a wholly inadequate word when over 100 million Americans are evangelicals and 30 million of them are charismatic or Pentecostal - the type who lay great store in speaking in tongues, rolling and writhing on the ground, and healing through the laying of hands.

According to the film's publicity material, 43 percent of evangelicals in the US claim to have "accepted Christ" before the age of 13. About half of all Americans reject evolution as an explanation for how the world has come to be what it is.

The scenes in the film may be from a summer camp, but the subject in focus is a much bigger phenomenon. Also, as Mike Papantonio, a self-professed Methodist and radio talkshow host who appears throughout the film, commented that this is much more than religion. This is political Christianity, whose members "elbow their way into positions of influence."

Yet, whichever way you look, you see unreason. How does unreason sell? How are millions of people persuaded by unreason? They aren't, and that's the point.

They are manipulated when they are young and impressionable. The messages are highly emotive: about love, being wanted, and standing up to social ridicule for being so devout. Fearsome images of Satan testing them with temptation are conjured; guilt and highly public repentance are elevated to theatre. In short, worship services are well-choreographed exercises in mass hysteria.

The kids are isolated from an education that stresses reason - thus the popularity of home schooling, away from what their parents would call the evolutionists.

There is at the same time, a stoking of insecurity, cultivating a sense of being under siege. Muslims are repeatedly mentioned. Secularism too is painted as a huge monster out to exterminate Christians, and as many of us know, gays and lesbians are said to be at the vanguard of this attack on them.

Now in Asia

Unfortunately, this phenomenon of political Christianity is becoming more and more evident in Asia. We hear their strident call to arms in Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore. In the latter, they have been pounding their war drums particularly loudly this year as the debate about Section 377A of the Penal Code gathers steam. This is the law that makes it an offence for two men to have sexual relations.

No one should imagine it is going to be easy countering them. Reason will not work, because they didn't form their views through reason in the first place. All that reason can do is to prevent those currently sitting on the fence from being swayed over to their side.

Theirs is an emotionally charged set of beliefs, and to sustain that charge, they must have identifiable enemies. In Singapore, where expressing hatred of Muslims is disallowed and certain to bring on the wrath of the government (not that they don't express such ideas in their private cell groups), most of their energies are focused on spreading hate against sexual minorities.

Still, many gays and lesbians underestimate the threat they pose. It is hard for rational people, gay or straight, to take irrational ones seriously. We dismiss them as quacks and loonies, but we do so at our peril. They set out methodically to insinuate themselves into the corridors of power and spread any number of false generalisations in their attempt to marginalise LGBTs. Among those stereotypes is that if equal rights are ever granted to gay people, we would run wild "recruiting" children into the "homosexual lifestyle."

Really, who is doing the recruiting now?

Editor's note: For those interested, former televangelist Ted Haggard makes a brief appearance in the film where he preaches: "we don't have to debate about what we should think about homosexual activity. It's written in the Bible." About two months after the film was released, a former male prostitute revealed that Haggard had paid for sex with him on an almost monthly basis over the previous three years.