Response to Jesus Camp

First of all, I was disappointed. They went and found a small extremist group in the middle of nowhere and made it sound like they represented all of evangelical America. A group that was very steeped in denominational practices (pentecostal thus the speaking in the tongues, convulsion like prayer, the breaking of things, the crying, etc) that made them appear sort of hysterical to an outsider (and I am assuming that most people who watch this movie are not going to be from Pentecostal backgrounds) and I think this distracted from what the movie was really about.. It was sort of like taking the new documentary about FLDS (the group that BIG LOVE is fictionally written about) and making sweeping statements about Mormons.

Second I was disappointed in my fellow Christians. And yes I call them that. Not because I like what they do but because disassociating myself with them is not going to to teach them anything. If we have learned nothing from American politics and culture over the last five years, we should learn that more we fragment the more we fight and the less that gets done. Anyways, what disappointed me the most is that in all the preaching and yelling about sin, gulit, the holy ghost, politics, war and Bush, there was not much Jesus at Jesus Camp. We never once heard about his life. Jesus was a political radical and yet these political radicals never mentioned any of who he was. Where they cried for war, he cried for peace, while he cried for taking care of the captives, the orphans the widows, they passed out tracts and protested judicial nominees. They taught the doctrine of the elephant not the Bible even if they did pledge their allegiance to it. Heartbreaking and disappointing.

I have actually met one person who does not believe in Global Warming…he graduated from Liberty apparently Falwell preached on it in Chapel one day. He is a classmate and he asked me one day if I believed in global warming… Previous to that I would have been pretty darn shocked. Here is what amazes me and I wish the movie had brought out…for all of conservative Christians value of Creationism in the next second they claim that there is no responsibility, no stewardship of creation. Not biblical or logical. But not exactly a a friendly republican doctrine..yet again the bible is drowned out by political ideology. I was also disappointed in the science can’t prove anything was the response to the evolution and creationism debate that was portrayed…because again it was extreme and didn’t do much to shed light on the problem other than make the conservative view point look ridiculous.  What they were getting at is…macro-evolution has not exactly happened before our eyes, there is evidence but we have not seen it in the way that one has seen the law of gravity in action. Ironically both sides require faith that the missing pieces of evidence will be discovered or demonstrated. I think really one cannot attack evolution is one knows nothing about science, nor can one attack religion if one knowns little about scripture and theology.  And until we understand that…the debate will go no where.

Lastly, the division of church and state swings both ways. Democracy swings both way. While we all shake our heads at this movie and think what is our nation coming to, I bet you that church watches CNN while civil unions are legalized and shake their heads and think what is our nation coming to… The movie implied that they are bringing their religious beliefs into the public sector. Dangerous ground, I agree. However…I argue that its dangerous to take it to far the other way too. Do we limit their right to speak? Do we limit their right to dissent? Are we going to choose to be tolerant to everyone except those who don’t share the views we like? Thats not democracy. I don’t deny there should be limits on someone freedom to express their views (vandalizing, hurting people, etc).  I don’t deny that somethings people say make me really angry, righteously angry but I respect their right to say those things. Because I value my own right.  We have to be careful that we don’t have a knee jerk reaction.

Finally, us moderate and even liberal Christians need to put aside our dislike and our anger toward our fundamental brethren. And we need to stop sticking our noses up and stop dwelling about how mad we are or how ridiculous they make our faith look. We need to reach out to fundamentalists, we need to engage them in dialgoue and fight not with politics like they are trying to but with scripture and theology because they won’t be able to just write us off. We need to take out the political parties in our churches and put back the radical that Christianity was founded on, Jesus.