From: newsbean	Date: May 5th, 2006 02:22 am (UTC)		(Link)

I think the choice not to include a voice over is excellent. Let these people speak for themselves.

From: humandays	Date: May 5th, 2006 02:23 am (UTC)		(Link)

hi :)

From: humandays	Date: May 5th, 2006 02:22 am (UTC)		(Link)

talk about culture wars ... yikes.

	From: dogemperor	Date: May 5th, 2006 02:27 am (UTC)		(Link)

The really scary thing is that there *are* places like that, and they *do* target kids as young as six. Read up on how "Vacation Bible Camps" are in fact actually run in pentecostal groups, or, heck, read up on the "Missionettes" and "Royal Rangers".

Trust me, I'm a survivor of one of those groups that actively promoted stuff like that :P

I also think it's interesting--and smart, IMHO--that they got a mainstream Christian to formally criticise the dominionists and provide some balance.

Maybe, just maybe, this film will show people what the *REAL* face of groups like the Assemblies or World Harvest Church or New Life Church is like--not harmless "conservative Christians", but bona-fide "Bible-based" coercive religious groups that indoctrinate kids who don't even know their friggin' *ABCs* yet on this stuff. (Yes, I was one of those kids. I'm forever thankful I got to learn just HOW much horsecrap was being shoveled in my general direction. I still have nightmares about these people taking over to the point they can't be thrown out partly because I've seen them planning it since I was a tiny little six-year-old *myself*.)

	From: dingbatz7	Date: May 5th, 2006 02:34 am (UTC)		(Link)

Maybe, just maybe, this film will show people what the *REAL* face of groups like the Assemblies or World Harvest Church or New Life Church is like--not harmless "conservative Christians", but bona-fide "Bible-based" coercive religious groups that indoctrinate kids who don't even know their friggin' *ABCs* yet on this stuff.

I fear for religious freedom. I feel so bad for the kids of the future. Sadly, I was one of those kids. I want to see that film for sheer disturbance factor.

	From: mytimetoheal	Date: May 5th, 2006 04:15 am (UTC)		(Link)

When my son was about 16 months old, my mother and I were at the bank where my aunt works. There's a sweet older gentleman there, and he's a big-time church goer (one of the few devoted Christians around here I can stomach being around because he's genuinely nice and doesn't mention Jesus every other word).

Well, he mentioned they were doing Vacation Bible School at his church (most likely a Baptist church), which was nothing new to me as I grew up in this area and see the signs plastered everywhere). It was when he said, "You could bring him [my son] to come play with us. We have classes now for children that young."

That came as an utter shock to me seeing as when I attended VBS when I was about 8 years old or so I think the youngest they had was maybe five or six year olds. Even my mom, who usually thinks such things are innocuous and not suspicious, was a bit put-off by it.

	From: eiredrake	Date: May 5th, 2006 02:15 pm (UTC)		(Link)

So when do we start the counter-dominionist Scouts?

	From: fannyfae	Date: May 5th, 2006 02:49 am (UTC)		(Link)
	Thank God, I escaped Missouri!

....and God created Hell and He named that Hell 'Missouri

You know, there is a reason why many people pronounce it "Misery". It has everything to do with the fact that the place really IS!!

	From: jarandhel	Date: May 5th, 2006 02:29 pm (UTC)		(Link)
	Re: Thank God, I escaped Missouri!

Amen. Let's just say I came out at Ft Lost in the Woods, Misery and leave it at that.

	From: dogemperor	Date: May 5th, 2006 02:52 am (UTC)		(Link)

Some of the other quotes are all too sad, and all too familiar, to me (being a survivor of some of the very groups promoting these "Jesus Camps"):

Among the children featured in the film is Levi, now aged 13, who explains how he was "saved" by Christ at the age of 5.

Another child, Rachael, now 10, dreams of being a missionary. She is seen practicing by approaching strangers in a bowling alley or on a street to tell them that God is thinking about them.

"The reason you go for kids is because whatever they learn by the time they're 7 or 8 or 9 years old is pretty well there for the rest of their lives," Fischer says on a radio show in which she is challenged by Papantonio, a practicing Methodist who is also a director of liberal Air America radio.

"As I understood, your question to me was 'Do you feel it's right for the fundamentalists to indoctrinate their children with their own beliefs?' I guess fundamentally, yes I do, because every other religion is indoctrinating their kids. I would like to see more churches indoctrinating," she says.

Papantonio responds: "You can tell a child anything ... you can make a child into a soldier that carries an AK47."

Fischer says: "You could call it brainwashing, but I am radical and passionate in teaching children about their responsibility as Christians, as God-fearing people, as Americans."

(Yes, the dominionists are actually--and this is something I've been screaming to the fucking *hills* about for ages--they're actually advocating the practice of the same thought reform techniques used by Scientologists and Al Quaida on their own children. And doing it with the express intent that they create a future of even more rabid "God Warriors" than themselves.)

The sad thing is, in a way, I was Levi and Rachel growing up--it took finding things being claimed in the church that didn't make sense (like claims that Christian heavy metal artists Stryper and Bloodgood were "satanic") that made me really start questioning. Had I not been so much of a metalhead then, had I not had the chance to discover things Outside--I'd have been just as trapped. Knowing that scares the hell out of me like little else.

Other quotes of note:

"We would go from our lives in lower Manhattan and get on a plane and in a few hours we were in an absolutely parallel America," Ewing said, describing the making of the film.

(We've often commented on how the dominionists, especially the pente dominionists, *do* effectively live in an almost completely parallel society to mainstream America. It's interesting that they observe it too.)

	From: cinnamonical	Date: May 5th, 2006 03:21 am (UTC)		(Link)

"The reason you go for kids is because whatever they learn by the time they're 7 or 8 or 9 years old is pretty well there for the rest of their lives," Fischer says on a radio show in which she is challenged by Papantonio, a practicing Methodist who is also a director of liberal Air America radio.

That is a damn incriminating quote right there.

	From: newsbean	Date: May 5th, 2006 03:22 am (UTC)		(Link)

we're proof that people *can* escape. I'm not a praying woman (don't believe in anything to pray *to* after getting through - and out - of this) but I do think that our thoughts can shape reality. Instead of fear, I trust that these children will discover what we have.

	From: dogemperor	Date: May 5th, 2006 03:18 am (UTC)		(Link)

And here's the quote that should scarethe absolute hell out of all the readers here:

Another pastor featured in "Jesus Camp," Ted Haggard, head of the National Association of Evangelicals, says in the movie children are fueling a boom in his churches that would continue to have a profound effect on U.S. politics.

"There's a new church like this every two days," he said. "It's got enough growth to essentially sway every election. If the Evangelicals vote, they determine the election."

THAT's why they're running things like "Jesus Camp"--they're hoping to so thoroughly indoctrinate and--yes, I'll say it--*brainwash* the tykes going to these churches that they'll end up hijacking the country. They are frighteningly close to doing this. In the pentecostal branches of the dominionist movement, this has been a process over *SIXTY YEARS* in the making, has been put in *especially* high gear in the past forty, may have claimed the Southern Baptist Convention (there is quite a bit of strong evidence that the hijackers of the SBC were at least aided and abetted by Assemblies-linked dominionists, and some evidence even suggests that the SBC was used as a "test case" by the Assemblies-linked inventors of "cell churches" for how well tactics for hijacking church congregations by infiltration would go; the Institute for Religion and Democracy is now using very similar tactics) and is the branch of dominionism most consistently associated with highly abusive and coercive tactics (to the point that several front-groups of the Assemblies of God are formally listed as "Bible-based" cults by a wide number of experts on spiritually abusive groups; I myself have documented how some of the tactics in these groups are identical to those used in Scientology, one of the most spiritually abusive groups ever documented. Even more terrifying, the pente dominionist groups are often very explicitly apocalyptic, have rather a long history of explicitly indoctrinating kids in "spiritual warfare" theology, and is even targeting teenagers with this.

There's a few more good articles I've found on this movie so far:
http://filmchatblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/more-ado-about-jesus-camp.html
http://www.tribecafilmfestival.org/tixSYS/2006/filmguide/event_np_full?EventNumber=4083 (apparently the topic of dominionism IS directly addressed).

	From: cinnamonical	Date: May 5th, 2006 03:20 am (UTC)		(Link)

"Extreme liberals, they have to look at this and start shaking in their boots," Fischer says in the film, which was showing at the Tribeca Film Festival this week.

I'm shaking in my boots, but not for the reason that Fischer thinks.

Gods, someone get me a shotgun already...

	From: yhnmzwcs	Date: May 5th, 2006 03:45 am (UTC)		(Link)

Staplegun.

Laugh a little. It'll protect you from obsessing.

But, yeah, they need some fixing. I just don't know if opening large holes in them is the best technique for remediation.

Kidnapping, torture, soul magics, etc. . . . I'm up for something if someone'll bring the beer.

	From: dogemperor	Date: May 5th, 2006 03:34 am (UTC)		(Link)

I have so far been able to find that Becky Fisher runs a group called "Kids on Fire Ministries" (and this is also the name of her "Jesus camp", "Kids on Fire" that is; now I have the song "Napalm Sticks To Kids" going through my head) who sells multiple videotapes geared towards the spiritual-warfare crowd.I have so far been able to find that she runs a group called "Kids on Fire Ministries" (and this is also the name of her "Jesus camp", "Kids on Fire" that is; now I have the song "Napalm Sticks To Kids" going through my head) who sells multiple videotapes geared towards the spiritual-warfare crowd.

Some of the books promoted in Kids on Fire's bookstore include works by Ron Luce (runs Teen Mania and BattleCry, "spiritual warfare" groups targeting teens; the former has in fact published a complete manual on "bait and switch evangelism" which includes literal suggestions to form mobbing-gangs to harass individual targets to the point of conversion); a very large number of books on third wave pentecostalism, and (not surprisingly) videos on how to turn your little sprog into a God Warrior to put Marguerite Perrin to shame.

The articles are, to put it mildly, bizarre; sources as widely ranging as "name it and claim it" preacher Creflo Dollar, "third wave" revivalists promoting kids of dominionists as an "overcomer generation", and even an article on "indigo children" (!) (usually "indigo children" is something I expect to hear about on newage-rhymes-with-sewage pages, NOT dominionist sites!).

The group sounds like it's probably some sort of neopente group without a clear affiliation with a specific denomination, but it's hard to tell--the only other affiliated group seems to be in South Africa (!) and may in fact be a satellite church.

	From: griffen	Date: May 5th, 2006 06:32 am (UTC)		(Link)

"Extreme liberals, they have to look at this and start shaking in their boots," Fischer says in the film

Shaking with laughter, perhaps? Or with anger, that people would do this to little kids? Those are the only reasons I can think of that fits the situation.

	From: jamie_miller	Date: May 5th, 2006 10:30 am (UTC)		(Link)

yeah, I'm not exactly shaking in my boots.

	From: dogemperor	Date: May 5th, 2006 11:49 am (UTC)		(Link)

With me, it's *definitely* the "shaking in anger", but that's because I survived it and got out with my sanity intact (but just barely).

Though knowing the name of the group ("Kids on Fire"), I now have the following song stuck in my head to the tune of "Jesus Loves The Little Children":

Napalm sticks to little children
All the children of the world
Red and yellow, black and white
Napalm sets them all alight
Napalm sticks to little children of the world...

(Yes, I know. I have a *really* dark sense of humour at times)

	From: scotmoore	Date: May 5th, 2006 02:32 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I choose anger. I'm not a fan of it usually, but when you have children striving to become missionaries, with the end result being election turn-out it makes me angry.

My anger is with people who read these sorts of things and say, "I want my child to be a part of THAT!" Because, let's face it, the responsibility here is on parents. They have the power to choose religious freedom for their children over rampant theocracy, but the parents are the ones pushing it. It's a damn shame they don't realize how much of their children's freedoms their taking away.

	From: neadods	Date: May 5th, 2006 01:34 pm (UTC)		(Link)

In one scene a cardboard President George W. Bush is brought on stage at an assembly so attendees can pray that he make America "one nation under God."

What's that line about graven images again?

From: obifrodo	Date: May 5th, 2006 08:50 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Not only does that sound like idolatry, but the NT seems clear that followers of Christ are not to be in positions of political power. Jesus is offered by Satan rule over the kingdoms of the earth and Jesus turns him down-- if that means anything, it seems to mean that earthly power is not God's concern. Jesus also seems to draw a sharp distinction between God and Caeser with the famous "render unto Caeser" saying. Furthermore, Jesus seems to repudiate the power of the state by utterly refusing to participate in it's legal proceedings before Pilate. Therefore, I would think so-called "Biblical Christians" should shun it as well. At most they might argue that times have changed and it's OK to have a Christian president today, and that's fine -- people can believe whatever they want to believe (indeed, I think Jimmy Carter is a very nice man). But they can't claim Christian involvement in politics as "biblical," from what I'm seeing.

So consistency would seem to demand that dominionists acknowledge post-biblical revelation if they wish to endorse George W. Bush, or anyone else, as a specifically Christian president. And if they are willing to acknowledge post-biblical revelation, then that changes everything.

	From: jargon_john	Date: May 5th, 2006 03:21 pm (UTC)		(Link)

They should play this side-by-side with an Al Quada training and propaganda video.

	From: dogemperor	Date: May 7th, 2006 02:18 pm (UTC)		(Link)

This would be especially apt IMHO--seeing as both Al Quaida *and* the "Third Wave" pente groups are widely regarded as coercive religious groups (and in fact, the more that dominionist pente groups embrace "spiritual warfare" stuff, the more likely they are to be regarded as cultic by experts in spiritual abuse).

For that matter, the tactics of the Taliban specifically (who, whilst not Al Quaida, are seen as giving aid and comfort to them) and the Third Wave "spiritual warfare" groups are frighteningly similar. And you're not the first person to have seen this, either; at least one person has specifically tied the "spiritual warfare" movement to domestic terrorism in the US (specifically abortion clinic bombings), in my reply I note specific similarities between dominionist groups and the Taleban in their tactics of isolating and indoctrinating kids (which have led to kids joining groups like the "Army of God" and other militia groups linked to domestic terrorism in the case of the "spiritual warfare" dominionists, and to graduates from the Taleban "madrassas" joining Al Quaida and similar movements in the other case).

I've also written on how these groups and Scientology use similar tactics (article here) and, interestingly, there are reports Scientology has planned similar acts of domestic terrorism (including a plan to blow up the FBI offices); other cultic groups have also been known to commit domestic terrorism (most infamously with Aum Shinrikyo in Japan and the sarin gas attacks, but the only case of biological terrorism pre-9/11 in the US involved followers of Swami Rajneesh deliberately contaminating several restauraunts in Oregon with salmonella; interestingly, post-9/11, one of the increasing trends in dominionist-run domestic terror has been to mail letters to women's clinics (containing powder) with letters claiming the powder is weaponised anthrax).

	From: queencoconut	Date: May 7th, 2006 02:39 am (UTC)		(Link)

Considering that many little kids don't even understand the concept of where babies come from, I doubt that they can understand the concept of a fetus and abortion. Consequently, they'll just end up hating and fearing something that they don't understand and oppose without question. Brilliant.

	From: dogemperor	Date: May 7th, 2006 01:51 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Hell, in a lot of these groups the "Abortion = EVIL" line is pretty much the ONLY sex ed some of these kids will get until "Christian counseling" at their marriage. (Well, that, and when girls get their period they will be often told the reason they are suffering is because Eve gave Adam the apple on the serpent's suggestion. No, I'm not making this up. Yes, I was actually given this line.)