Jesus Christ!

I grew up in the Church of Christ, a small and extremely conservative denomination, and I believed in all of its teachings until the age of seventeen, when I strayed from the "straight and narrow" in pursuit of something else, something more. When I describe my previous church to those unfamiliar with it, I call it "just a little less conservative than the Amish." There are no musical instruments, no female leaders, no salvation without baptism. The only thing worse than being a fornicator is being a homosexual fornicator, and the only thing worse than killing your neighbor and three kids is killing a microscopic fetus. I am harsh on my previous beliefs, I know, but I still believe religion can be a good thing. The Church of Christ, I hope and believe, is about to undergo a fundamental change with the leaders of my generation - my friends who stayed in the church are surely more secular and understanding than the seventy year-old generation before us. The same can probably be said of any major religion within the United States.

For nearly ten years I attended summer camp with my church in a forgotten crook of Texas countryside outside of Bandera. It was week of Bible lessons and competitions, where "mixed bathing" in the river was forbidden and the watermelon was always ripe. Emotional sermons were a daily tradition, and it was in response to one of those sermons that I was baptized at the age of 11 in the murky river that has since run nearly dry.

My camp was certainly conservative, but it was nothing in comparison with the church in Jesus Camp. Well, first of all, we don't believe in speaking in tongues, but we also didn't pray over a cheap cardboard cut-out of W. We had those sermons against abortion and even some counselors who forbid Harry Potter in their cabins (and a girl who was ridiculed and called a sinner for having a thong and a push-up bra in her suitcase). We were told we were living in a wicked generation, and we girls were also told to return to our cabins to change if we were wearing anything "suggestive," meaning shorts that didn't go to our knees or spaghetti strap tops.

Now that I'm writing about this, I'm realizing how little different my camp was (and is) from the camp in the film. This scares me. Perhaps such Christian fundamentalism is more widespread than we believe.

I really do salute Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady for their film. It exposes the dangerous close-minded way many of America's religious leaders are leading. I see nothing different between Reverend Wright's ill-advised statements and Becky Fisher's sermons. There is always a way to take an idea to an extreme that hurts society.

Some parts of the film especially moved me. I really appreciated (though I didn't enjoy) the scenes that interspersed Fischer's sermon with the cries of the children. It was an excellent montage that heightened the tension and highlighted Fischer's immorality. It was a good filmmaking move to keep the diagetic music (with that woman kind of crying or yelling or singing or whatnot), and in other sequences the music choice was point on with the mood.

I believe Becky Fischer is wrong, yet I believe her branch of extremism will live on for centuries to come, just as any other kind of fundamentalism will. I do believe that she thinks that she is doing what is right, just as I believe that everyone in my previous church thinks the same. However, this does not make either of them right. Anyways, who is in charge of determining right and wrong in the first place?