Jesus Camp

Last night we watched Jesus Camp, a documentary about an Evangelical summer camp that teaches kids to love Jesus and hate liberals. At first glance it's easy to talk about how crazy and brainwashing the Evangelicals are. After all, the leaders screamed at the kids to feel the healing blood of Christ so their sins would be washed away, then encouraged them to yell out jibberish while in some scary emotional high, which left most kids in tears. They also taught them that evolution is not based on science, but is a belief that the liberal school system was drilling into their heads, as if every day at school they are being told that creationism is stupid.

After thinking about some of the things that I saw, I realized that many of the problems I have with Evangelicals, I also have with Mormons. I'm not sure why this crossover exists, but for some reason many Mormons and Evangelicals have the same faulty logic. One focus of the Evangelicals in the documentary is that we are at war, specifically with the Muslim religion and we have to train our kids to fight against this. I also have heard this same line of thought with Mormons, and I think it's racist and wrong to think of Muslims as our enemy. Another thing that was brought up several times was they inferred that this generation of kids is some sort of chosen generation, saved to fight evil in these last days. Mormons had been spreading similar rumors around, even attaching names of general authorities to made-up quotes, until the First Presidency came out and told people to stop doing it. This kind of goes along the same idea that we're at war--the Evangelicals seemed to relish the idea of war and loved to think of themselves as being strong enough to fight it. This kind of attitude seemed completely contradictory to any of Jesus' teachings in the Bible. The next resemblance is the attitude of Evangelicals that the way to make yourself better is to pray, read the Bible and go to church. Not to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and accept others even if they're different than you. When I was young, I knew that any question in Sunday school could be answered by saying, "Pray, read your scriptures and go to church," when none of those things actually directly help anyone. So my problem is, Christianity is raising a generation focused on doing things that aren't actually helping anyone except for, arguably, themselves. The sick aren't being healed, the homeless aren't being sheltered, the mentally ill aren't being accepted or treated, the poor working class aren't being represented. With all these major problems going on in the world and billions of people needing aid of some sort, the Evangelicals decided to focus their efforts on protesting abortion in Washington by putting red tape with the word "life" written on it over their mouths. They prayed fervently for a righteous government that would turn over turn Roe vs. Wade. They desperately want these unborn children to have a chance at a life. Once given this chance at life however, Christians seem to be the last to help those who are born into poverty or other hard circumstances. They reject a nation that supports welfare and will fight to keep these poverty stricken people from having access to any form of birth control. Big businesses that they support through their conservative votes will gladly take advantage of the poor working class, using loopholes and lobbyists to keep wages and benefits ridiculously low. But the liberals are the evil ones because they are abortion supporting murderers.

This generation of Christians seems to be more focused on putting themselves above other people because they have the truth, rather than helping anyone in any way. In my opinion, Christianity, and maybe organized religion as a whole, needs to be completely revamped or completely abandoned. I spend three hours at church every Sunday and the only people that may get helped from it are members of the Mormon church because I pay money to a fund to help members. Other than that there's not much that my time or efforts at church or church activities go to actually helping people, which is what I always thought Christianity was supposed to be about.