Fundamentalist Evangelicals

I watched a fairly disturbing movie Tuesday in class. It’s called Jesus Camp. I know this shouldn’t surprise me because I’ve witnessed some of the behaviors in this movie first hand, but it does. Let me just clarify that I didn’t actually watch the entire thing, I’ll be doing that in the near future – if I can stomach it. The professor played parts of the movie she felt were especially disturbing, and I can understand why.

Firstly, this movie is about a Pentecoastal group and is focusing on the “Kids on Fire School of Ministry”, and obviously from the name, this focuses on teaching kids. In this movie, and according to Becky Fischer, she likes to grab the kids while they’re young, and I’m talking anywhere from 7-10 years old. These kids are taught through fear of hell and they have dedicated their lives to the church and to Jesus, but these people take it to an extreme level.

Here’s what their website says about them:

The purpose of Kids In Ministry International is to impart vision to children and adults of how God sees children as His partners in ministry worldwide. The purpose is also therefore to teach, train, and equip children to do the work of ministry and release them in their giftings and callings.

It is also to teach, train, and equip adults to minister to children, teaching them how to train and release children into the things of the Spirit and to find an active place in the body of Christ in all areas of ministry. Those areas include evangelism, mission, the gifts of the Spirit, worship, hearing the voice of God, prayer, healing the sick, and more.

These purposes are to be accomplished through a variety of forms including but not limited to curriculum, books, other written materials, seminars, conferences, schools of equipping, crusades, outreaches around the world, tapes, videos, and the internet.

So okay, you’re preaching to your kids, you’re trying to teach them about your religious beliefs and trying to bring them up morally right, that’s all fine and dandy, but when 75% of kids who are home schooled are Evangelicals (as outlined in the movie), I think there’s a problem there. When you’re teaching children as young as 7 that abortion is bad, before they even truly know what sex is, and telling them that abortion is killing babies and that only 1/3 of your friends are with you today because their mommies kill 2/3 of them, I think there’s a problem. When little girls are not allowed to dance or enjoy themselves like most little girls do because they can’t “dance of the flesh” and can only “dance for God”, I think there’s a problem.  When they talk about not wanting to be judged by the public for their beliefs yet turn around and judge everyone else by telling them that their way is the only way and everyone else will burn in hell for their beliefs, I think there’s a problem.

I was watching this movie and these kids were shaking, talking in tounges, and crying because of all the people who are demoralizing “this great nation” by getting an abortion, and it just seemed to me as if this was a form of abuse. These people are forcing their children to grow up ahead of their time and you can see this in how most of these “kids” were acting like little adults, and this bothered me. What happened to trying to maintain your childrens innocence for as long as possible? These kids have been stripped of that at an early age and are learning about death and what their parents consider social wrongs. They’re teaching their girls that they have no right over their own bodies and everything they do they must do for God or else it’s a sin.

Worst of all is that they teach that science is a falsehood, that it’s there only to try to overturn God’s word and their way is the only true way to God. I have such a problem with this frameset because their religion is only a fraction of all religions that exist and they’re not even the ones with the most worshippers.  How can they discredit the other religions in the world by making such blanket statements as “our ways is the only true way.”

These people are raising these children to be “Soldiers for God” and Becky’s reasoning behind this is something along the lines of, “These people in the Middle East are teaching their children to be terrorist and they send them to camps and show them how to use a hand grenade and how to strap on a bomb belt. Well we need to teach our kids to be soldiers too. We need to teach them to be warriors in the name of Jesus Christ.”

To compare the way you are teaching your kids the bible to terrorists says a lot, in my opinion. Not to mention, they’re not taught any differently. What she fails to realize is that the terrorists are grabbing the kids and putting them in camps to be terrorist for all the same reasons these people are fanatically teaching these kids.  They’re turning the kids into terrorists because of religion and all the wrongs they see in the world.  Becky doesn’t mention this little fact in this documentary and I truly think it’s because she’s ignorant of the fact that what she’s doing is a form of terrorism and the same kind of terrorism that caused 9/11 because she’s preaching to these kids a fundamentalist type of Christianity that is just taking every single word in the bible literally and warping them to fit their needs.

These kids are not taught diversity nor tolerance. As a matter of fact, one of the children in the film says, “whenever I’m with someone who isn’t Christian I feel weird.” This is anti-tolerance. This is teaching your kids ignorance. I can understand being proud of your faith and worshipping your God in the way that you’ve been taught and in the way that feels comfortable to you, but to teach that this is the only way and everyone else is going to burn in hell is ridiculous.

Something else that caught my attention in the movie is that this same kid who was talking about he’s weirdness while being around other people who aren’t Christian also said that he’d been saved at 5 and was happy about that and was miserable before he was saved. How can ANYONE truthfully say that they were “saved” at 5? They haven’t truly lived yet! They haven’t been tempted by things other than toys and punching your younger sibling, or maybe the occasional innocent theft of something from the store, but no real big issues. That to me shows me that this child has no clue what life has in store and the only thing he is doing is verbally vomiting what he hears at home.

The mentality of this group is that of a cult. They grab people on the street when they are most vulnerable and preach to them. They say that the only way to God and the only way to salvation is their way and anyone who says differently is heretical and is going to burn in hell, just like they will if they don’t listen to them and start walking the straight path. They grab people like this one woman who’s husband was in the army and had gone off to war, kids, people who have experienced some kind of loss or are at a turning point in their life. They prey on the weak in order to preach to them and “save” them to earn brownie points with God.

What I want to know is why are these people so concerned with everyone else’s salvation and not their own? Why don’t they just worry about their own place in heaven and let me and everyone else worry about their own?  If these people are right and everyone else is wrong about which is the “right” way well to God, at least the rest of us are going to be having a grand ol’ time together in hell because the minority who believe this extreme view of Christianity are just that: the minority.

I found this showing of the movie on Google videos.  Play it when you have some time and see what I’m talking about.  As usual, I love comments, so comment away.

 

 

Rights for All: Married or Not

Susie Bright had a great write-up that starts in on the gay marriages in California and then evolves into this wonderful article that states the reasons why people want to get married in the first place.  Below are some of my favorite portions of the article.

For some people, a marriage proposal, more than anything else, means, ‘I Love You, Above All Others, You are My Destiny.” What they want, more than anything, is that emotional dedication. They will find temporary succor in a wedding, but if they’re captive to their own demons, that insecurity will never leave them. [emphasis mine]

 

How do you make your lover feel secure — and what part is their responsibility? You can never reassure an insatiable lover enough; and conversely, there are spouses who are such liars and cheats that they would put King Solomon on edge with their antics.

Some lovers, who are in a financially unequal relationships, want legal security. They don’t want to be discounted as a SAHM or dedicated muse, if the shit hits the fan.

Then there’s the unexpected illnesses, deaths, suicides, that beg for the protection of lover-positive law. Some of the most brutal cases of injustice I’ve witnessed were instances when one partner lost her beloved suddenly, and the long-estranged “blood family” came swooping in, and took everything away, from snapshots to the family car.[emphasis mine]

For all these reasons, I embrace an evenhanded marital law, the one decent thing a wedding provides.

Justice is direct; it’s rather beautiful to behold — but the romantic bundle that often goes along with people’s hitching papers is another beast entirely. It’s probably worth a few heart-to-hearts to get to the bottom of it.

“What do I want this marriage? What are my worst fears — and most delicate hopes?” If you can’t bare your breast about these things, it’s probably a bad time to get married.

…

But from the other side of the deathbed, I know that being a fierce advocate for my dear ones, to keep them out of pain, to speak for them when they can’t, to rattle the cage when they are too weak — that’s something I’ll always treasure, and fight to protect. It doesn’t mean “marriage,” per se, it means legal respect for the diversity of our chosen families. You can keep the cake-topper; I’ll take the equality.[emphasis mine]

I want to make a couple of comments to those chosen emphasized statements.  Firstly, I’m one of those that wants to get married.  I’ve been married before and I probably should have learned my lesson from that marriage about all the problems that there are in marriages because I feel that I got married to my first husband for all the wrong reasons.  I feel that he changed a lot after we were married and he wasn’t the same, loving, nurturing man that I knew when he proposed to me.  Maybe it was the fact that I pulled a “Carrie” à la Sex & The City and made this BIG deal about our wedding day when maybe it was really something he may not have wanted but never said anything because he wanted to make me happy.  Maybe it’s because he was still trying to show me all his strong points to keep me but once he started getting more comfortable in our relationship, the real Him came out.  I’m not entirely sure, but I do know that we were both at fault.  I do know we were both equally wrong in the reasons why our marriage failed and I do not want to make those same mistakes again.

The divorce that I went through killed me because I was one of the many children of the 70’s and 80’s that was brought up watching movies like Snow White and Cinderella, so I had this notion that marriage was supposed to be a timeless thing, even though I watched my own parents divorce.  I didn’t want that for myself.  I wanted the fantasy that my grandmother had in meeting the right man at 13 and staying with him until he died at 71.

But is this really a “happy” fantasy?   In watching my grandmother’s marriage, she never worked, my grandfather took care of everything for her, all she had to do was keep the house clean, take care of the kids, do all the domestic work, and was my grandfathers’ secretary for his at-home business.  But was she “happy” with this arrangement?  I don’t think so, but I don’t think she’ll ever say otherwise.  I see a lot of the same concepts from the Feminine Mystique in my grandmother, but for some reason she never conquered these things.  Even when she’s been freed from her chains by the death of my grandfather, she still won’t do for herself and I can’t quite figure out why.  Is it just that she’s become so accustomed to doing things for everyone else for so long that now she just doesn’t know what to do with herself or is it that she’s afraid of what’s out there since she hasn’t really been exposed to the outside world on her own?  I wish I could get the answers to these questions and I wish I could make my grandmother see how wonderful it is to be free and how liberating it is to be able to go wherever you want without having someone constantly down your throat telling you what to do, but I can’t convince her of the positive qualities of the freedom that I have.

So why do I want to get married again and have the possibility of going through the mess of a divorce?  I’m a bleeding romantic.  This is a huge flaw of mine.  I believe in the romanticism of being told “I will love you for the rest of my days” and as much as this scares Susie, I find it terribly romantic. Some of the other reasons I want to get married is pretty much outlined above in the article.  I want to have children and with children I feel I would need a certain amount of security in case something were to happen to my lover for my sake and for the sake of our kids.  As it stands right now, the only way for me to attain this amount of security in the great state of Florida is to be married.  If I could have all this without actually getting married, I probably would, but in truth – as I stated above – I’m a romantic and would love nothing more than to have a man pledge his eternal love to me and I to him.

What I understand from this article is that should you chose to get married, that’s great, but that everyone – whether they’re married or not – should have the same security within their relationship and should be afforded the same rights as those who are married when they have made the decision to be domestic partners, even if they don’t want to go through the entire marriage process.