Suffer Little Children

The great American tradition of celebrating family values by dumping the brats at summer camp gains a new twist in a documentary about the charmingly-named Kids on Fire camp at Devil's Lake, North Dakota. The website of Pastor Becky Fischer, who founded this particular dupe factory, notes that "We believe that childhood is the time that God designed for people to receive the gospel." Pastor Becky, ex-motel manager, ex-radio station manager and ex-sign shop owner, apparently specialises in telling seven-to-twelve-year-olds that they are hypocrites and phonies and that "This is a sick old world. Kids, you got to change things. This means war." Gospel, I seem to recall, means "good news". A cardboard cutout of George W Bush is utilised in prayer meetings; I am not certain of the Pentecostal churches' position on idolatry, but in this particular case it appears encouragingly flexible.

The film has been criticised on a Christian website as "a sarcastic documentary that paints evangelical, fundamentalist, charismatic, and politically concerned Christians as very shrill, warlike and dangerous", when of course they are nothing of the kind. "I want to see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as the young people are to the cause of Islam," Pastor Becky, fisher of men's children, tells the camera in her no doubt calm, peaceable and trustworthy fashion. "I want to see them radically laying down their lives for the gospel, as they are over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine." Of course, it is possible that this quote was taken out of context: "They're out to show the most dramatic, exotic, extreme things they found in my ministry," she said of the film-makers. "I'm not ashamed of those things, but without context, it's really difficult to defend what you're seeing on the screen."

The Reverend Ted Haggard, speaking for the National Association of Evangelicals, expressed concern that "those on the far left" will utilise the film to "reinforce their most negative stereotypes of Christian believers". The talk of war, he said, was allegorical. "It doesn't mean we're going to establish a theocracy and force people to obey what they think is God's law." No doubt the seven-to-twelve-year-old phonies and hypocrites, crying for salvation in the context of an image of the War President His Very Own Self, will be made well aware of the distinction.