Fisher is the Pentecostal children’s minister featured in Jesus Camp (2006), a documentary film that shows what happens when impressionable children are given over to devoted fundamentalists armed with smarmy metaphors and cheesy ‘educational’ toys and gearing up for deadly purposes. She’s worth quoting at length:
I can go into a playground of kids that don’t know anything about Christianity, lead them to the Lord in a matter of, just, no time at all, and -- and just moments later, they can be seeing visions and hearing the voice of God. Because they’re so open.
They are so usable in Christianity. If you look at the world’s population, one third of that 6.7 billion people are children under the age of 15. One third. Where should we be putting our efforts? Where should we be putting our focus? I’ll tell you where our enemies are putting it. They’re putting it on the kids. They’re going into the schools. You go into Palestine and I can take you to some websites that will absolutely shake you to your foundations and show you photographs of where they’re taking their kids, the camps like we take our kids, the bible camps, and they’re putting hand grenades in their hands, they’re teaching them how to put on bomb belts, they’re teaching them how to use rifles, they’re teaching them how to use machine guns. It’s no wonder, with that kind of intense training and discipling [sic], that those young people are ready to kill themselves for the cause of Islam. (Reflective pause)
I wanna see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as the young people are to the cause of Islam. I wanna see them as radically laying down their lives for the Gospel as they are over in Pakistan, in Israel, in Palestine and all those different places, you know, because we have – excuse me, but we have the Truth. (chuckle, smile).
The suggestion that we need to lead our children to the Lord so that they, like the children of Allah, will be prepared to lay down their lives for the Gospel should make all but the most cold-hearted fundamentalists shudder. Let’s see these children, for a moment, through Becky Fischer’s eyes: armed with grenades, strapped to bombs and raising rifles, prepared to kill and die for an absurd vision of the truth embedded into their psyche before they had a chance to think for themselves -- embedded so deeply that they never can escape. Considered in terms of their epistemology, the truths taught to the children of the Lord and to the children of Allah are exactly the same – they are products not of rational discourse but of revelation. If Becky Fisher’s dreams come true, these children will soon be staring each other down, armed to the teeth, mirror-image terrorists for the divine.
Fisher is not the only Christian leader who recognizes the stunning potential of children. In Tranforming Children into Spiritual Champions, George Barna, a renowned market researcher serving the evangelically inclined, demonstrates that the 'greatest probability of someone embracing Jesus as his or her Savior' occurs at the ages between five and twelve. Materials published by the Child Evangelism Fellowship identify children as a "harvest field … virtually untouched" and takes issue with "subtle worldly philosophies [that] have persuaded the majority of Christians that children cannot make a decision for Christ until they can reason." The Child Evangelism Fellowship is the largest child ministry in the world, and in a country that separates Church and State, announces boldly on its website:
Are you a strategist at children's ministry? Are you focused on the best location to reach the most children? Let me tell you about the triple-point-place for reaching children -- the public school!Last year in South Carolina alone, the Child Evangelism Fellowship had 183 after-hours ‘Good News Clubs’ in public schools, reaching 13,524 children. The Fellowship also sends teams of missionaries into America’s playgrounds and housing projects in search of the very young, and last year claimed to have saved over 1 millions souls, world-wide. (other sources: Rachel Aviv, 'Like I was Jesus: How to bring a nine-year old to Christ,' Harper’s Magazine, August 2009)
The goal for us should not be simply to fill the minds of children with a different ideology, equally dogmatic, before the fundamentalists get their chance. Rather, we need to teach them to think critically about what they read and hear; they need to be encouraged to evaluate and judge for themselves. That itself is enough to inoculate them against many ideological diseases, religious and otherwise.
In the spirit of such an education, I offer here a modest didactic rhyme – something for the child in us all. It was written a few months ago in the shadow the evangelist’s tent in Savu Savu and grooves on the Old Testament tale of Abraham and Isaac. My editorial and interpretive voice in the poem is obvious; but at the same time, if anyone chooses to compare the poem with the original text, I’m confident that they’ll find I’ve treated the Bible fairly.
My hope now is that the esteemed Dr. Fishy will set the piece to music. And if not them, I’ll settle for the Great Big Sea.
Abraham the Patriarch (Genesis 11-24)
Abraham the Patriarch, the Bible does record
Had an evil voice inside his head that he thought was the Lord’s
The voice told Abraham that he would father a great Nation,
That he would a be famous man, a blessing to Creation
His descendants would be countless, as numerous as the stars
And they’d fill the land of Canaan as wide as it was far
Had Abraham the wherewithal to see a therapist,
He might have actually learned that he was clinically depressed
If he had gotten treatment and the pills that he required
His self-deluded grandeur might eventually have expired
But as it was he met the Priest Melchizedek instead
Who told him he was blessed and took a tenth of all he had
The voice inside his head no doubt filled Abraham with pride,
It made him strut and swagger; it made him glow inside
But all the same, he surely felt a cruel and nagging fear
For he was getting older and his end was drawing near
And yet had not a single son to bring his heart some cheer.
Still the voice kept telling him, his seed would spread and grow
Finally, Abraham spoke up: ‘How can I really know?!’
Now you and I would probably seek out answers in a book
And not the guts of animals, where Abraham did look
He got a heifer and a ram, a she-goat and a dove
And cut them into pieces to delight the Lord above
And then he saw a vision, which the voice of God explained
‘Your descendants will be many, but they’ll need to feel some pain
They’ll be oppressed and kept as slaves for some four hundred years
And then I’ll give them all that land I’ve promised for your heirs’
With such a change of plan what was a Patriarch to think?
I suspect that such malevolence would have driven me to drink
Yet Abraham was different, and he got all excited
He looked at his wife Sarah and his passion re-ignited
But no matter how he loved his wife, she wouldn’t be a mother
So he gave up and looked around and tried it with another
Then one day the servant-girl gave Abraham a son
Ishmael they called the boy, but he was not to be the one
‘Try again with Sarah,’ said the voice of the divine,
‘She will bear the special son that I have had in mind.
When Abraham was ninety-nine he once more heard the voice
That tortured him throughout his life by promising him boys
Again the voice told Abraham, his destiny was great
But then God added something weird for him to contemplate
‘You’ll be the father not of one but of great many nations,
‘But only if you honor me by your self-mutilation.’
So Abraham whipped out his knife and off his foreskin went
Then put that blade to all the men who shared his bloody tent.
So Sarah finally birthed a boy, and Abraham rejoiced
They cut the baby’s foreskin off without giving him a choice
They named the baby Isaac and had a giant celebration
And then got rid of Ishmael, expelled him from the nation
For many years it seems the voice left Abraham alone
And he was finally happy, with a son to call his own
But then one night the voice of God, so cruel and so malicious
Demanded an obedience most horrible and vicious
‘Abraham, sweet Abraham,’ said the voice inside his head
‘You know that son you love so much? I want to see him dead
‘Take him to the mountains and then slay him with your knife
‘And lay him on my altar as a burning sacrifice.’
Old Abraham he proved himself a solid man of faith
Not for a single moment did he doubt or hesitate
He had no words of protest, no need for understanding
He would do exactly what the madness was demanding
He gathered up his son and all the firewood he’d need
And went into the mountains to do the bloody deed
He trussed up little Isaac and laid him on the altar
Raised his knife up to the sky, and never once did falter
Suddenly an angel’s voice was carried on the breeze
‘Hey, I’m here to tell you, God likes what he sees.’
‘He loves your blind obedience, the way you’re always on your knees
‘So now he will reward you -- there’s no need to kill your son,
‘Kill him something else instead, and then we’ll call it done.’
I guess that you could say the story has a happy ending
But as far as Abraham’s concerned, there's no use in pretending
That he should be a hero and a man to emulate,
A person to look up to, someone to venerate
Abraham the Patriarch was a man afraid of doubt
A man who did not like to think or work his problems out
He surrendered moral judgment and any sense of shame
Denied responsibility and never took the blame
His faith and his obedience, his answer to God’s call
Enabled him to do things repugnant to us all
That’s what makes him scary -- a sociopath, a freak
A man who was as dangerous as he was spiritually weak.
As for God himself, he comes off as a nasty bloke,
A deity of fickle mind who likes the cruelest jokes
More likely still the voice of God’s an ailment of the brain
A pious inspiration for the criminally insane
O.K., fun's over -- let's all go down to the basement for tea and cookies.
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