"Jesus Camp." This is the name of an edifying documentary about American evangelicals, released in France on April 18. It follows the "faith formation" of children aged 8 to 12 from families belonging to the evangelical movement. They attend catechism classes given by a missionary, a Bush fan, whose words are chilling. The poor children would love to read Harry Potter, like their little friends, but the catechist strictly forbids it, pointing out, without laughing, that wizards are the enemies of God and that "in the Old Testament, Harry Potter would have been put to death." The camera then captures a brief moment of happiness: a child of divorced parents mischievously confides to his neighbor that he was able to see the DVD of the latest installment... at his father's house! But the condemnation of the paper wizard's crimes is nothing compared to the brainwashing these children are subjected to at the summer camp. The entire American conservative agenda is covered, and in the worst taste: a visit from a cardboard President Bush whom they are made to greet as the new Messiah; a distribution of small plastic fetuses so that they realize the horror of abortion; a radical critique of Darwinian theories on the evolution of species... All this in a permanent atmosphere of carnival, applause and singing in languages. At the end of the documentary, the catechist is accused by a journalist of carrying out a veritable brainwashing of the children. The question does not shock her at all: "Yes," she replies, "but Muslims do exactly the same thing with their children." Islam is one of the obsessions of these pro-Bush evangelicals. A surprising scene closes the film: a little missionary girl, who must be 10 years old, approaches a group of black people in the street to ask them "where they think they will go after death." The answer leaves her speechless. "They're sure they're going to heaven... even though they're Muslims," she confides to her young missionary friend. "They must be Christians," he concludes after a moment of hesitation. These people are "evangelical" only in name. Their sectarian (we are the true chosen ones) and warlike (we are going to dominate the world to convert it) ideology is the antithesis of the message of the Gospels.
We also end up being disgusted by their obsession with sin, especially sexual sin. We tell ourselves that this insistence on condemning sex (before marriage, outside of marriage, between people of the same sex) must hide many repressed impulses. What just happened to Reverend Ted Haggard, the charismatic president of the National Evangelical Association of America, which has 30 million members, is the perfect illustration. We see him in the film haranguing children. But what the film doesn't say, because the scandal came afterward, is that this herald of the fight against homosexuality was denounced, a few months ago, by a Denver prostitute, as a particularly assiduous and perverse client. After denying the facts, the pastor finally admitted his homosexuality, "this filth" of which he claims to have been a victim for years in a long letter sent to his followers to explain his resignation. This lying and hypocritical America, that of Bush, is frightening. However, we must avoid unfortunate confusions. True mirrors of the Afghan Taliban, these Christian fundamentalists, locked in their poor certainties and their frightening intolerance, do not represent all of the approximately 50 million American evangelicals, who, it must be remembered, were mostly hostile to the war in Iraq. Let us also be careful not to identify these God-crazed people with French evangelicals, who have been rooted in France for sometimes more than a century and who today number more than 350,000 across 1,850 places of worship. Their emotional fervor and their proselytism inspired by American megachurches can upset us. This is no reason to equate them with dangerous sects, as the public authorities have too easily done over the past ten years. But this documentary shows us that the certainty of "possessing the truth" can quickly tip people who are probably perfectly well-intentioned into hateful sectarianism.