It felt absolutely genuine and sincere, as I’m sure it did for the children in the documentary. I would have been insulted and angry at the suggestion. The ecstatic responses, the stock phrases used in prayers, the praying in tongues, the religious gestures – these kids learn by imitation.īut I used to be one of those kids, and it didn’t feel like I was imitating anyone. When I watch Jesus Camp now, I think the same thing most viewers probably do: Those kids are just imitating their parents and church leaders. But you are also watching someone talking like they’re trying to win a game of Pentecostal Cliche Bingo. Around 45 minutes into the film, when Levi is preaching, you might think you are watching an unusually articulate child. That and the fact – how did I not notice this before? – that Pentecostals speak almost exclusively from some kind of unwritten Jesus Phrasebook. There’s a kind of family resemblance that comes from listening to the same style of preacher all the time. One of the things I notice is that the cadences and rhythms the kids use when talking about God are similar to the ones I see in childhood footage of me. I was older than the kids in Jesus Camp, but I see myself in every one of them. I spent three successive summers at American Bible camps in my teens – Tulsa, Oklahoma and Fort Worth, Texas in 1999 Warrenton, Missouri in 2000 and Dallas and somewhere in Arkansas in 2001. I moved in the same Pentecostal circles as Becky Fischer.
If you’d like to get to know me better, watch Jesus Camp. But there’s part of me that wonders if I was really watching it for the first time, and it just felt familiar because this was my life. Presumably, I did watch it once and just can’t remember when or where.
Then a few scenes passed, and I continued getting the same sense of deja vu. But when it began, I recognised the footage, and assumed I must have seen a trailer.
I have absolutely no memory of watching it the first time. I say watched Jesus Camp for the second time. So you see, I wasn’t kidding when I wrote “ I could have been a suicide bomber.”