May 24th, 2009 at 11:08 am
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I just finished watching Jesus Camp on A&E, this documentary about evangelical Christianity as taught to kids at a summer Bible camp in Missouri. It’s amazing how much this film reminded me of my elementary school education. It’s a much more extreme version of CCS, but the main elements were all there: teaching kids to proselytize to their friends, their family, strangers on the street, hand out tracts, teach them that abortion is murder and pray for it to end, decry evolution and the institutions that promote the theory, understand that the devil is hiding in seemingly innocuous places like pop culture and the US government. CCS didn’t have anybody speaking in tongues or mass repenting or crying on the floor, but it had the rest: malleable children, unflinching obedience and the potential to fill their little minds with faith, with Christian values, with whatever other message the teachers wanted to give them.
I’ve said a lot of things about my elementary school/church over the years, none of it very flattering, but a lot more of the concrete details of my Christian youth flooded back to me throughout the movie. The whole film takes on a haunting, “this is how insane our country is” tone, but growing up it was perfectly normal and a lot of it mimicked my childhood mentality perfectly. We pledged allegiance to the Christian flag every morning (which, apparently is different from the Christian flag pledge they do in the movie — CCS did you make that up?!) I tried to save my non-Christian friends and my parents. We sang songs about being Christian soldiers (“Onward Christian Soldiers,” “I’m in the Lord’s Army,” anyone?). I went on a three-day overnight class trip to a Christian camp, which in my childhood I remember as being one of the best weekends I’d ever had. My fourth grade teacher ranted to us about how humans could never be descended from monkeys, asking us how could those scientists degrade humans that way by thinking we came from such a lowly stature. In the third grade, I wrote a position paper called “Abortion: Legal Murder,” not really knowing anything about abortion at all. My sixth grade teacher told us all to tell our parents to vote for Bob Dole, that Clinton’s whole motivation for doing anything was sex (and we couldn’t believe that our sixth grade teacher used the “s word” in class). When I was at Friday night basketball practice where I was a terrible player, I prayed to God to make me a better one. They told us the Smurfs were demonic, the Circle of Life wasn’t real, Halloween was Satan’s holiday, gays were sinners, that if our Buddhist parents ever asked us to pray to a false idol by bowing three times we should refuse.
In retrospect, I don’t really think we were as passionate about the faith and the cause as the kids in the film were – some of us, anyway. We approached it with a quieter curiosity and just wanted our questions addressed. Others I know remained silent atheists through the whole thing. The big difference between us and the Jesus Camp kids, I think, was our parents — a lot of us were Chinese kids from Oakland, some low income. My parents almost never talked to me about God. A lot of the other parents were Buddhists and never really encouraged the kids to follow the school’s teachings beyond strict academics. And maybe that’s what kept us from totally embracing Christianity as it was taught to us.
I’ve gotten over my anti-Christianity backlash from my post-CCS days and I actually think now that organized religion is a great thing if not abused. I think Christianity itself is fine (although I am really curious about this whole gospel of Judas thing). I just don’t really think that kids know one way or the other. I know kids are much smarter than we give them credit for but an eight year old does not have any basis to write a paper calling abortion legalized murder. For the most part, we escaped CCS alive – some of us are still in the church, some are pastors, and others turned a 180 and denounced religion altogether. It’s not the worst thing in the world to grow up in a Christian school, and I think I’ve grown up with some interesting perspectives and experiences because of it — but there is something about a child sitting in school, praying for the Rapture to come, being afraid that their Saturday morning cartoons were Satan’s messages, trying to save their friends and family but not really knowing why, that still disturbs me to no end.
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May 21st, 2009 at 8:41 pm
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Maybe it’s the 80+ degree weather in New York this week, but I’m very happy these days. I’ve found a pleasant peace living alone in my Brooklyn apartment and my little daily routines. I almost don’t even want the subletter to move in. (I already cashed her check though, so oh well.) I like the kids on skateboards yelling down the street, I like the people who turn up their boombox and chat on the stoops on Flatbush and Woodruff, I like the cars blasting reggae at ungodly hours and even the damn ice cream truck that for some reason likes to come around at 10pm. I like cooking messily and yelling obscenities at the TV and playing guitar until past midnight and our newly discovered roof access where you can see Brooklyn stretched out in the light-polluted night.
Summer in New York is going to be swell.
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May 20th, 2009 at 5:38 am
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I have tickets to see Aerosmith with ZZ Top in June.
I have tickets to see Jason Mraz in August.
And I’m heading to LA next week to see my boyfriend and go to the Fleetwood Mac concert.
This summer = awesome.
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May 18th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
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I love the men in my life! Yes, this means you.
I also love America’s Best Dance Crew and the Beat Freaks, but that is a whole different story. I mean, TELL me these girls aren’t amazing:
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May 15th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
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Today I learned that lobsters never age. Or, at least if they do, they age at a rate that is virtually undiscernable to humans. As they get older, they don’t contract more diseases, they don’t lose their sex drives, they don’t slow down. All they do is grow bigger, and eat more, and expand, and molt their shells. The only deaths they seem to have are ones that are inflicted by external forces – predators, being caught and eaten. So theoretically, there could be some lobster out there that is fantastically old and fantastically huge, lumbering around on the ocean floor. It makes me want to stop eating lobsters and just keep one as a pet.
There’s also a song about the ageless wonder of the lobster.
Lobsters are so awesome.
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May 12th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
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Ever since I started listening to Radiolab I’ve been thinking about everything in terms of science. Or, at least, the science they refer to on Radiolab. I keep mulling over the idea that the choices we make are a result of a careful balance between emotion and rationality — the emotional choices take over when our memory capacities are filled. That we’re only one head injury away from being a completely different person. Or my favorite — that time doesn’t really exist and our consciousness is just moving through a predetermined path that is already laid out for us (but there are still infinite parallel universes that contain all the choices we didn’t make in this reality). For a girl like me who’s been rooted mostly in the arts and romantic ideas, it’s a curious new take.
All of these scientific speculations just remind me what a universe we live in, where human beings are something relatively new – where animal instinct and planetary rotation and the tides of nature are things that have existed so long before us and will outlive us so far after we’re nothing but dust. I had a dream not too long ago that I was pregnant and because of it, I wouldn’t be allowed to take a trip into space (in the dream world, it was a recreational activity). I accepted it, but kept thinking about what it would be like thousands of miles high, looking down at this big blue planet from a spacecraft, marveling at how small the world really is. I think that living in this metropolis with every modern convenience and this packed schedule of mine makes it hard to remember every so often that this small little life is a window to witness how spectacularly designed this universe is. Sometimes all I want to do is go to an empty beach, or drive to a hill in the middle of nowhere to look at the stars, and just be overwhelmed.
In the middle of all this, I wonder a lot about our generation, this pool of young twentysomethings that have been made to believe we, we, are somehow special and that we need to “find ourselves,” find our meaning in life. How many people ever really find their meanings in life? Sure, a lot of people I know have — or think they have. This doesn’t mean everybody will, or even has to. Meaningless deaths are not uncommon. It goes even further when you consider how all your emotions and intelligence and memories are just neurological functions — amazing neurological functions (Radiolab makes me aware just how awesome the human brain is), but unromantic neurological functions nonetheless. And then I wonder a lot if my occasional frustrations with the thought of the future, of fulfillment, this dangling threat of the rest of our lives, is because of the sheer narcissism that has been infused into this generation.
One of my coworkers and lunch buddies is a 44-year-old former opera singer and Yale graduate who laments, often, about the decline of American society with modernity, with technology, with this obsession with becoming your own personal star via reality television and YouTube. The rest of us, recent college graduates, usually take offense at this because it’s all we know. After all, it’s easy to brush off those comments as misplaced nostalgia from a bitter middle-ager. But perhaps there’s something to be said here.
Lately I’ve been coming across a lot of articles about “Generation Me” (it’s a book too) and the idea that because we – young idealistic twentysomethings – have grown up being told from all sides, “You are special,” “You can be anything you want to be,” and this is why we end up with the quarter life crisis rampage. That the prospect of self-fulfillment is so central to our life goals and that the sheer volume of choice (and here we come back to a great episode of Radiolab), to put it simply, confuses the shit out of us and makes us crazy. For someone who’s been plagued with life plans and obsessions over a meaningful existence for so long, I don’t doubt that this is real.
So how to reconcile? Not only on a personal level, but how to wrestle with this culture that places so much importance on the tiny, shrimpy little individual in a world that is glittering with so much more? I came into International Affairs in part to try to become a piece of a movement that was outside of this, something built on constant learning and understanding in parts of the world that are so much unlike our own. In more than a “I’m a celebrity and I’m distributing mosquito nets to prevent malaria in Angola” sort of way — not that there’s anything wrong with that. The last thing I want is to agonize over self fulfillment more, but I think just maybe, if I can crawl out of this shell and really witness even a slice of this shifting, thriving, shining world, dip my foot in the water and shade my eyes from the sun, using my puny little human senses in this puny little human lifetime, maybe it will be enough.
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