Jesus Camp (2006) brought back some bitter memories. The documentary follows the experiences of Christian pre-teens in the “Kids on Fire” Pentecostal summer camp at Devil’s Lake, North Dakota. Using various psychological strategies, the people running the camp repeatedly induce altered states of consciousness in their underage charges, inciting ecstasies of glory and guilt, dignity and shame. By teaching them to associate the Bible with bliss and doubt with despondency, the counsellors addict the children to their authoritarian mythos. The camp uses this addiction to shape the children’s inner worlds, teaching them that creationism and George W Bush are godly, while evolution and Harry Potter are evil, and that God wants them to speak in tongues—but not to tell ghost stories. A militaristic subtext runs through the camp’s ideology: the children are on the frontlines of a war between God and Satan. The camp’s founder, Pastor Becky Fischer, is quite clear that such things as abortion and Islam are strategies “the enemy” uses in his battle with heaven, and that children’s souls are the most important targets for both the demonic and the divine.

Like those children, I was once a Biblical literalist; that is, I believed that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God. This changed when, at age 16, I finally read the New Testament from cover to cover, and learned that Judas died in two irreconcilable ways.

In Matthew 27:3-10, Judas throws his 30 pieces of silver at the feet of the Temple priests and goes and hangs himself. The priests buy the field where he committed suicide and name it the Field of Blood. In Acts 1:18-19, Judas uses the money to buy a field. One day he falls down in the field, his belly splits open, and his intestines come gushing out. In this reading, it’s Judas’ gory end that names the field the Field of Blood.

A fatal flaw

There’s no way to harmonize these stories, and believe me, I’ve talked to Biblical literalists who’ve tried. They usually argue that the rope Judas used to hang himself broke, causing him to fall onto rocks that tear his stomach. Even if we force assumptions like this into the text, it doesn’t change the fact that in Matthew, Judas returns his blood money and kills himself, while in Acts he tries to hold onto both his silver and his life.

That I could read the entire New Testament and find only one contradiction reveals the dullness of my adolescent mind. There are contradictions throughout the work.

Here are a few other examples: Matthew and Luke give Jesus very different genealogies, right down to the name of Joseph’s father, who’s named Jacob in Matthew, and Heli in Luke. In Mark, the curtain in the Temple is torn immediately after Jesus dies, but in Luke it’s torn long before, when darkness descends upon the land. Paul’s letters flatly contradict several statements made in Acts about his life, such as his post-conversion attitude towards Jewish Law and his evangelical activities in the cities he visited. Beyond simple contradictions, the New Testament also presents differing accounts of Jesus’ life. Consider the gospels. Neither Mark nor John say anything about Jesus’ virgin birth. Matthew strongly implies that Mary and Joseph lived in Bethlehem throughout Jesus’ childhood, while Luke says that they only travelled there for the imperial census. Mark writes that Jesus’ family responded to his preaching by thinking that he was insane, even though, according to Matthew and Luke, angels visited his parents before he was born, his birth was miraculous, and Herod went on an infanticidal rampage specifically to get rid of him before he reached maturity.

In Mark, Jesus tries to keep his divine identity a secret, so that not even his disciples understand who he is, while in Matthew and Luke, Jesus’ identity is obvious not only to his disciples but to many other people as well, and in John, Jesus proclaims his identity publicly and repeatedly. The gospels also give differing accounts of Jesus’ miracles, as well as the events following his resurrection.

Where skepticism began

None of these inconsistencies caught my eye. No, the stories of Judas’ deaths were the only Biblical blemishes I noticed, but they were enough. I’d found a hairline crack running through the Rock of Eternity. Through that crack seeped all the human things the Biblical literalist fears, like ambiguity, uncertainty, and fallibility.

To understand the impact this had, remember that for a Biblical literalist, the Bible’s perfection gives it absolute authority. All other texts, regardless of their literary, philosophical, or religious merit, are viewed as flawed products of the human imagination. By this reasoning, the Bible is the only solid foundation upon which to build a personal identity. An identity grounded in the Bible supposedly overflows with meaning and moral superiority. The flip side of this belief is the notion that if the Bible were flawed, then we would have nowhere to stand, and nothing that could infuse our lives with dignity and decency, value and virtue. I’m not exaggerating when I say that Judas’ contradictory deaths killed something inside me.

Despite this, I was lucky. Biblical literalism was a mental strait-jacket. After I’d freed myself, my intellect blossomed and my spiritual life deepened. And the jacket was relatively easy to escape. Even though I attended a Pentecostal Sunday School, my religious instructors never once played with my state of consciousness. I was never brought to tears or exorcised, I was never compelled to babble in tongues or lose myself in religious fervour. Though I was indoctrinated, I wasn’t spiritually abused. As a result, my inner world was never toxic enough to thoroughly poison my intellectual development. Thus, when I found a blatant contradiction in the Bible, I could recognize it for what it was and modify my beliefs accordingly.

The children of Jesus Camp may not be so fortunate. Kids on Fire tries to mentally download emotionally-charged mythological schemas capable of overriding their critical faculties. If the download works, then the children will thereafter be unable to tell the difference between facts and emotionally convenient beliefs, between reality and religious fantasy. In later life, this will make them easy prey for the demagogues of the radical Christian right.

Future voters

It’s in the interests of the radical Christian right to drown the intellect in these kinds of emotional tempests, but it’s certainly not in the interests of democracy or of our struggling biosphere. Democratic and ecological accountability both depend upon the critical faculties that let us weed the errors out of our mental gardens. In an age of climate destabilization, the radical Christian right’s attempt to undermine these faculties en masse makes it, as Chris Hedges writes in American Fascism: The Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press, 2006), a “radical evil.” Jesus Camp shows that in this, as with all radical evils, the children are the first to burn.