Roll up your sleeping bags and grab a flashlight because Cult Favorite is going to camp! Next stop on our summer road trip is the 2006 doc Jesus Camp, which follows a few kids as they attend the Kids on Fire School of Ministry. Led by Becky Fischer, the charismatic camp fuses God and country, drawing portraits of “us” and “them” with primary colors of red, white, and blue. The film, meanwhile, fuses different branches of evangelicalism and plops them squarely into rural America in its own process of stacking up insiders and outsiders. The concept of spiritual warfare involves skirmishes over classification, so we think through some that show up in the film re: relationships and distinctions posed between learning/indoctrination; religion/culture; belief/politics. The rhetoric and rituals reflected by these categories also shape them, so let’s make sure to pack some critical thinking skills along with our bug spray. We also kindly ask that no one forgets s’mores stuff, plz and thx.

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Production assistance from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama.

Theme music produced with Udio.