JC in the Hizzee

My atheist friends here will be happy to know that I had an all-Jesus entertainment weekend, between finishing Harry Potter 7 and watching what has to be the best horror movie of the last decade: the documentary Jesus Camp. Truly creepy. Is this what Frances means when she describes a "healthy" development of doctrine-centered faith in modern religion?

Jesus Camp focuses on an evangelical summer camp in Devil's Lake, ND run by Reverend Becky, who believes that Christians should refashion their faith on the model of Hamas, quite literally celebrating Palestinian suicide bombers as positive role models. Pre-pubescent kids show up for prophecy training: they speak in tongues, dance to Christian rap, and worship before a cardboard cutout of George W. (hello, graven image), screaming "one nation under God!" and "righteous judges!" at the top of their cute little lungs. One camp leader gives them hammers and prompts them to destroy porcelain cups with the word "government" written on them. For good measure, they make a pilgrimage to Colorado Springs to get all inspirational with Ted Haggard before trooping to Washington for some missionary work. The best character may be little Rachel, an adorably sweet Raggedy Ann girl who seethes with hatred for "dead churches" and dreams of running a conversion-oriented nail salon. Approaching some elderly black men in a park, she asks them where they think they're going when they die. "Heaven" says the man. "Are you sure?" she asks incredulously. Walking away, she whispers, "I think they were Muslims!"

One of the funniest things about JC is the anti-Harry Potter sermonizing, punctuated by tirades about "warlocks" and the devil. This seems to be where at least some of the kids draw the line against the brainwashing, as one indicates in an aside to the camera. I note the irony here b/c if you've read HP7 (SPOILER ALERT), you know that Rowling goes all C.S. Lewis on us. All we're missing is the talking lion. I'm really curious how JKR's non-Xian readers will relate to the hard core Christology of this book, whether it's the long disquisitions on the status of the soul or the sacrificial death and resurrection scene "at the close." It hasn't really been hard to notice the Christian value system JKR has promoted throughout the series, but nowhere before was it as overt as this, a little much even for me. So on the pop culture acceptability scale, Rev. Becky apparently thinks Christian rap is OK ("JC is in da Houuuuse!"), but please, please, stop the kids before they READ.

Of course, JKR is a liberal Christian who takes occasional shots at George W., as in the opening lines of HP6 where the Brit. Prime Minister dreads a phone conversation with a "wretched man" who is "President of a far distant country." In HP7, Voldemort basically decides that he wants to be Dick Cheney, running the Ministry of Magic from behind the scenes, manipulating the dimwitted new puppet Minister, Pius Thicknesse. Hmm. . . . I wonder who that's supposed to be. She also generally presents her religiosity as a manifestation of moral choice in light of human mortality rather than as pious sermonizing about the power of prayer or as doctrinal rigidity, making her faith unrecognizable to our right-wing cognoscenti.

For what it's worth, I thought HP7 was a patchy read. As we all know, JKR ain't Shakes, or even JRRT for that matter. Her gravest writing sin, for my taste, is her inability to let the reader figure anything out for him- or herself. Every new plot revelation has to be endlessly chewed over by her main characters just to make sure you get the point. The opening scene in HP7--the murder of a muggle-studies teacher--is cliched action picture stuff, the book rambles too much in the middle, and Voldemort has always lacked something as a villain. I'll call it "subtlety." In HP6, we get all Freudian and find out that his mommy didn't love him and that he was a budding sociopath even before he started tinkering with his soul. It seems to me that such radical-evil psychologizing runs counter the key Rowling theme that moral judgment and choice shape the soul and its destiny. Ralph Fiennes makes him notably better in the films than he is on the page.

Still, having read all the Potters and embraced the characters, I greatly enjoyed HP7, especially the action scenes, which are the best in the series. There weren't any real surprises to those who had connected the dots from earlier books, and the only really moving/surprising death was that of an elf. But HP7 was satisfying in that Frodo-trudging-up-Mount-Doom kind of way. I'd even say that, as a series closer, it beats Return of the King, which suffers a bit more from sameness and drags through its coda. Plus, I'm sure it will drive Rev. Becky to even battier heights to hear from future campers that the series was Christian allegory from the start.