I went to the premiere of the amazing and brilliant Jesus Camp last night and I had to cover my head with my jacket during part of it because the speaking in tongues, the terrifying the children with how Satanic they secretly are for being children, the freaky comandeering of emotion and spirituality into this apalling rhetoric of a punishing God and a constant war with the Devil, all of it I spent serious time with as a child. Even back in the mid-eighties, the Jesus warrior scary radical evangelicals were taking over small, normal churches, like the Presbyterian church in my town which had always been a sane, down-to-earth kind of place until then. I haven't seen this world in full force since then, since I was maybe 11 or 12, when I decided to get myself out of there and ended up in a preppy boarding school in Connecticut. Which was a terrifying place in its own way, but there Satan was just a bulimic heiress kleptomaniac from Greenwich who wouldn't stop playing her Crosby Stills and Nash.
I tried to get at in my novel Girly that this space the born-agains open up is extremely feminine and plugged in to the spiritual in a way that most Americans simply cannot access any other way--those elements, which we want so badly, have been excised from our culture. I'm not talking about the larger scope necessarily even: the 5000 years of patriarchy that has systematically repressed the feminine. I'm talking about even 30-odd years ago there was a Zeppelin concert you could go to, that kind of feminine, ecstatic space, and I'm not sure that's around so much anymore now that we have organized and pared down all of our arts to such a degree, now that their is so little space for anything but the blockbuster in all of our art forms.
Even 15 years ago you could go on a road trip and not see these mcmansions and townhomes and endless endless applebees everywhere--you could venture into wild space, it still existed in front of us and in our imagination. The filmmakers start Jesus Camp with shots of strip malls and that is exactly right--the evangelicals provide something ecstatic and messy and beyond all this ugliness. I'm sad to say don't think the Democrats have anything to compete with that.