Jesuit prayer and the Jesus Camp kids

Recently PBS presented the 2006 documentary Jesus Camp about young children brought up in an intense charismatic environment. I found myself very much bothered by it, in part by the "in your face" activism that it encouraged and in part by the comment of one young girl about "dead churches"--those in which congregations were essentially passive--"where God would not want to go. " I've been trying to think through my reactions. After all, had I not been raised in the hothouse environment of a Catholic school with as rigid a picture of right and wrong as was shown in the film--and as a young Jesuit had I not been trained in a spirituality intended to be as transforming as the "spiritual exercises" engaged in by these children?

Now, of course, I am looking at things with a far greater sense of moral ambiguity and, I hope, a much better sense of respect for how intelligent and sincere individuals might very well not share the same views I would hold about right and wrong when in fact I am able to decide on such views. The Jesus Camp kids were above all fanatics in the making, and I kept getting an undertone of Christian militancy that provided an unsettling parallel to other bits of film I had seen about young Muslim kids training for jihad.

The more I thought about it the more I began to appreciate just what had been the tone of the Ignatian spirituality presented to me as a novice during the intense month of reflection known as the Long Retreat. One thing that simply would not have happened is that any of us would have been allowed to start speaking in tongues--a staple of the Jesus Camp experience--or otherwise let our emotions run wild. Our chapel would have been the ultimate of the "dead church" disdained by the girl in the film. And this is just what it should have been.

The idea was that through our meditation, above all the intense effort to place oneself at the scene in considerations of the life of Jesus, there would be an appropriate level of response--ideally, a determination to identify with Jesus even to the point of being ready to take up the cross ourselves. However, what this would mean in practice was a readiness to do the ordinary things in what really would be an extraordinary way. It was a spirituality, then, that has a strong parallel with the training of a Zen monk. Our satori would be demonstrated by our actions, not by some emotional display.

Much of the wisdom of Loyola was in the recognition that there could be counterfeits to the action of the Holy Spirit. An important aspect of the Long Retreat was this effort to understand what he called the discernment of spirits. And it was this that was so markedly absent in what I saw in the documentary. Impressionable children were encouraged to trust their own emotional responses in a highly structured group setting. One thing that was not going to be allowed was that they would begin to think for themselves. As Jesuits, despite all the emphasis in Loyola's Spiritual Exercises on "thinking with the church," the very effort at discernment meant that we would be expected to ask questions. With the training that we would then receive as we went through our studies for the priesthood we would find these questions answered. Obviously, since there are so many of us who are no longer Jesuits, this did not always happen, but the importance of the process remains one of the lasting things I took from my years in the Society.