1. Saw Jesus Camp

2. Read “Through a Glass, Darkly: How the Christian Right is reimagining U.S. history” by Jeff Sharlet, in the current issue of Harper’s

Going into Jesus Camp, I had my reservations. I worried that it would be another pointed confirmation of cosmopolitan Blue-Staters’ worst fears; yet another chance for people on the East Coast and in Western Europe to have a good chuckle about those nutty, misguided fools in the flyover states.

And to some extent, it was that. I sat in a theatre full of young, liberal Minneapolitans who laughed at the wayward provincialism of the people in the film, at the homeschoolers who don’t believe in science and the youth minister who aerosols her frosted hair into submission before blessing her flock’s hands with Nestlé bottled water.

And I laughed with them. But not nearly as much as I cringed at the film’s scenes that clearly weren’t being played for laughs: specifically the ones where children, young children under ten years, were driven to tears and writhing on the floor and speaking in tongues as adults browbeat them and called them sinners and explained that everything they liked in life (Harry Potter, ghost stories, recess, fun) was a direct product of Satan.

That made my face red, made me sink further into my seat, made me grit my teeth, perhaps because it got in and needled at something deeper and personal about my own childhood and the history of my relationship with religion and religious types to a greater degree than I really would have preferred any film was capable.

Needless to say, I did a lot more seat-sinking than chuckling.

The second item is also disturbing, perhaps more intellectually than viscerally. It’s about the attempt on the part of fundamentalist Christians to literally rewrite history, using specially-commissioned textbooks for homeschoolers and religious schools, so that every historical event and person is and was working in the service of, or in reaction to, God’s will. For example, did you know that:

1. The British defeated the Spanish Armada with help from God’s “Protestant wind” so that “the New World would not be overly settled by agents of the Vatican”?

2. The two world wars, the Great Depression, JFK’s assassination, Vietnam, AIDS, 9/11, and Iraq are God’s punishment for the New Deal, Roe v. Wade, and various Supreme Court decisions favoring secular institutions?

3. Stonewall Jackson is a national and religious hero, practically a saint, because he was a civil rights pioneer who taught slaves to read and led a crusade for states’ rights? and that the North was going against God’s will by “striving to alter basic American structures”?

4. Alexis de Tocqueville was an Evangelical Christian in disguise? (Yeah, I don’t get that one either.) (UPDATE: In disguise as a Frenchman, as Meredith helpfully pointed out—but I still don’t get it.)

A good companion piece is Sharlet’s previous feature for Harper’s, about the Rev. Ted “Meth and Male Prostitutes” Haggard, whose appearance in Jesus Camp can only be described as the very quintessence of irony.

I need to go do something fiercely secular. I’m still gritting my teeth.