More on Evangelical Extremism...

Sources and inspirations for this week's 'toon:

• The main inspiration was Jesus Camp, which I rented over the weekend. My reaction to this flick?
  
  Yikes.
  
  I usually don't get a visceral fright from horror movies... they're just kinda boring to me. I guess the scene in "The Ring" where the kid crawls out of the TV is pretty scary... and the scene in Hannibal where he feeds Ray Liotta his own brain made it hard for me to stomach food for a while. I also found Requiem for a Dream disturbing on many levels.
  
  But this movie... holy freaking crap. Let's just say I couldn't watch the whole thing all the way through in one sitting. It's that messed up. Of course, mostly because it ain't no horror movie... just the everyday lives of Evangelical extremists in America.
  
  As many have noted, by far the funniest part of the movie is at the beginning of the camp, when the white-bread freakazoid adults are getting their little minions pumped up to a Christian techno-rap tune with lyrics like "J.C.'s in da house!" and "We're kickin' it for CHRIST!"
  
  The laughs stop there, though...


• Check out a couple of articles by Chris Hedges, whose book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America just came out in January. The first is on the radical Christian Right's use of middle and lower-class despair as a recruiting tool; for example, playing on the guilt and shame of women who've had abortions for the purpose of furthering an extremist ideology. In the second, Hedges talks about the radical Christian Right's infiltration of the military and police, which he says "signals the final and perhaps most deadly stage in the long campaign... to dismantle America's open society and build a theocratic state." While this may seem somewhat alarmist on the surface, he does make a compelling point that the "final aesthetic" of the radical Christian Right is violence.


• Check out Susan Jacoby on the plight of atheists in our society.
  
  See also Boltgirl on Makeover Ministries' movement to "inspire women to look good from the inside-out and to be Supermodels for Christ"... according to founder Tammy Bennett, who decks herself out "from head to toe in silver." Wow...