The Kids on Fire Camp: Examining Fascist Indoctrination in American Youth

Kids on Fire School of Ministry was a Pentecostal summer camp located in Devils Lake, North Dakota, and run by Becky Fischer. “There are two kinds of people in the world, those who love Jesus and those who don’t,” says a mother of children who attend the camp. At the camp in North Dakota, children of very young ages are sent on an emotional rollercoaster that requires them to repent for their sins and stand against such issues as abortion and global warming. 

Children are then made to feel guilty about not being Christian enough. They are indoctrinated to “take back America for Christ” and become “warriors of god.”

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“Where should we be putting our focus? I’ll tell you where our enemies are putting it: they're putting it on the kids. You go to Palestine, and they're taking their kids to camps like we take our kids to bible camps, and they're putting hand grenades in their hands. 

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I wanna see them as radically laying down their lives for the gospel as they are over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine and all those different places,” says Becky, the leading preacher. Becky often screams in the middle of her preaching, “This means war.” When asked why she focuses on kids, she responds by saying “Anyone who does any work with kids knows that because the reason you go for kids is that whatever they learn by the time their 7,8,9 years old is pretty well there for the rest of their lives.”

Becky (Source)

The level of indoctrination is uncanny. What this camp does has nothing to do with Christian doctrine. They rarely, if ever, talk about Jesus’s mission of peace and understanding, trial, death, or resurrection. It is relatively humorous in the uneducated American society we live in today to see the public promote profiling and invasion of Muslim-American families and rights, while things such as this are more threatening to American education and democracy, government, intellectual freedom, and the separation of church and state. 

The only reason these camps get away with such activity is that they throw Jesus’s name into the mix and call it Christianity. The evangelical “church” is a cult that, at best, perverts Christian doctrine. If this were any other religious affiliation, these individuals would not be able to get away with such large and widespread fascist indoctrination. 

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I call the practices of this church fascist indoctrination because it has many of the same characteristics. Fascism seeks the mass mobilization of a nation through discipline, indoctrination, and physical education. The kids at this church are told blatant lies, 'taught' fallacies (like what babies look like in the womb), and are encouraged to do physical acts (like breaking the coffee cups). Fascism seeks to "purify" the nation while using political violence and war. And these kids are being trained to become "warriors of god." 

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The fascist indoctrination is no more evident than when the question "How many of you are those who would give up their lives for Jesus?” is asked with a cheering response. “We are being trained to be in god’s army… You know a lot of people die for god and stuff, and they're not even afraid,” said Levi, a male attendee of the camp. “We’re kinda being trained to be warriors only in a much funner way,” says Rachel, a female attendee of the camp, agreeing with Levi.

The camp often features a sermon that worships a picture of George Bush, who is an evangelical himself. This is the best evidence of fascist indoctrination because they are teaching kids to worship a supreme leader who exercises a dictatorship over subjects. The evangelical church makes up roughly 25% of the U.S. population. In 2007, 25% of the population thought that Jesus would return. 

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