I finally finished watching Jesus Camp last night, sometime in the middle of the night, and after the initial anger at watching the indoctrination of children had worn off, I found myself feeling much of nothing, nothing at all. Which reminded me of my own thankfully limited experience with charismatic churches: at fourteen, I stood in a room surrounded by a hundred people convulsing on the floor, feeling nothing of whatever it was that struck them with frenetic glossolalia, and thus made to feel as though I were the one cut off from the “real” world.

What fascinates (terrifies?) me the most about these child “armies” is the obviation of genuine ecstasy by antithetical rote rhetoric. The enormity of emotion is hopelessly inverted. In charismatic churches, glazed eyes somehow see clearer, see further. The most external and foreign of input becomes a deeply personal covenant with God, and we are left with an impression of the faith of automatons and the automation of faith.

Near the beginning of the film several children are shown performing what I can only describe as a war dance. Clothed in fatigues, masked in grease paint, they stomp and shout and clash sticks in preparation for some unfathomable battle. Their pastor justifies this rather hypocritically by saying the “enemy” (Muslims) do the same with their children. Throughout it all this eagerness for conflict made me think of the concept of courage, and why so many of us are so sure that the end of our own lives will be met with dignity and grace. To be sure it’s easy enough to be courageous, to treat the idea of war with irreverence and a certain glib confidence, when people are convinced to the bone that theirs is the side that can never die.

Only in a fundamental monotheistic religion is there a desire for melodrama so strong that the entirety of human destiny can be boiled down to good versus evil. And yet the Satan of the Old Testament is vastly different from the New. The serpent was only ever meant to be a serpent. Even the Satan of Job’s story was a member of Yahweh’s Divine Council, an “Adversary” who acted as a (forgive me) devil’s advocate and itinerant accuser, afflicting Job with boils only after receiving God’s permission (and after God had already done far worse). In truth, Satan was never viewed as evil until after the Babylonian exile, when the Jews in diaspora modified their religion to closely mimic the dualistic Zoroastrianism of their Persian captors. As the central focus of the Jewish faith shifted to the diametric opposition of good and evil, the depiction of a mainly legislative Yahweh took on aspects of Ahura Mazda — Zoroaster’s deity of light and truth — while Satan, who had previously been little more than a prosecuting attorney in Yahweh’s employ, morphed into the equivalent of Ahriman, Ahura Mazda’s pernicious opposite.

This revisionist history is, I think, a wonderfully subversive cop out. By declaring themselves aligned to the side of “good,” people can be kind to one another without ever doing a kind thing to one another. Feed the hungry without ever being near the hungry. Simpering cowards who would never willingly place themselves in mortal danger can delude themselves and others into thinking they are protectors of the faith and warriors of the light. With God on one’s side, impossible action is bridged by impossible thought. It is the spirit, not the body or mind, that can do everything, be everywhere, exist in every moment. The chasms of your life are not traversed by what you’ve done, but simply by what you’ve willed yourself into believing you can do. And what you’ve willed yourself into believing you can do, of course, is move mountains, slay dragons, cast out demons, and walk on water.