Jake Scherzer was incensed to learn about Escuela Caribe, a sort of reprogramming camp for kids that includes physical punishment and humiliation.
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I grew up in a very, very religious part of East Texas. We confided in our preachers as if they were family, we went to church as if our lives depended on it (and for a few destitute souls, it did), and we were surrounded by Jesus. I remember driving back from Los Angeles with the woman I was dating at the time, and we passed a weathered sign in front of a dilapidated, abandoned shack. The sign read “Jesus Saves.”
Jesus didn’t save that shack. Nor did he save the kids in the documentary that I’m about to discuss. But first, a bit of context.
The Southern Baptist Church was always a fixture in my youth, even though I didn’t really cotton to it and ended up attending an Episcopalian private school about 30-40 miles away from my hometown on a scholarship, but religion was always an aspect up until I hit my teenage years and decided to stop caring about God and Jesus altogether. Regardless, I still held on to a bit of religion on some level. I still tend to cross myself on occasion, I wear my granddad’s dog tags that have the Crusader’s Cross medallion on them, etc. I even pray every once in a while. But the sheer devotion demanded of many kids who were basically a tabula rasa for whichever church showed up was very disconcerting. I remember a lot of Pentecostal friends. Virginal young women who’d go around without makeup and wearing denim skirts, their equally sexless brothers milling around the family, all wide-eyed at the things that they never really got to experience due to their inherently sheltered nature, etc.
And then there was YWAM camp. Youth with a Mission, set to teach kids about God and have them go out and spread the gospel accordingly. They’d lure dumb country kids in with promises of waterslides and fun and games, and then practically beat you over the head with the Bible. The entire thing was essentially a gauntlet of dorky youth pastors, barbecue, and Bible study, right smack-dab in the middle of nowhere.
Even YWAM is mild compared to what I’ve come to learn about (the now thankfully defunct and shuttered) Escuela Caribe.
Even the trailer itself reeks of dread from the very beginning. A lot of articles on the internet mildly shame Ms. Logan for putting herself in the documentary, which seems to be a bit of an odd complaint considering that we’ve seen the likes of Morgan Spurlock, Michael Moore, and even Orson Welles making themselves a part of their respective documentaries, but regardless, her message here carries enough weight that such a complaint should be idly dismissed. The mere fact that she went in with positive intentions and peeled back part of the façade to find all of the horrifying stuff inside should be the focus here.
I’m not going to focus on the part where these people are forced into this program, because that’s obviously terrible. The ideas behind this whole system, however, are what need to be addressed if we’re going to have a constructive discussion about these sorts of institutions and their methods involved.
There’s a very storied history behind the idea of shaming people into becoming “God-fearing” types in evangelical Christianity. You’re raised to be afraid of sex. You’re raised to be afraid of cursing. You can’t even listen to fucking Black Sabbath albums because apparently if you play them backwards, Satan will show up and be like “hey, bro, let’s hang out and let me damn your soul to eternal suffering and stuff.” There is a lot of deeply unhealthy rhetoric in evangelical Christianity, and it absolutely limits us all as people, and it all emerges in equally unhealthy ways. The young guy in this documentary, David, who was sent to Escuela Caribe to essentially be de-programmed of his gayness, presumably went through a lot of hell to be forcibly, half-assedly yanked out of a thing that he felt was normal. To be angrily cleaved from an emotion and a drive that resided in him and was a part of him, no matter what the Jesus freaks said. And that’s horrendous. It ruins lives. It makes people legitimately feel like they’re completely damaged and it will likely take him a while to ever be at peace with himself, if he ever is.
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We’re killing future generations with this overbearing, awful nonsense.
You can’t breed behavior out of anyone. Hell, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE taught us that, in a sense. I’m being facetious there, but the fact that entire institutions still ascribe to any notion that someone can just have something unplugged from their psyche and they’ll be “normal” is utterly nauseating, and these evangelical re-education camps are one of the worst possible offenders. I’m still marginally a Christian, but I like to think that Jesus would show up, take one look at these people, and be like “Okay, wait, what in the Hel – wait, no, not Hell, that’s the other dude. What in the heck are you guys thinking? Weren’t we all supposed to be accepting and loving? All that shit about ignoring the speck in your neighbor’s eye lest you have to acknowledge the plank in yours or whatever? Come on, guys. Jesus Christ. I mean, ‘me’.”
This deep, constant well of self-loathing that places such as Escuela Caribe tend to breed only exacerbate the very issues that they look to solve, and they only do so in the pursuit of profit and proselytization, both of which can be fool’s errands if they’re not well-intentioned. And these come across as profoundly seedy and dirty, based around nothing but a desire to guilt people into following any modicum of Christianity. In retrospect, I’m happy that I really didn’t care about YWAM short of getting to swim and eat burgers and hot dogs and hang out with cute girls, but if I went back and looked upon that experience with my now-jaundiced eye of nearly 30 years on this planet, I’d probably see many, many things that would set me off into a rage. Yet people were forced into this cycle by either their own volition, by circumstance, or by family members who just wanted to wash their hands of what they perceived as a problem, leaving it all in the hands of the Lord and a bunch of people who likely barely hung on by the seat of their pants day-to-day while working at such an establishment.
We really need to take a huge step back and look at how all of this affects us as a culture. Sure, it’s nice that this place is closed down, but there’s still a virulent strain of religion of all flavors that seeks to stomp people down rather than raise them up. It hurts rather than helps. It ends up coming across as the antithesis to everything that would help us as a society, and these elements are the ones that need to be properly addressed and corrected. If we spent more time focusing on our systems rather than our individuals, we’d make a lot more progress in general.