File under A Truly Frightening Halloween: Writing for Religion Dispatches, Julie Ingersoll tells you everything you wanted to know, and then a little more, about the not-so-very veiled cultural threat innocuously billed as the San Antonio Christian Film Festival, a five-day event for cinephiles of faith that ended yesterday.
The Festival, the culmination of the 2010 Christian Filmmakers’ Academy, which features Hollywood’s most outspoken evangelical Kirk Cameron as a “faculty” member, intends to create a “Christ-honoring replacement industry outside of Hollywood.” Replacing godless Hollywood with a Christian film industry is one piece of the Christian right strategy known as dominionism: creating “biblical” alternatives to, and ultimately replacements for, secular political, cultural, and economic institutions.
The Festival is hosted by Vision Forum, the Reconstructionist, Christian patriarchal homeschooling organization. Vision Forum’s President, Doug Phillips, is no minor player in conservative politics: he is the son and follower of Howard Phillips, founder of the Constitution Party. Tea Party-backed candidates Rand Paul and Sharron Angle both have ties to the Constitution Party; in Colorado, former Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo is running for governor on the Constitution Party ticket, endorsed by conservative blogger and CNN contributor Erick Erickson. Tea party groups are learning about the “biblical basis” of the Constitution from the Constitution Party-related Institute on the Constitution.
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Phillips’ patriarchal “family vision,” with its rigidly proscribed gender norms that homeschooling is designed to reinforce, is described in detail by RD contributor Kathryn Joyce in her book Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement. Women are to be submissive in all things; their entire life purpose is to “glorify God” by producing as many children as possible. (Indeed the prolific Duggar family of TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting is a favorite of Vision Forum.) Boys and girls are socialized into distinctly different roles in which males are protective, adventurous, and imaginative; females are dependent, supportive, and submissive. Phillips promotes this family vision in the Academy and Festival by encouraging films that endorse it (in 2007 there was even a special category “Biblical Family”).
Be sure to read far enough in to catch reference to “epistemological self-consciousness.”