ISIS religious extremists don’t have to reinvent strategies for indoctrination.  As I watched a television report on the Islamic State’s recruitment and indoctrination programs, what I saw was more familiar than strange or exotic.  I remember clearly going to vacation Bible school every summer through my childhood and early adolescence.

It should be no surprise to anyone that fundamentalist Islamic leaders and clerics do exactly what fundamentalist Christian leaders and clerics do to ensure a steady, predictable stream of successfully indoctrinated young people entering adulthood trained to be involved in the program to reach the goals of their religious group.  The primary goal is to plant solidly a belief, invariably called “The Truth,” into the young citizens’ thinking and their responses to the world.  First, of course, are the religious group’s beliefs, the group’s truth, about God.  Every other idea about how one should deport oneself in the world is developed into a curriculum designed to teach first what the group’s God (invariably assumed to be the one and only true god) requires of all persons, and more specifically of the people who may be considered to be the legitimate members of the approved group. The religious assembly or sect believes collectively it has the accurate information about what God requires… and also the consequences for individuals who don’t do what God expects all people to do… Nobody is exempt… Well, nobody who doesn’t bother to do exactly what the God has established as the procedure for getting into the exempted group with all promised rewards… in this life and in the next. Depending on the group, it gets theologically complicated to get and to keep the exemption.

The television report I saw about Islamic State recruitment and indoctrination included a video of beautiful Middle Eastern children and adolescents clustered around a bearded adult teacher sitting in a prominent chair beside a prominent black Islamic State flag.  The fledgling Islamic State, not recognized formally as a state by the world community of governments, has declared its leaders’ intentions to establish an Islamic Caliphate which will eventually swallow and include all of the world’s countries. The curriculum of the Islamic State schools indoctrinates young people with a curriculum based on Islam’s holy book, The Koran, which the children learn to recite.  World domination by fundamentalist Muslims is what Allah requires of the Islamic State, the Caliphate.  What is happening in places where they are allowed by law or by military might to do it looks a lot like what I remember about vacation Bible school… except the fundamentalist Islamic world view includes a future where male religious leaders are in charge of a world-wide totalitarian state which is peaceful finally because people are terrified of being beheaded or buried alive or otherwise brutally killed if they don’t live up to the requirements of Sharia Law.

I am glad to report that the Baptist Vacation Bible School in Roseboro, Arkansas, had not even a hint of violence in it…except, of course, fairly vivid descriptions of what would happen in an inevitable next life to those people who died without bothering to get the aforementioned exemption.  Plans for conquering the world were indeed part of the curriculum, but it was presented as a matter of sending missionaries to the far corners of the earth to do good work as doctors and nurses and teachers.  Oh, there was also the Christian flag prominently displayed… and the teachers were mostly female. The flag was blue, red, and white (red cross on a blue square in the left top corner of a larger field of white).I checked the Internet for the words, which I confess I had forgotten.  I found two versions.  The Baptist version: I pledge allegiance to the Christian Flag and to the Savior for whose Kingdom it stands, One Savior, crucified, risen, and coming again with life and liberty to all who believe.  A version which I guess is considered by fundamentalists to be much too mamby-pamby:  I pledge allegiance to the Christian Flag and to the Savior for whose Kingdom it stands, one brotherhood uniting all Christians in service and love.

I can’t resist adding my guess that a whole bunch of those gun-toting Tea Party extremists who hate American government because they think it isn’t God’s Kingdom were exposed to the some of the same curricular materials that I studied as a child.  What they evidently got out of their experience was that their God is an angry god who expects them be vigilantes in grocery stores, streets, parks, and especially in the vicinity of clinics offering birth control services for women. It’s that possibility which makes me most afraid of ISIS.