Intellectual Defenestration

"three-headed Jesus-freak teenagers"

Matt Labash in The Weekly Standard has an entertaining take on the movie Saved!. His overall point is not that Christian schools and Christian culture in general are inappropriate targets for satire, but, rather that Saved! does the satire badly, showing both a genuine lack of knowledge of its subject material and an underlying hostility towards it. He also has an amusing (and quite accurate) description of Christian schools:

Often in these settings, order, discipline, and piousness are in pitched battle with the roaring 15-year old id, which insists on doing donuts around the Tree of Good and Evil, even when it doesn't partake. In fact, in most of the Christian schools I attended, none of the cool kids were guilty of engaging in a sibilant spray of Jesus-speak like Mandy Moore's Hilary Faye. Few of the nerds did either. In fact, the opposite was always true. Sure, one of your wayward buddies, who might've had too much beer at his older brother's party last Friday night, would inevitably and tearfully storm the altar at a youth summit for some hyperdramatic confessional emoting--the better to impress girls, who tend to reward such displays. But in a place where everyone nursed a slight case of public-school envy, the more reluctant a believer you were, the cooler you seemed. Christian-school kids, of course, had all the same urges and appetites of their public school counterparts, they just felt guiltier about them. But our rebellions were often quiet ones, the indicators of that rebellion so attenuated, that something as simple as the number of zippers in your Chess King shirt, or the length of your wraparound belt, might be the only communicable shorthand that you were in fact, bearing the Mark of Cain.

And he makes a good point about satire in general:

SUCH MOCKERY is not, as commonly believed, best practiced by outsiders, but rather by those who operate on the inside fringes of that which is being mocked. The difference between the two is the difference between relying on an ethnographer to relay the scuttlebutt of a tribe whose language he doesn't even understand versus relying on the tribe gossip to give you the straight dope in the tribe's own tongue. Sure, the former can observe that Dikumba sports a plate in his lip. But then what? As the Door editors offer in an uncharacteristically earnest disclosure, "We satirize something we love--the Church, and more generally people of faith--with the hope that our prodding might generate some course corrections while inducing a laugh or two."