"Worms'll eat your flesh up"

The only thing the latest installment of C4's 'Cutting Edge', 'Baby Bible Bashers', lacked was Louis Theroux. In every other respect it was just the sort of grotesque but grimly gripping programme he produces.

It took the tried-and-tested starting point of taking the cameras to America, and the focus fell on three child preachers and their families. There was Brazilian Ana Carolina Dias, who started preaching at the age of three; nine-year-old Terry Durham, whose energetic performances drove ecstatic congregations wild and had them queueing up for T-shirts and signed photos; and Samuel Boutwell, who was baptised in what looked like a large metal dustbin, who was terrified of the flesh-eating worms that lay in wait in hell, and whose usual Saturday involved not playing with sticks like other seven-year-old boys but protesting outside the local abortion clinic.

I'm not sure what was most disturbing: Ana Carolina's thought that she'll continue to sleep in the same bed as her father until the day she gets married; Terry's belief that he could cure cancer by a simple laying on of hands; the fact that his father, deemed not old or responsible enough to raise him, suddenly reappeared on the scene and installed himself as his manager when the commercial potential became clear, utterly unaware of how nakedly greedy talking about building up an "empire" sounded.

An ugly portrait of Christianity's lunatic fringe it might have been for the most part, but it was also affecting in showing Sam's tearful bewilderment at the mockery and angry aggression with which the bigoted beliefs he had taken from his father were met on the streets of Sin City, New York, a long way from their safe home turf of Mississippi. He might have reiterated his faith and expressed his sadness for those who wouldn't listen, but clearly he'd been traumatised by the experience.

As an indictment of the children's controlling, manipulative, dogmatic parents, it was, appropriately enough, damning.