Jesus Camp

I’m back! I had a horrible, HORRIBLE stomach flu. Long story short, I threw up about twenty times and wished I were dead. Then slowly I got better and managed to finish the Jesus Camp documentary review I started last week. So finally, here’s my take on a little doc that’s been getting quite a bit of press recently. I was happy to see this film (and meet the film makers) at the Hot Docs screening last Wednesday. It’s a controversial little flick so let me know what you think. I’m going to go back to drinking lots of fluids now. Peace out.


Jesus Camp
(Directed by Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady)

Jesus Camp is a shock doc that not only confirms tentative fears about the right wing fundamentalist Christian movement in America, it creates whole new nightmare scenarios you never imagined. The film follows the Evangelical church, in particular children’s pastor Becky Fischer and the brood of tykes that eagerly partake in her “Kids on Fire” summer camp in Devil’s Lake(!), North Dakota. Becky is a fervent believer that children form the backbone of “God’s army” and they must be trained from a young age to be leaders for future generations of soldiers. There is an intensely creepy innocence to Pastor Fischer’s description of her camp, and why the children who are “so close to God, so open” are the perfect fodder for indoctrination into the church’s intolerant and ultimately uneducated views. It is one thing to argue evolution, but quite another to think global warming is a welcome sign of God’s coming apocalypse. As one mom tells her home schooled son (who learns from Evangelical appointed text books), “just think that science can’t prove anything. Everything is God”.

Directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (whose first film was the excellent "The Boys of Baraka") Jesus Camp is guilty of bias. There is clever sound editing afoot that lets you know when the big bad Christians are on screen, and the voice of dissension in the film, a left leaning southern DJ, does get the last word. It’s hard to know, however, how the filmmakers could have presented their footage much differently. It’s almost like we don’t want to believe people would put a cardboard cut-out of President Bush at the front of their church and ask people to pray to it. We certainly might not want to see young children speaking in tongues, passing around plastic fetuses and crying out for the end of abortion. But there it is - Friday night at Jesus Camp. Oh, for the days of smores and ghost stories around a campfire.

Is the film propaganda? Well, I’m sure there are plenty of Christians (Evangelical or not) who would argue that their summer camps are nothing like “Kids on Fire”. Many people would say this film does not represent them, but others would say it is a mirror to the huge churches being built in America everyday. Both directors spoke to the audience after our screening and said that Pastor Fischer and all the participants had watched the finished film and were very happy with the movie. They saw it as a fair and accurate description of what they do and what they believe. I shuddered to realise that what disturbs the unindoctrinated seems justified to those who pack the pews. Perhaps most shocking of all is the power and popularity of this growing religious movement. This group of fundamentalists hold a lot of sway in politics and infrastructure already, and their voice will continue to shape America in the future. Jesus Camp may anger you, upset you or perhaps even inspire you, but I would recommend everyone see this film for the good of their education. Four out of Five