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| "This is a pretty sick old world!" The blonde preacherwoman is shouting to her congregation, bemoaning secularism and a world that seems to have turned away from God. She tells the gathered and attentive throng that God loves them and that He has plans for them, that they are warriors for the cause, that they can go out there and change the world. It's a rousing piece of preaching that wouldn't necessarily be that out of place in many of the country's more conservative evangelical gatherings, but for one difference: She's preaching to children. If there's a star of Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's Jesus Camp, a bracing documentary that's a slap in the face to those who still harbor a quaint belief in the separation of church and state, it's this woman, Pastor Becky Fischer. A stout and heavily hair-sprayed force of nature with a breezily bossy manner, she runs an evangelical summer camp in North Dakota that goes by the unfortunate name of "Kids on Fire." There, she and her fellow preachers indoctrinate the young in their explicitly political and worryingly militant brand of evangelical Christianity. It's the kind of place where rambunctious kids are up late in their cabins spooking each other with flashlights, when a counselor comes in and reminds them that telling ghost stories (and generally any kind of story that doesn't glorify God) is a no-no. During the day, Fischer leads the youngsters in raucous prayer meetings that frequently dissolve—in a rather calculated manner—into teary confessionals and spasms of speaking-in-tongues. All this is done for the explicit purpose of training these young Christian soldiers (the military analogies run thick in this strain of evangelism) for waging ideological battle in the larger world. Jesus Camp is most affecting in portraying the camp's children, whom co-directors Ewing and Grady (The Boys of Baraka) have a clear fondness for and an ability to elicit powerfully honest testimonials from. The film's clear standout is Levi, a skinny and intense pre-teen who is already well on the road to fulfilling his dream of being a pastor. Listening to him speak with utter sincerity about his faith and the fact that he was "saved" at age five makes for a nice counterbalance to the brimstone bombast permeating the rest of the film. Almost completely opposite is Rachael, a preternaturally self-possessed nine-year-old who thinks nothing of going up to complete strangers and trying to convert them; although her confidence is impressive, the aura of a future self-righteous schoolmarm is unmistakable. Ewing and Grady have less success in tying this wonderfully recorded microcosm into a discussion of evangelicals' larger importance in the modern political landscape. Fischer and the other adults on screen make no pretense about their joy in having an evangelical as president, and they see nothing but blue skies ahead: As the preacher thunders on the radio in Fischer's car, "Liberalism is dead!" For a counterpart to this right-wing orthodoxy, Ewing and Grady turn not to other preachers with differing political views, but instead to an angry Air America radio host, Mike Papantonio, whose main claim to inclusion in the film seems to be his Christianity. Given the clumsiness with which Papantonio's broadsides are shot into the narrative, it's unlikely that Jesus Camp will gain much traction among conservative Christian audiences, as distributor Magnolia hopes it will (which is why they're bringing the film to evangelical-heavy districts in Missouri, Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma before opening in New York a week later—not to mention why it was pulled from Michael Moore's film festival for fear of a conservative backlash). Complaints about the filmmakers' techniques to the side, Jesus Camp has an inarguable power, and it comes from the children. The scenes of towheaded kids less than ten years old with faces streaming in tears as they pledge to do their best to make America a Christian country are as indelible as they are disturbing. Although Ewing and Grady remain mostly agnostic on Fischer and her methods, it's hard to keep on the sidelines as this expert manipulator rhapsodizes admiringly about Muslim extremists' dedication to their cause. Cut to the flickering images of children writhing in a spiritual trance on a chapel floor while being hectored about the glory of dying for Christ, and one knows exactly where the first Christian suicide bombers will come from. |
