Jesus Camp

Jesus Camp is a slender documentary that looks at the extreme Evangelical Christian movement. It is mostly a snapshot of Pastor Becky Fischer, a preacher from Missouri who fervently believes her destiny is to train the next generation of religious warriors. The attention-grabbing hook is that her targets are adorably impressionable young children. That Pastor Fischer herself is an outsize figure, an unironic mix of garish tastes and self-assured swagger, is a bonus.

Pastor Becky Fischer is a woman with a mission. As an evangelical Christian, she wants to see the whole world united before her favorite Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. She’s also a primally smart woman with an agenda. Her mission is to convert the children, with the logic that what you imprint onto a child at the age of 8, 9, or 10 will stay with that child for life.

She might seem more like a brassy Texas housewife than a cult leader, but she holds a magnetic sway over her young charges. Every year she hosts a bible camp at an isolated ranch; ironically located in Devil’s Lake, North Dakota that draws hundreds of children from around the country. At most summer camps, kids tell ghost stories and ride horses. Under Pastor Fischer, these kids spend hours at prayer, speaking in tongues, weeping in prayer, and chanting for the immediate end of abortion.

It would be very easy for Jesus Camp to play as a shrill piece of anti-Christian propaganda. Indeed, the ultra-liberal West Hollywood audience where I saw the film roared with laughter at every reverential mention of George W. Bush. Unlike the audience, however, the filmmakers treat their subjects with evenness and respect. The camera rarely editorializes, and the subjects are given space to speak freely and at length about their beliefs.

While the film itself is unafraid to engage in sly urban-hipster humor at the landscape of churches and fast food restaurants that fill up Missouri, it does have welcome moments of balance. She is allowed to speak freely, and she is at ease on camera. Watching the filmmakers’ footage of her young flock falling over in the aisles and speaking in tongues, she takes an obvious pride in her ministry’s work.

It’s easy for the hyper-literate, post-modern cognoscenti to be horrified at the brainwashing these children seem to be steeped in. An audience full of smug, unmarried thirty-somethings who still live like over-privilged twenty-somethings are forgetting is that we’re watching children. They are malleable. They are eager to please. And they change. The odds that every child who attends Bible Camp will spend the balance of their adult life as a rabid bible-thumper are slim. Television is insidious, and peer pressure is unavoidable. These kids will make their own way as surely as the rest of us godless heathens did. The best of them will reach adulthood with a solid moral compass deeply engrained in their thinking, and the worst of them will become shrill, intolerant talk-radio hosts. But is that intolerance any worse than the venomous blue-state, anti-Republican intransigence that is passed around today.

The audience seems to forget what the rubes are slowly figuring out — being media savvy is a quick route to power. A segment in Jesus Camp takes place in a massive evangelical church in Boulder, Colorado where the church-going population is growing at a near exponential rate. (And, interestingly, the founding pastor recently resigned due to his role in a gay sex/crystal meth scandal). The service is held in the round like a rock concert, with an elaborate A/V setup that would dwarf many public access stations. The volatile elements of the Christian right are figuring out quickly what draws an audience and what keeps them coming back.

We also seem to have forgotten that our enemy is watching us, and sooner or later will posess the same tactics that we use. That is one of Becky Fischer’s philosophies. At points, she waxes almost rhapsodic about how Palestinian children and brainwashed from birth and handed weapons at shockingly young ages. Given a slight change in circumstances, it’s very easy to see her passing out handguns and semi-automatic weapons for her young charges to use in their war for Christ.

It’s tempting to extract a larger narrative out of Jesus Camp. Given the current political climate and the deep air of mistrust that hangs low over the religious right, using the people portrayed in Jesus Camp to bash the whole of religion seems like everyone’s patriotic duty.

Crafting a portrait of people on the fringe is risky business. It’s all too easy to end up preaching to the choir, or holding the subjects up to unwitting mockery (as in the odious American Movie). Errol Morris sidesteps this issue by warmly siding with his subjects, and gamely following them down whatever path their eccentricities take them. The makers of Jesus Camp wisely stay out of the way, and give their subjects all the space they want. As admirable as that approach is, it leaves the editorializing to the audience. It’s easy to imagine that Pastor Fischer and her children are delighted with the platform they’ve received. In the theaters in Los Angeles, though, her position of aggressive religious belief is like throwing raw meat to the dogs.

Sure, it’s very easy to laugh at the family who reveres the leadership of George W. Bush because of his open and fervent religious convictions. But for those who do laugh, what’s difficult is to accept that family as every bit the equal American citizen as the gay-marriage supporting, Republican bashing Hollywood liberal. There is no longer a political vocabulary for compromise in the current climate. It’s all or nothing, and holding onto that stark dichotomy is dangerous.