Documentary Week: Jesus Camp (2006)

2 years ago

Documentary Week: Jesus Camp (2006)

HEY! TEACHER! LEAVE THOSE KIDS ALONE!

by Michelle Said

“I want to see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as there are dedicated to the cause of Islam. I want to see as many people laying down their life for the cause of the Gospel as there are people in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine. Because, excuuuse me, but we have the truth!” – Becky Fischer

Shock and awe—that is the phrase that keeps sticking in my mind after watching Jesus Camp, the 2006 documentary by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing. It’s a method of indoctrination that isn’t too difficult when you’re dealing with kids. I mean, it’s not too hard when you’re dealing with adults either, but I think it must be easier and more gratifying when you’re placing a vice grip on impressionable, developing brains. Which is exactly what we see the parents and instructors in Jesus Camp doing.

Jesus Camp is the film about the Kids On Fire School of Ministry. Kids on fire? Surely they’re joking!, you say. They’re using the same imagery as the Tibetan monk in China? The same end game as suicide bombers in the Middle East? For a Ministry?

Oh, but you see, it’s different — these kids are on fire… for Jesus.

…Somehow I don’t think Jesus would be cool with that, but maybe that’s just me.

It’s really hard for me to talk about this piece without becoming overly political. I first watched this film shortly after it came out. We still had George W. Bush in office and it really did seem like the country I had grown up loving so fiercely was beginning to slide into a rigidly extremist right wing nation. I began to fear that the Christian Right equivalent of Al-Qaeda would somehow rise to power and strip down the rights of women and enforce their beliefs on those who did not agree with them. “Because, excuuuse me, but we have the truth!” That phrase kept ringing in my head. “We have the TRUTH.” Blind faith replacing rationality and science. “WE HAVE THE TRUTH.”

Thankfully, things change. America redeemed itself in a way that I didn’t think would be possible in this day and age. A hardcore conservative was replaced with a left-leaning moderate via a democratic election. But watching this documentary brings me back to those days when it seemed as if we might actually see these people bring a majority to government. It makes that fear seem so very real.

Jesus Camp does what any good documentary should do—really, it does what any good piece of journalism should do. It presents both sides to an argument while painting a portrait of the subject at hand and creates a narrative out of the void. It follows Becky Fischer and her fire kids through a summer of the Christian Camp located in the appropriately-named city of Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, as well as a brief postscript that includes a trip to the New Life megachurch in Colorado Springs, at the time headed by now-infamous Mega Preacher, Ted Haggard.

What makes this documentary so frightening and effective is the way it documents how these kids are blindly reciting the words of their parents and their church leaders. A boy flips off his cartoonish DVD on creationism to do his homeschool work with his mother. “Did you get to the part yet where they say that science hasn’t proven anything? ” she asks, stone-faced. And then you know you’re in for quite the ride.

The majority of the camp attendees are Pentecostal/charismatic followers who believe that they become filled with the Holy Spirit during worship, which includes speaking in tongues, writhing on the floor and a whole lot of crying. Conveniently, this sort of behavior perfectly aligns with that of children, who are more than capable of tapping into the sort of rage and raw emotion expected of newborn babies - since they are only a few short years away from that age themselves. Also, it almost goes without saying, they really love magic. For example, when I was a kid I believed that there was a stream of magic running through this planet that made everything that was truly important happen. It made Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and Jesus real. It made a fully constructed Malibu Barbie Beach House pop up in my living room on Christmas morning. And, most importantly, it meant that there was a God, someone who looked over all of us and made sure that we would all follow His word and that we would all live great lives. My mom took me to church every Sunday and I would listen to the sermons with rapt, wide eyes. I was fucking sold on this whole God/magic thing.

So yeah, I would have loved Jesus Camp. Truly. I probably would have tried to befriend Levi, rat-tail and all, or even Rachel, the shy girl who clings to her religion because it gives her a feeling of superiority over bullying classmates. After all, wasn’t Jesus born special? Wasn’t he born as the Son of God? These kids believe in the superhero of Jesus, the one who loves children and looks over them. I would have sat there in the bowling alley right along with Rachel, praying to God to help me get a strike. It didn’t feel like an abuse of His powers, it felt like I was just using His divinity in the way He wanted me to.

Then I found out that Santa Claus was not real and I felt like the whole argument unraveled.

But that’s my experience. I know a lot of people out there who continue to have religion-based lives, who go to their place of worship on a regular basis, and believe that there is someone or something that looks over all of our fates and decides how our lives will proceed. This is a lot easier for some people to deal with than an infinite abyss that does not contain anything, or anyone, of value to any higher meaning.

I know I am getting a little beside the point here, when I should be discussing a movie about evangelical Christians. But I think that, in a certain regard, Jesus Camp is a startling portrait of the modern American religious crisis. I think that rather than the oft-discussed point that Americans are becoming more and more divided politically, we are actually just becoming more and more divided religiously. We have gone from deciding what is right and what is wrong into what is Good and what is Evil. Or, maybe I am mistaken, maybe it has always been this way. The Crusades wouldn’t have happened without demonizing the other side, nor the Salem Witch Trials, nor the Holocaust, nor 9/11. (And, an aside, I know that whenever anybody brings up the Holocaust or 9/11 at anytime it makes an argument automatically invalid, and I concede this point, except when you have a leader—in this case, Fischer—wistfully hoping that the children she is teaching would lay down their life similar to ways that the extremists in the Middle East do for the cause of Christianity. “WE HAVE THE TRUTH.”)

I could really go on and on and on about how much I disagree with these people, on why I feel what they are doing is wrong and corrupting in a whole way that they cannot even fathom—because people who are intentionally sheltering their young for the purpose of keeping ideas and theories away from them probably don’t really have the capacity to see how much this is harming instead of helping—but this film makes that point for me.

Not that I think that this is purely a left-wing, liberal piece of film. Not at all. I think that Jesus Camp is almost a Rorschach blot—the viewer sees whatever he or she wants to see. Becky Fischer has since come out and said that she stands by the documentary and the controversial images within because, she says, it exposes people to these churches and shows people their way of life and belief. Instead of saying that she was misconstrued, she says that yes, this is how it was and how it is.

In a certain way, examples like this let me understand a little bit as to how the Evangelical movement has a solid base of steadfast followers. They never back off. They never admit that they are wrong. There is a certain courage in standing up and saying, “This is what I believe!” But this empty shouting gets us nowhere—it’s just shock and awe. It’s the Wizard of Oz, cowering in the back room, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” It’s Ted Haggard pointing at the camera one minute and condemning documentary filmmakers for the acts they commit behind closed doors (gay sex!) and then being exposed in an illicit drugs and homosexual prostitution scandal a few short months later.

So, really, as with so many movements, the problem is the hypocrisy within. The structure is built on shadows and trickery, purposefully leading astray a generation of kids. This film tells the story of how flash and image (in the form of power point presentations, song and dance, Barbie and Ken dolls, jello molds of brains, sticky hands and balloons) are instituted as teaching materials instead of substance and discussion, how fear is instilled instead of knowledge, and how berating and aggressively approaching strangers is rewarded with pats on the back and approval. Shock and awe, volume 2.0. Excuuse me.

Michelle Said is a writer living in New York.