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Film maker sees power of Pentecostal faith

October 28, 2006

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady are the film makers behind Jesus Camp, a movie that has been denounced by some evangelical leaders. The film focuses on a little-known Pentecostal children's pastor and a small group of conservative Christian children who protest abortion, attend home school, speak in tongues and try to convert non-believers. Herald-Leader religion reporter Frank Lockwood interviewed Ewing. Here are excerpts:

Question: How many Pentecostals did you know before you started this project?

Answer: I was raised a Catholic, and my partner's Jewish, so we had met a few in Baltimore in our last movie (2005's The Boys of Baraka), but we didn't know a great deal about Pentecostals before we started.

Q: When the young people go forward and begin to speak in tongues, the church music appears to be erased and replaced with kind of a spooky, haunted-house-style, Halloweenish music. Why was that done?

A: I don't think the music's Halloweenish or spooky at all, actually. So I would disagree with that. We did not intend for the music to be spooky or Halloweenish. We think it's an emotional soundtrack. The composer really tried to capture sort of the feeling of any given scene. I don't agree that it's spooky.

Q: What did you learn (while making Jesus Camp)? What did you come away with?

A: From the whole experience? I think that Rachel and I both learned that the evangelical experience or the born-again experience is something that's extremely prevalent and common in the United States. I was raised in the suburbs of Detroit City, and Rachel was raised in D.C., and we live in New York, and I think that ... the incorrect sense from a lot of urban dwellers (is) that the born-again experience is really not relevant to them and it's something sort of out there and maybe unusual. I think we both learned in the course of making this film that there's 100 million evangelical Christians in this country and that the beliefs we encountered making this film are extremely pervasive and widespread. I think that a lot of people who live in urban areas of this country maybe aren't aware of that, so we became aware of that. And I think that we also learned that faith, real deep faith, sort of trumps everything. I think that there's no sense in attempting to persuade someone who is a Bible-believing Christian, who believes that the Bible is the literal word of God. I think that people trying to sort of intellectually debate certain points, especially when it comes to scientific beliefs, for example, (will fail). The kids in our movie are taught that the earth is 6,000 years old. The scientific community, on record, would dispute that and say that it's between 1.5 billion and 4 billion years old. I think that people who try to sort of reason their way around faithful people and try to persuade them -- it just doesn't make any sense. I think belief sort of trumps everything. True believers, I think that we should just all learn to live with each other and not try to convince the other side that they're wrong and we're right and vice-versa. I think that we both sort of learned that. I think it'd be best if everybody just learns to coexist and not continue to just confront each other, because it just won't get us anywhere. Especially when you're talking to someone who believes that the Bible is the literal word of God.

 

 

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