The children at the Kids on Fire
summer camp are intent as they pray over a cardboard cutout of
President George Bush. They raise their hands in the air and
sway, eyes closed, as they join the chant for "righteous
judges". Tears stream down their faces as they are told that
they are "phonies" and "hypocrites" and must wash their hands in
bottled water to drive out the devil.
The documentary film Jesus Camp
follows three children at the Kids on Fire Pentecostal summer
camp in the small city of Devil's Lake, North Dakota.
Tory, aged 10, tells the camera
why she likes "Christian, heavy metal rock and roll", rather
than Britney Spears. "When I dance", she says, as she cavorts
around her bedroom, "I have to make sure that that's God. People
will notice when I'm just dancing for the flesh."
Filmed over a year by two New
York-based documentary makers, the film has caused a furore
since it opened in the mid-west two weeks ago, setting
evangelical Christians against non-believers, and separating
Pentecostal from non-Pentecostal evangelicals.
Too scary
After a television news report
about the film became a hit on
YouTube.com, it attracted media attention across the country
and opens in Los Angeles today.
Some critics say that the often
raw approach used by the camp's founder, Pastor Becky Fischer,
as she prepares the children for "war", is too "scary". Others
accuse the documentary makers of distorting Pastor Fischer's
message.
Jesus Camp is "a sarcastic
documentary that paints evangelical, fundamentalist,
charismatic, and politically concerned Christians as very
shrill, warlike and dangerous," a critic wrote on the Christian
website
MovieGuide.org.
At one point Pastor Fischer
equates the preparation she is giving children with the training
of terrorists in the Middle East. "I want to see young people
who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as the young
people are to the cause of Islam," she tells the camera. "I want
to see them radically laying down their lives for the gospel, as
they are over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine."
Those comments caught the eye
of Talking Heads singer David Byrne, who saw the film at a
festival in Washington in June. "I kept saying to myself, OK,
these are the Christian version of the Madrasas," he wrote on
his blog. "So both sides are pretty much equally sick."
The film garnered more
publicity when Michael Moore screened it, against the
distributor's wishes, at his Traverse City film festival. One
member of the audience there said after seeing it: "The people
in the film were so bizarre, yet they were so sincere, they were
like Leslie Neilsen in Airplane." The film won the festival's
Scariest Movie award.
"Extreme liberals who look at
this should be quaking in their boots," Pastor Fischer says at
one point in the film. She goes on to tell the children, mostly
aged from seven to 12: "This is a sick old world. Kids, you got
to change things. This means war. Are you part of it?"
Not ashamed
Despite her sometimes
unsympathetic portrayal in Jesus Camp, she helped the makers,
Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, to promote the film. "They're out
to tell a story and they felt they found it with some of the
political things," she told the Los Angeles Times. "And they're
out to show the most dramatic, exotic, extreme things they found
in my ministry, and I'm not ashamed of those things, but without
context, it's really difficult to defend what you're seeing on
the screen."
The film-makers say that they
set out to examine the two cultures in contemporary America.
"Clearly there are two parallel Americas," they say on the
film's website. "One is a conservative counterculture comprised
of tens of millions of evangelical Christians who feel engaged
in a culture war with what they perceive as immorality and
godless liberalism." But they deny that they deliberately
misrepresented their subjects, or even took sides in the debate.
"We intentionally made a film
that was devoid of a point of view," said the co-director,
Rachel Grady. "We did expect different reactions, but how stark
those differences are has been fascinating. One camp watches it
and want to send their kids to the camp; on the other end there
are people who want to call the cops."
But the reaction from some
evangelical groups has already harmed the film, which opened two
weeks ago in some midwestern states. The Reverend Ted Haggard,
who runs the 30 million-strong National Association of
Evangelicals and appears in the film, called on his followers to
shun the film. The box-office in the midwest did not meet the
distributor's expectations.
The Rev Haggard said the film
was too literal in its presentation of some of the opinions of
Pastor Fischer. "My concern is ... that those on the far left
will use it to reinforce their most negative stereotypes of
Christian believers," he told Christianity Today. The "war
talk", he said, was allegorical. "It doesn't mean we're going to
establish a theocracy and force people to obey what they think
is God's law."
Very disappointed
Ms Grady said she was
disappointed by his reaction. "We're very disappointed that
someone with such clout has rejected the movie. I think he
doesn't like how he comes across in the movie."
The Rev Haggard does, however,
articulate one of the film-makers' key points: saying that when
evangelicals vote they can determine the outcome of an election.
"I really did not know how
intertwined the politics was with the theology," said Ms Grady.
"We were surprised at how much they really dovetail." With the
US mid-term elections just over a month away, she added, "It's
playing out before our eyes. There are a lot of contested seats.
They vote. They know the people who have the same position as
they do."
Profile: Becky Fischer
Pastor Becky Fischer seems to
be enjoying her moment of celebrity. "I've gotten thousands of
hits on my website," she told the Los Angeles Times. "I'm
wearing sunglasses in the airports. It's really making me
nervous."
According to the website Pastor
Fischer worked in business for 23 years before taking up a full
time ministry. She managed two family enterprises, a motel and
an FM radio station, for 10 years and then owned a custom sign
shop and worked part-time as a children's pastor at her local
church in Bismark, North Dakota.
Her Kids Ministry International
states on its website: "We believe that childhood is the time
that God designed for people to receive the gospel." Amid all
the controversy generated by the film, Pastor Fischer has
defended herself. "Excuse me," she says in the film, "but we
have the truth."
