The acclaimed new documentary “Jesus Camp” reveals far more about liberal paranoia than it does about the fervent Pentecostal Christians it sets out to expose.
The film, opening in theatres across the country, focuses on a religious summer program called “Kids on Fire” in Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, that draws young campers from across the country. While the two New York-based directors (Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady) claim they tried to treat their subjects openly and fairly, the ads for the movie indicate their obvious agenda—featuring an endorsement claim proclaiming “Jesus Camp” as “One of 2006’s Most Frightening Films.”
The movie goes to great lengths to make a faith-based summer camp look like an authoritarian training ground for Nazi youth or jihadist killers – comparisons deliberately invoked in words and images. The filmmakers use extreme close-ups and dizzying camera angles show a congregation in fervent prayer, or speaking in tongues, accompanied by dissonant, don’t-look-in-the-closet music that could have been borrowed from “Psycho” or “Night of the Living Dead.” Mike Papantonio, an outspokenly leftist radio host for “Air America,” provides running commentary that regularly warns the audience of the alleged danger and dishonest of Christian conservatives.
But even more than the hysterical tone of the film itself (which regularly punctuates images of enthusiastic religious kids with “ominous” media sound bites concerning the nomination fight for Justice Samuel Alito) the reaction of prominent critics demonstrates a wildly exaggerated fear of people of faith. According to Jennifer Merin in The New York Press, the movie depicts evangelists stirring campers “into such frenzied chanting about banning abortion and creating a Christian America that they enter trance-like states… These hair-raising moments…expose a terrifying training ground of religious indoctrination and will (hopefully) convert those who watch it to a greater awareness of what’s happening on our home front.”
Meanwhile, in the prestigious New York Times, Stephen Holden writes: “At Kids on Fire we see children in camouflage and face paint practicing war dances with wooden swords and making straight-armed salutes to a soundtrack of Christian heavy metal. We see them weeping and speaking in tongues as they are seized by the Holy Spirit. And we see them in Washington at an anti-abortion demonstration.”
He then concludes his review with a warning of such delusional grandeur as to verge on self parody. “It wasn’t so long ago that another puritanical youth army, Mao Zedong’s Red Guards, turned the world’s most populous country inside out,” Holden writes. “Nowadays the possibility of a right-wing Christian American version of what happened in China no longer seems entirely far-fetched.”
Mao and his Communist minions butchered at least 35 million human beings. Does Stephen Holden of the New York Times honestly believe that Christian kids in America might some day do the same?
While the reaction to “Jesus Camp” by the secular establishment regularly features words like “terrifying” and “hair-raising,” the most frightening aspect of the film’s release involves the apparently sincere concern on the part of any number of cosmopolitan sophisticates that decent, devout, family centered, patriotic, kind hearted, law-abiding Christian activists actually represent the present day equivalent of menacing, murderous Maoists.