It might have something to do with my own history and familiarity with Pentecostal Christianity and radical faith, but I didn’t find this film either too ‘disturbing’ or ‘propagandistic’, all in all.  Jesus Camp, which was released on DVD on January 23, follows a particularly dedicated group of Christian kids and their youth leaders through a camp in North Dakota, in Colorado at Ted Haggard’s church, in Washington, D.C., at a protest of Roe v. Wade, and in their homes/schools with their families.  I have read maybe thirty or so major reviews of this film, not many of which said anything that wasn’t almost completely predictable.  There were those, and there were many, who saw this film as a cautionary tale or ‘wake-up call’ for liberals/moderates/progressives/secularists/reasonable people (”one knows exactly where the first Christian suicide bombers will come from…” - Chris Beltrami, Film Journal International).  There were also those who saw the film as anti-Christian or anti-evangelical ‘propaganda’ (Michael Medved, for one).  There is something to the first claim, I think, but with respect to the second, one can say with some certainty that, at the very least, many efforts were made to be fair and to empathize with this group of sincere Christians.  If this isn’t evident from the film itself, it is fairly obvious from the director’s commentary.  What is most striking about this film, which seems to have been ignored by most reviewers and lost in all the knee-jerk moralizing, is the remarkable intelligence and creativity of the children, and just how likeable and even in many ways normal they and even their main leader, Becky, really can be.  Several of them, especially 12-year-old Levi (who prepares and gives a sermon to the other kids at the camp), are clearly wise (in many ways) and articulate beyond their age.  And little 9-year-old Rachael, courageous, bright and adorable, is praised by the directors of the film who enthusiastically wonder “where she is going to be in ten years”.  I wonder about that myself. 
 

     What is disturbing about the film is not that there are people dancing, ’speaking in tongues’, weeping, and doing other things which are bound to look odd to an outsider.  Those who have taken an Anthropology or World Religion course in college or watched PBS have certainly seen and heard of much stranger things, and may have learned to deal with them in a mature and non-judgmental way, by understanding them first before coming to conclusions about how ‘bizarre’ or ‘backward’ they are, and by examining their own ’strange’ behaviors.  I can remember, in an anthropology class I once took, reading Horace Miner’s essay ‘Body Ritual Among the Nacerima’ and learning to see myself as a member of a particular culture, whose practices and values could look ridiculous, and might require some justification in order to assert their superiority.  This kind of empathy for other cultures and self-awareness is the beginning of mature thinking in the modern world.  Unfortunately, nearly every ‘liberal’ or ‘moderate’ reviewer I read, even in our nation’s leading newspapers (The New York Times and Washington Post), seems not to have done this at all, instead choosing to focus (with much justification, surely) on the extremist political aspect of the Christian fundamentalist group portrayed, with its fanatical and almost unquestioning support for president Bush (who is prayed for symbolically through ’laying on of hands’ on a cardboard cut-out at one point in the film - a move some, including reporters in major newspapers like The Guardian (UK), have misunderstood as praying to Bush), indoctrination against scientific consensus (especially in the areas of evolution and global warming), and manipulation of the minds of these children that some would argue borders on child abuse.  No reasonable modern person concerned with the state of civil society and democracy can really avoid being disturbed, to some extent, by these aspects of this group, and perhaps other aspects of the evangelical Christian ‘movement’.  What should bother us also, however, when we examine such well-meaning if naive or even willfully ignorant true believers, is how they can be exploited so easily by political and religious leaders who may or may not share their faith or their concerns.  One truly ironic but sad moment in the film comes when Pastor Ted Haggard is seen preaching passionately about the immorality of homosexuality and joking with the cameraman about sexual infidelity.  Since the theatrical release of the film but before the release of the DVD, Haggard has had to step down from leadership of his church due to allegations of sex with a male prostitute and eventual admission of getting a massage from the prostitute and buying (but not using) methamphetamines.  Meanwhile the beloved (in the eyes of many in the film) Bush administration, while still drawing support from many religious conservatives and evangelicals, has been exposed as well, not only for the selling of the Iraq war and the tragically failed occupation, torture of innocent and uncharged detainees, and many other misdeeds that undermine it’s stated advocacy of democratic values, but also for misleading the very evangelicals who make up a large part of it’s voting base.  A recent book by David Kuo, a conservative Christian and former Director of the Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives in the Bush White House [1] details how major leaders within the Republican party think conservative Christians are politically useful idiots and “nuts”.  Kuo worked closely with key Republican leaders and also reveals that not even close to the amount of money promised to faith-based groups for anti-poverty programs and service ever showed (Bush promised $8 billion, says Kuo, and a little more than an eighth of that was ever seen).  Here is Kuo, in an excerpt from an October 16 appearance on The Tavis Smiley Show:

Smiley: What got my attention, and the attention of so many others, obviously, is how little regard the Bush administration, according to you, has or had for its key, critical, Christian conservative base. You say in the book that the administration inside the White House really is dismissive of Christian evangelicals. That they refer to them as boorish; they refer to them as nuts. They refer to them as goofy. They refer to them as out of control.
These are all in quotes; things that you’ve heard and witnessed in meetings with regard to how the White House views or doesn’t view, as it were, its critical conservative Christian base. I assume you stand by all of this.
 

Kuo: Oh, absolutely. And this is not surprising. This is not rocket science. Frankly, any honest person who has been involved in Republican politics will confirm this story. Will say the same thing. And that’s why this book is a book about seduction. It’s a book about how Christians have been seduced into politics. Seduced into thinking that somehow politics is the answer, and it is also, I hope, an eye-opener for them, because they need to understand that politicians are starved for their votes. Starved for their votes.
 

But they don’t care about them as people. They’ll say anything that they can to get their votes. Because they think, frankly, that they’re easy to manipulate. And that’s important for people to know, because it’s not that – you’ve got the Christian political leaders who are the mouthpieces of the White House, and who go and talk to the really, really well-meaning. The moms and the dads, the grandmas who give 15, 20, 25, 50 bucks.
 

Because they think they’re really supporting godly activities, and that’s their goal. I saw tonight that the RNC has raised $200 million in this campaign. Right, but they’re doing it with a false promise. They’re doing it by presenting this picture of President Bush as sort of pastor-in-chief. And Christians need to look at him and say, “No,” right? He’s the president. We need to look at him through critical eyes. The same critical eyes and cold, political eyes with which the White House looks at us.

     None of this really comes as much of a surprise to some, but you can bet those ‘Jesus Camp’ leaders and children might be disturbed by such revelations, if they are able to be honest with themselves and accept them.  What would little Rachael think of her beloved president and his key advisors referring to her, her family, and all her friends as ‘out of control’ ‘nuts’ who happen to be stupid and naive enough to use for political purposes?  Politicians who pretend to religion (and rest assured there are plenty in both parties) in order to get votes commit an act of betrayal to everyone, including religious conservatives (and even the few pseudo-theocratic types) of the ‘dangerous’ type shown in Jesus Camp.
 

     One other issue that was not addressed even in the better reviews (like that in Time magazine), is the apparent inconsistency of bemoaning militaristic and extremist symbolic religious indoctrination in the ‘Jesus freaks’ of the film and not recognizing that our government-funded education system and the private marketing industry both do something remarkably similar to all children.  In education even through high school and college, children are taught an almost exclusively glorious and self-congratulatory history of our country [2], learn to ‘pledge their allegiance’ to the American flag (the ‘Jesus Camp’ folks actually pledge allegiance to a ‘Christian flag’), and are trained in taking sides and irrational jingoism through otherwise healthy activities, like athletics (I post this on Super Bowl Sunday).  All of this, along with military advertisements on television and recruiting in schools, amounts to a standard system of propaganda, which keeps us, like other powerful countries throughout history, constantly at war with the world.  One can also mention, and this is perhaps the most powerful form of indoctrination today, the aggressive campaign by marketers to shape children into fanatical consumers from a very young age.  Even the radical children in Jesus Camp wear the right brand-name clothes.

     All told, I think Jesus Camp is worth seeing, as its straightforward presentation of such a disturbing phenomenon will hopefully raise important questions that we aren’t really working out answers to, some of which I have outlined here.  In this respect, it’s not The Corporation, Mark Achbar’s amazingly insightful and similarly balanced 2003 film, but if we can avoid immediate moralism and simplistic (if ultimately necessary) ‘calls to action’, Jesus Camp may have something to teach us.
 

- Peter Broady
 

Peter Broady is a fellow out of Wasilla, Alaska, who reads and writes in spare time, and aspires to be ‘read but not that revered’.  You can contact him here, at his website, or by email at pbroady@gmail.com.
 

[1] David Kuo, Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction
[2] see James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me