Jesus Camp, the new documentary from Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, explores an element of American life that may seem foreign to many Georgetown students: hard-core evangelical Christianity. Ewing and Grady manage the controversial subject with delicacy and keen observational skill, and while the film may fall short of its lofty ambitions, it nonetheless raises important questions about home-grown fundamentalism.
The film begins with the resignation of Sandra Day O’Connor from the Supreme Court and uses the battle over Samuel Alito’s approval to sketch a rough outline of the strength and strategy of the evangelical movement in shaping the American political landscape. These are broad goals, and Ewing and Grady are not up to them, at least not in a film as brief as this. They do, however, manage to provide a glimpse into the evangelical life by examining a community of evangelicals and the summer camp in rural North Dakota that brings their children together.
As a study of faith and indoctrination, the film is excellent. The central figure in the story is Pastor Becky Fischer, a conservative evangelical with no qualms whatsoever about the means used to help kids find Jesus. Children are very much the targets here, too, as 43 percent of evangelicals are born again before the age of 13. It’s a startling statistic after considering that at age 13 most of us have barely figured out masturbation, let alone the nature of God.
Fischer herself is an alternatingly funny and terrifying figure, a zealot with a complete lack of doubt or sense of irony. She is absolutely certain of the moral superiority and natural appeal of her cause, yet makes sure to make her message, presented in Power Point form, as flashy and gory as possible. The scene where she instructs a room of faithful to pray toward a cardboard cut-out of George Bush is comical, until you notice that the kids are speaking in tongues.
The children themselves get a fair bit of screen time and are fascinating subjects. With his mullet and over-large shirts, Levi seems every inch a classic yokel, until he opens his mouth and proves both thoughtful and quite the performer. The eager young Rachel, all of nine years old, is painfully earnest. It’s startling, and a bit embarrassing, to watch her walk up to a woman at a bowling alley and tell her about Jesus and His plans for her. It’s telling, too, to watch the interactions of the youth when none of the adults are around. Suddenly they’re just pre-teens again, not young warriors being groomed, as Fischer repeatedly claims, to lay their lives down for Jesus.
The film fails when it attempts to draw larger truths out of these small examples. Ewing and Grady’s debut feature, 2005’s excellent The Boys of Baraka, effectively captured the pain and danger of inner-city life in Baltimore and the importance of environment for youth. They were able to make a few valid, more widely applicable points by expanding on a small case study, and it seems that they were planning on doing the same here. Unfortunately, they are unable to really place Fischer and her followers within the broader evangelical movement, leaving the audience wondering if this represents the norm or a radical outlier. When they pull farther back to look at the critics of evangelical Christianity, especially in the form of Air America radio host Mike Papantonio, it seems even more disjointed and contrived.
It’s a shame that they aren’t able to address this broader context more effectively, especially since Fischer and her congregation raise a slew of questions. What do we allow parents to teach their children? How do we allow children to be exploited for political ends? Is evangelical Christianity really shaping the nature of the Republican Party or, as many have suggested in the last few years, are politicians merely taking advantage of these fundamentalists?
The Christianity that is described in Jesus Camp is a virulent, intolerant form, and proudly so. While Ewing and Grady don’t manage to convince the viewer that this is a looming threat to the American way of life, or even that Fischer’s ultraconservative faith is necessarily representative of the evangelical movement, the film is nonetheless a thought-provoking examination of youth, religion and manipulation in America.
