"Jesus Camp" Review

Dear Readers,

Have you ever seen Jesus Camp? It’s an interesting movie. It’s a documentary about a bunch of hardcore evangelical Christians. It follows a group of kids who go to a Christian camp called “Kids on Fire” run by an intense Pentecostal born again Christian lady.

First of all, “Kids on Fire” is a disturbing name for a children’s camp, don’t you think? I understand that the name of the camp is a metaphor, that it really means, “kids figuratively blazing with the Holy Spirit,” but still, uh… “kids on fire” brings disturbing images to my mind.

The political and cultural agenda behind the film is obvious. The documentary filmmakers want to belittle Christianity and the religious right. They advanced their agenda by carefully selecting which footage would make it into the final version of the film. It’s probably safe to say that the filmmakers had at least a week’s worth (168 hours) of footage from making the documentary, and they shortened down all their footage to fit into the time limits of a feature length film. So the scenes were picked to create an interesting story and to advance an agenda by making Christians look crazy.

I’m sure the camp director lady said lots of nice, lovely prayers, but the filmmakers picked the weirdest-sounding prayers to put in the film. One prayer the camp director lady offered was when she was setting up some of the electronic equipment before the camp really started. She prayed (with her eyes open, as she was walking around touching the electronic equipment) something like, “Please Jesus, be with the electronics. Make your Holy Spirit go inside all the wires and all the computers before us, Lord, to fortify those little wires and those little switches and them little blinking-light doohickeys so that we may spread your Word, Lord Jesus. Bless the power-point presentations, Lord, and do not let the Devil inside these electronics, because we know the Devil always tries to destroy our multi-media presentations.”

Doesn’t that prayer sound weird? But I got to thinking, well, sometimes before my wife and I go on long trips, we say a prayer, and ask Heavenly Father to bless us so that our car won’t break down, and that’s basically what that lady in Jesus Camp was doing. It’s OK to ask for blessings for material things. But the lady in the documentary made it sound like she wanted the spirit of Christ to literally go inside the wires and fight off the demons that were trying to get in there, and that just sounds wacky.

My point is, I’m sure the camp director lady offered plenty of prayers more normal sounding, like, “Lord, please bless that we’ll all have a nice day and no one will get hurt playing sports.” But the filmmakers picked the weirdest prayer to make it to the final version of the film.

And so Jesus Camp wasn’t an honest representation of what went on at the camp. It wasn’t an unbiased sampling of events in the lives of a few Christians. It was more like a sensational expose. The filmmakers found the weirdest Christians and then filmed the weirdest freakiest stuff they saw them do.

The movie probably left the impression on many viewers that “Christians are like the Christians in Jesus Camp, and Christian camps for kids are like 'Kids on Fire'.” It probably left viewers less likely to take Christianity seriously, and less likely to convert to Christianity or strengthen their faith in Jesus Christ.

Here are few other creepy/ crazy things that happened in Jesus Camp:

People spoke in tongues, in the Holy Roller style.

A Christian family went bowling, and I don’t know if it was the music or what, but I’ve never seen bowling look that creepy!

A group of home-schooled kids said their own version of the Pledge of Allegiance, that went something like, “I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag of the blessed United States of America.” Then they all put their hands on a Bible, and said, “I pledge allegiance to the Bible…” I’m not making this up. I was shocked to see that.

A pro-life guest speaker came to the camp and told all these little kids about how evil abortion was. He got out these little figurines of fetuses, and passed them around, and he said sensational stuff to the kids like, “A fourth of pregnancies in America end in abortion. Look around you. Look at your friends. Look at four of your friends, your fellow Christians. Look into their eyes. Now imagine one of them dead!” (I’m not actually quoting from the film, you understand, but I’m paraphrasing the gist and the emotion of the film.)

They brought a big cardboard cutout of George W. Bush to one of the sermons and said stuff like Bush was God’s President and holy Christian soldiers need to go over to Iraq and convert the heathens. (By the way, here’s an interesting article about how Bible verses were used in some of the Operation Iraqi Freedom literature http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/05/18/2009-05-18_rummys_memos_suggest_a_crusade_after_all_used_scripture_to_prod_w_in_iraq_war.html )

The camp director lady asked kids who had sinned to confess their sins and come forward and she poured water on their hands, and it was supposed to be symbolic of forgiveness or something.

They all sang and danced along to a Christian rap song that had the lyrics, “I’m kicking it with Christ,” and “J.C. is in the house!”

The preacher lady condemned Harry Potter and said that anybody who reads those books or watches those movies is working for the devil.

The thing that bugged me most about the movie was that it never showed the people sitting down and discussing theology. As far as I can remember, Jesus Camp never showed anybody actually reading from the Bible. The movie showed people quoting from the Bible a lot, and they paraphrased it a lot, but they never actually sat down, read the scriptures and talked about what the scriptures meant. It was almost as if the evangelical Christians didn’t care about literacy. The evangelical Christians were all about fanaticism. It was as if the zealot who yelled the loudest and showed the blindest devotion to God was the most righteous person at Kids on Fire. Calmly thinking through things was not as celebrated as much as speaking in tongues was. Now, certainly this reflects on the hardcore evangelical Christian movement itself, but the filmmakers took advantage and made these people appear even more anti-intellectual than they really were.

Another thing that bugged me about the movie was that it subtly connected capitalism/ consumerism/ soulless corporations with Christianity. The movie unnecessarily showed pictures of McDonald’s signs, Pepsi cups in the hands of young Christians, a kid was wearing a shirt with the word “Jesus” on it, but “Jesus” was in the logo of Reese’s candies, um… it showed SUVs and minivans that the Christians drove around. It showed the McDonald’s-esque food they served in the camp cafeteria- tater tots and egg-mcmuffins.

That stuff reminded me of an article I read once in National Geographic Magazine about Disney World and Orlando, Florida. The article talked about the spread of big box stores and the spread of Protestant mega-churches and suggested that the two were connected. It really is an interesting article. ( http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/03/orlando/allman-text.html It starts talking about religion on page 4 ) But I think both the National Geographic article and Jesus Camp are attempting to make Christianity appear shallow, or bad in some way, by associating it with all this name-brand/ suburbs /hyper-consumerism stuff. You know what I mean? It’s like the movie was saying that Christians aren’t as Earth-conscious as secular liberals, maybe. The agenda behind Jesus Camp reminded me of the agenda behind the corporation hating magazine Adbusters. It’s like the documentary was saying that Christianity is just another evil corporation out to make a profit and create loyal customers.

I noticed a similar expression in the foreign film Motorcycle Diaries, about Che Guevara. There was one scene where a loveable kid pointed to a cathedral and said something like, “Our indigenous culture was destroyed when Jesus Christ incorporated moved into town.”

A similar thing happened in the Time magazine Mormons, Inc.
( http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,986794-1,00.html )
That article emphasized how rich and powerful the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is. It emphasized things like how a lot of Church meetings are ran like business meetings, and a lot of the Church leaders are business-oriented people, like Bill Marriott. Here are some excerpts:

TIME has been able to quantify the church's extraordinary financial vibrancy. Its current assets total a minimum of $30 billion. If it were a corporation, its estimated $5.9 billion in annual gross income would place it midway through the FORTUNE 500, a little below Union Carbide and the Paine Webber Group but bigger than Nike and the Gap. And as long as corporate rankings are being bandied about, the church would make any list of the most admired: for straight dealing, company spirit, contributions to charity (even the non-Mormon kind) and a fiscal probity among its powerful leaders that would satisfy any shareholder group, if there were one.

The top beef ranch in the world is not the King Ranch in Texas. It is the Deseret Cattle & Citrus Ranch outside Orlando, Fla. It covers 312,000 acres; its value as real estate alone is estimated at $858 million. It is owned entirely by the Mormons. The largest producer of nuts in America, AgReserves, Inc., in Salt Lake City, is Mormon-owned. So are the Bonneville International Corp., the country's 14th largest radio chain, and the Beneficial Life Insurance Co., with assets of $1.6 billion. There are richer churches than the one based in Salt Lake City: Roman Catholic holdings dwarf Mormon wealth. But the Catholic Church has 45 times as many members. There is no major church in the U.S. as active as the Latter-day Saints in economic life, nor, per capita, as successful at it.

In a way I’m proud to be part of a financially stable and materially powerful Church, but I think emphasizing the material clout of churches and ignoring their spiritual clout is quiff.

When it comes to its position on capitalism/consumerism Jesus Camp reminded me of Fast Food Nation, and Asphalt Nation.

OK, I think by now you know how I feel about the movie. It was well made, and interesting, but it had a not-so-subtle cultural political agenda behind it.

Sincerely,
Telemoonfa