Say Anything Blog

After my post last Tuesday about the documentary Jesus Camp I was lucky enough to have received a review copy of the film a few days later on Thursday.  Over the weekend I watched the film and have come to two basic conclusions about it:

1. Despite the fact that Becky Fischer, the director of the camp in the film, endorses this documentary I just don’t think it was an entirely fair portrayal of the camp or America’s evangelical Christians in general.
2. I’m still not very comfortable with everything Fischer and her colleagues are doing at their camps, nor am I comfortable with some of the behavior I saw from the “evangelicals” portrayed in the film.

Let me address the #1 first.

I think it would be fair to say that if you took a bunch of video footage and edited it down to a few selected clips of specific activities and then added in ominous music and commentary from an ardent critic you could make just about any youth summer camp or church service look bizarre, fanatical and even dangerous.  And that is, in a nutshell, what Jesus Camp does to Fischer’s Youth On Fire camp in Devils Lake, North Dakota and the evangelical Christian movement in general.

The evangelical Christian movement is undoubtedly a very easy target for these kind of tactics.  As my friend Julie (herself an adherent to this particular brand of religion and a former camp attendee) pointed out in her reaction to the flim, to outsiders many of the rituals, sayings and customs that evangelicals take for granted can seem strange to outsiders, if largely harmless, even when put in their proper context.  But put them in the hands of a talented filmmaker and they can be made to look very sinister indeed.

For instance, at one point the film shows Fischer leading what appears to be a youth service at her church.  For several minutes she gives what I felt to be a typically standard, if rather forceful, Christian sermon.  She talks of being faithful, honoring God with one’s actions and not leading a double life by being a Christian only at church on Sunday.  When her sermon concludes, though, she tells the congregation that they will all now “talk in tongues.”

Now I've got to admit that the whole talking in tongues thing throws me for a bit of a loop, but upon further consideration I wonder if it is fundamentally any different from other spiritual rituals the average American is more familiar with. Like guided meditation, for instance, or the chanting that is routine in many religions? I don't think it is any different, yet the way this episode of chanting is presented in the film you'd think you were watching footage from some whacked-out congregation in a movie like Rosemary's Baby or something. The scene on camera cuts rapidly to several shots of the chanting congregation while clearly edited and remixed audio of the chanting itself crescendos to a roar.

It seems to me as though the only additional thing these filmmakers could have done to get their point across is flash "THESE PEOPLE ARE CRAZY!!!" on the screen during the scene. And that's just one example of how the filmmakers carry out their agenda during the course of the film. The rest is pretty much the same: Worship scenes manipulated so that they appear stranger than they really are, comments from kids clearly cherry-picked to sound more extreme than they really are, etc. Heck, even the defacto narrator of the documentary is none other than Air America talk radio host Mike Papantonio, an ardent critic of what he calls "fundamentalist Christians."

I don't care what anyone else has to say: This documentary had an agenda, and that agenda was to make evangelical Christians look weird, depraved and even dangerous.

All that being said, though, I wouldn't be fair if I let some of the people portrayed in the film off the hook. In my first post about this documentary I said that one of the things that bothered me the most was a comment from Fischer about wanting the kids in her camp to "lay down their lives" for their religion like the folks in Palestine and Pakistan do. I was subsequently told in the comments that Fischer meant "laying down lives" as devoting one's life to God. That seemed plausible. In the film, though, I got to see that whole statement from her in context and I've got to say that I'm not any less disturbed by it. There's even a quote from one of the camp kids later in the documentary talking about how he thinks it would be "really cool" to die for his religion.

I just don't think there's anyway to defend putting ideas like that in kids' heads. And yet that is clearly what Fischer is doing.

I was also less than impressed by a mother in the film who, while homeschooling her child, basically tells him that evolution should not be taught in schools and that creationism should. A close-up shot of the science textbook the kid was studying from showed that it was titled something like "Creationism In Physical Science." I know a lot of people buy into the creationism thing, but saying that it should be taught instead of evolution? C'mon. That's just crazy talk.

All in all, this was actually a decent documentary, though very one sided as I've already pointed out. Which is disappointing because this topic is such an important one. We are currently in a battle with a global religious/political ideology that is intent on bringing our society down. There is probably no other time more important than now to examine the religions present in our societies and gage what they are and what sort of impact on politics they're having. Sadly, though, this movie (much like a book I recently read about religion and politics) is more about demonizing than exploring and observing.