Film Review: Jesus Camp

Director: Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing

Wherever you go, Religion is a highly emotive subject and one that is guaranteed to polarize opinions. Jesus Camp is a 2006 documentary that debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival which according to the distributor who bought the rights "doesn't come with any prepackaged point of view" and tries to be "an honest and impartial depiction of one faction of the evangelical Christian community". It was also nominated for Best Documentary at the 2007 Academy Awards.

Rousing praise for Jesus

The film focuses on the ''Kids on Fire School of Ministry" which is run by Becky Fischer and is a summer camp for Christian evangelists to go along to with their children so they can become submerged in the faith. Three children are distinctly followed throughout who are Levi, Rachel and Tory who are already being brought up in devout Christian households in out of town Missouri.  The kids are told to admit their sins and become good Christians all of the time and not just in the presence of other Christians, this shaming amongst other activities seems to produce a lot of crying and wailing from the children which is perceived as good by the parents.

The directors do an excellent job of just demonstrating what happens at these sort of religious camps, they don't openly question or judge what is happening and leave that to the viewer themselves. In many ways what is shown comes across as brainwashing children who are dealing with religious and moral issues with which they are not mature enough to understand. The children protesting against abortion are doing it because they are told that abortion is bad without being anywhere near informed enough to form an opinion on the subject. The reasons Pastor Becky Fischer gave for trying to promote the ideology in children were incredibly weak and just smacked of taking advantage of their naive tendencies.

9 year old Rachel protesting in Washington D.C against abortion

Many people involved in the camp criticized the film for showing it in a bad light which is a double edged sword, clearly the film makers left out bits where the children probably had fun and did more engaging activities but left in some of the clearly distressing emotional parts. But regardless of that it still shows that these children aren't necessarily being given a choice in their religious upbringing. The leaders of the camp claim to be purely working to get people in touch with God but have ulterior political motives which are revealed later in the film with apparently Evangelists having the power to decide elections because of their numbers (clearly didn't bother using those numbers in the last 2 elections).

Throughout the film there are cuts to a radio show called Ring of Fire which is hosted by Mike Papantonio who is also a Christian but displays much more level headed views and actually has Becky Fischer on the show during a phone-in. He openly criticizes her motives for targeting children and believes people should be allowed to make choices as adults, Fischer's response is honestly chilling and confirms any doubts you had about the camps motives being completely innocent.

3.5/4 Superb documentary that doesn't question or cast judgement