This is a simple but powerful documentary about an evangelical summer camp for children in Missouri. There is nothing fancy here. The camera picks out three children, two of them extremely articulate, to follow through the camp, and it watches as their parents talk about homeschooling, and the camp pastor explains that evangelicals have to imitate muslims in getting children to commit to a brand of religion when they are very young. The counterpoint is provided by a radio talk show host (one of the pair that does the ‘Ring of Fire’ program on Air America) who talks of the perversion of religion that emanates from the religious right. For most of the documentary, the evangelicals speak for themselves without commentary.
One of the pleasures is footage near the end of Pastor Ted Haggard preaching on the sins of homosexuality and hamming it up for the camera when some of the Jesus Camp kids visit his mega-church. This, of course, is the same Ted Haggard who had to resign his post last October for use of drugs and male prostitutes.
The reason to see ‘Jesus Camp’ is simply that this is a world most of us (I assume) know very little about. As an atheist since before I was aware of having any politics at all (courtesy of a church of england boys boarding school), the scenes in church and in the camp are quite frightening. To me they are a kind of child abuse. You see 8, 9 and 10 year old children crying, writhing on the ground, being told that they are hypocrites, and acting out some militaristic fantasy (complete with war camouflage paint) about being holy warriors. One little girl picks out a bemused young woman at a bowling alley and goes up to tell her that Jesus has a message for her. A mother trashes evolution and repeats to her son that only creationism can answer the questions he has. Another 9 year old girl twirls to Christian heavy metal and explains that it is easy to be tempted by the flesh, even for her. There is one particular boy, with a mop of blond hair, who sits apart from the other kids reading his bible and is seen more than once in anguish because he is not certain of his faith. The use of sin and hell to frighten children, the genuine pain that many of the children seem to be in when the camp has its regular revivalist prayer meetings, it all makes me wonder at the chasm between what I think of as the responsibilities of a parent, and what those in the documentary believe it is legitimate to do to/with children.
BTW, in my post about documentaries and fiction movies on the ‘Children of Men’ thread, I was not trying to start a pomo fight/debate (though I certainly come out of a quite different Left tradition, and, like Simon, I worry that a certain kind of bastardized postmodernism created space for the Right to start justifying the teaching of creationism and the like on the grounds that there is no truth out there — see Walter Benn Michael’s provocative ‘The Trouble with Diversity’ here).
My point was about how the viewer processes the information from the two types of film. That is clear to me when watching ‘Jesus Camp.’ I reacted very differently to scenes of children talking emotionally, and weeping and wailing about Christ in the documentary, than I did to similar scenes in ‘The Apostle’ or ‘Palindromes’ because I knew these were real kids, that this was really happening. That does not mean the documentary is necessarily more powerful, but it did make me more angry.
Real kids, yes . . . and really happening, yes, but in front of a movie camera is anything altered in the kids’ “performances”?
I enthusiastically await Netflix’s decision to send me this film. On Monday morning I had three openings and Jesus Camp was at the top of my queue, but noooo . . . It now appears to be suffering from a “very long wait.” Guess I could drive over to the Blockbuster.
I’m returning my copy tomorrow, as soon as I watch it again with my 13 year old. I want him to know how lucky he is that we only sent him to soccer camp (though it was an Italian soccer camp so he was bored out of his mind).
chris,
no you didn’t!
Sorry, Gio. I was channeling Arnab. I LOVE Italian soccer (though not as much as Chelsea soccer).
I watched Jesus Camp last night; it’s slight but the children featured are engaging, empathic, passionately engaged in something other than video games and other consumer driven pursuits; they’re also smart and don’t strike me as any more brainwashed than anyone else I know (relatively speaking). I think this documentary makes some viewers uncomfortable because it makes visible the process of ideological assimilation we all fall victim to no matter how we define our spiritual beliefs (and the film seemed to encourage me to adopt a superior stance to the world it documents which is problematic). The fact that we keep returning to the Christian radio talk show who despises fundamentalists and their ilk also allows the viewer to have his Christian beliefs and still snear at the “crazies.” Of course, the woman running the camp provides some truly provocative tidbits to chew on, but I think the kids keep a somewhat healthy distance from the adults in their lives (the scenes in the summer camp cabin at night or the looks of good old-fashioned boredom on the faces of some of the kids in the church service suggest a certain subversive strain that marks these kids as kids and not little adults performing for the adult gaze–at least not always). I wish the film had been more multi-dimenional in its approach to the subject–as it is the filmmakers choose the easy path and that’s too bad. The arrival of Rev. Ted Haggard, who was recently outed by a drug dealing male prostitute, adds a creepy touch but, once again, I’m put in a position to feel even more superior to these people.
You know, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Borat last night while watching Jesus Camp. That scene at the fundamentalist Christian church still strikes me as one of the most gracefully inspiring sequence of film during the past year. I do believe Borat wanted to give us another opportunity to look harshly upon those whose ideological belief systems are at odds with our own brand of secular humanist rationalism, but Borat is outclassed–invited in to share their space, break their bread, and receive their prayers (smelly leisure suit and all). Look, I don’t believe what these groups believe, but I can’t condemn them either. That’s the beauty of freedom.
I didn’t feel superior to those depicted in Jesus Camp and I don’t think that the documentary was trying to put down its subjects. The question it asks is whether children that young should be subjected to all-encompassing ideologies without being offered critical space to evaluate those ideologies.
There is no beauty in a freedom that takes people at an age before they are developmentally capable of considering critical alternatives and puts them in a totalizing space where every kind of moral and peer pressure urges them to adopt religious belief (and one with a very stark message of good and evil at that).
I don’t agree that all ideological assimilation is the same and Jesus Camp is the same socialization process that all children undergo in one form or another. There are degrees of what is essentially brainwashing. The forms of pressure have a clear coercive effect.
My politics are pretty liberal, and my kids have figured that out. But I think that plenty of parents explain their beliefs to their kids but offer them some space to criticize or question. At least I try. That is totally absent in Jesus Camp.
My boy will feel the love of Jesus, or I will whip his ass.
is there any belief system more subtly and powerfully persuasive than 21st century western capitalism/consumerism? i don’t think so. and kids are just about the most targeted consumer group, no? haven’t seen JC, but as someone who spent a large part of her youth going to christian camps (okay, that was in italy, not in fundamentalist country), i don’t find them dangerous or particularly pernicious. i have objected to scientology-bashing on this site before (how sad the way tom cruise was received last night by the oh-so-pure hollywood crowd), not because i know anything about it, but because our outrage at religious “cults” seems to me silly and blind. we are barking up the wrong tree. kid gets out of jesus camp/scientology course and runs face first into a coke vending machine, a nano ipod, a razr cell phone. that is indoctrination.
My boy will also taste the glories of Coke and spend unthriftily at Target, or I will whip his ass.
More seriously: I guess I take Gio’s complaint seriously insofar as it does strike me odd how we (a broad, beyond-blog inclusive “we”) get so fired up about the “crazy” religious (Jesus campers, Scientologists) and give the mainstream religious a pass. That said, I might be somewhat inclined to enjoy a bit more broad-based (beyond-blog inclusive) knocking of religions. But that isn’t Gio’s point, I gather.
And on another note I probably agree with Chris that we shouldn’t assume that all ideologies are equivalent. (Mike writes unironically, right after he demanded a broad-based equivalency of attack on religion.) Or at least that we lose something useful by reading JesusCamp and CokeVending as merely part of normal development.
Similarly, or because of this useful heterogeneity, I’m also resistant to hierarchizing the perniciousness of ideologies.
NOTE: I take Gio’s point to be most useful if she’s arguing not that capitalism deserves more scorn than christianity, rather that capitalism strangely gets a pass while we casually knock around the christians. If, however, we’re separating the he-man indoctrinations from the girlie-boy group-thinks, I’m not sure that’s the kind of differentiating I want to get behind. As someone who has trouble separating my bland protestant upbringing from the persistent wash of consumerism, the gross psychological tortures of raced and gendered and sexualized “identity” in late-20th America from the less-visible anxiety-provoking structures of class, I feel poorly equipped to pick the one that’s fucked me up the most.
yes, mike, you’ve got me right. but it’s more than giving a pass to consumerism/capitalism. it’s getting angry at the wrong object. it’s redirecting anger and dissipating it. it’s going for the smoke while neglecting the meat. it’s being taken for a ride and feeling cool about it.
listen, you know i’m not for a wholesale condemnation of religion, cuz, as i made clear before, i like religion, i am a religious person. but, even as an antireligious person you might want to consider the possibility that we might get angry at these small target with a lot more passion they deserve. jesus camp? who gives a shit? in the meantime, excuse me while i buy me this caffe latte without which i just cannot start the day.
this is a mea culpa. i love starbucks. why do i love starbucks? because it is the only decent indoor space we have — at least in super-uncool miami. what worries me no end is that one day we’ll all be very angry or very worried about something terribly important and the only place we can congregate and discuss it is precisely… nowhere… or our computer terminals, which is marginally better. the social insularism of our world gets me frantic with anxiety. jesus camp? who gives a shit? at least they are all in the same space at the same time, talking to each other.
but we are entitled to our own obsessions. i’ll be quiet while you trash religion. and i’ll watch the documentary before i say another word.
Hey Gio–maybe this is an off-blog comment, as it has nothing to do with this particular or any other movie. But….
I agree with you in paragraph 2, and your attempt to point out how this may be misdirected anger. I might again quibble and say: do I only get one object for my anger? But I *do* agree that there’s a hue and cry about fundamentalism (of various stripes) that seems an opiate for the anti-masses.
I was raised religious. As I alluded, it was a pretty happy-God, everybody’s-forgiven, ecumenical kind of protestantism. But it was pervasive, and I was there every week (often more than once) for 16 years, until my doubts and resistance emerged more forcefully. (We were catholic until I was about 6, when my Mom convinced my Dad to go Baptist, and he was ripe for the move since he’d lost his hardcore faith after Vatican II.) And even in this pleasant context I found myself astonished by the meanness of the community, the viciousness of certain prejudices–more and more as I grew into doubts and away from certainties, and suddenly my questioning of the homophobic and the Deity merged.
I also have cousins who went to Lutheran versions of a hellfire Jesus Camp, at least twice a week; the last three kids (in a large family) were homeschooled. I used to be on this aunt’s email list, until I replied-all to a particularly vicious, anti-semitic rant that she forwarded to her group following some criticism of Mel G’s Passion. The kids are lovely and profoundly, profoundly fucked up. We have in the family talked about it as a kind of child abuse–despite the fact that the parents are really loving in so many ways. Right up until they get their ten-year-old into fits of anxious weeping about her damned soul. And I have a far-right catholic uncle who’s done the same things to his kids, one of whom (now 30) is in and out of the hospital because she reads her anorexia and depression as rituals of profound faith, a reading her uncle tacitly affirms.
So…I come by my anti-religious chops with some history. I haven’t seen this movie because I don’t feel like I’ll learn much. (I can recommend Hell House, a somewhat-older doc about certain fundamentalist halloween rituals–because the documentary is trying to observe and understand activities that the participants come to for complex and varied reasons. This may be the case with Jesus Camp, but everything I’ve read about it suggests a perhaps-deserved p.o.v. that observes in horror the activities portrayed; horror might be my reaction too, but I always am more interested in trying to understand how and why, and less in critiquing a what I already know to make me very uncomfortable.)
I don’t doubt that religion can provide foundations of meaning and community and moral sensibility. I also can’t doubt thousands of years of history wherein religious structures help cement vicious inequities in various social contexts.
I also came of political age–working in elections, able to vote–with the rise of the Moral Majority, and experienced the interrelations of politics, a vicious religious sensibility, and big-business “ethics” in that decade. Maybe, growing up religious in America, I have a more difficult time seeing these as separate realms, deserving my separable approbation.
And, again–is even the fundamentalist hijinks of a caricatured evangelical fundamentalism exploiting its children worse than capitalism? I still want to resist making a choice. I hope this stands as something of an apology, in the old form–making sense of why I might have some of these reactions.
But (and I hope this is obvious) I absolutely see your point, and even take it to heart–you are calling us (an in- and out-of- blog “us”) on certain critical behaviors that deserve some attention.
mike, you are always so generous and open in your comments! yeah, i see how you come by your antireligius zeal. you come by it honestly and i can hardly blame you.
i have seen a lot of good stuff done in the name of religion, and a lot of healthy, happy people, so maybe i was just lucky that way, or unlucky, depending on one’s point of view.
i like fundamentalism, christian and otherwise, like a bullet in the head, and i have no qualms with you there, but my suspicion is that people who are seriously fucked up would find something else to attach their fuck-upedness to if they hadn’t stumbled upon religion. while there is no shortage of pretexts (they have weapons of mass destrucion; they destroy the fabric of our society; they spread illness), i’ll admit that religion is a pretty formidable one, though. maybe lack of religion, in and of itself, wouldn’t make them a lot better, is all i’m saying.
this being sad, there is a lot of shit that goes on because of and around religion, a lot of serious shit. i have no stake whatsoever in denying it, none at all. i keep a more or less healthy level of constant anger towards my own church, while i manage not to be angry at other versions of christianity qua versions of christianity when they do and say bad bad things by viewing them only as manifestations of social disease. i get angry at them for being diseased, not for being christian. intolerant and hate-mongering christian leaders are to me just intolerant and hate-mongering leaders. there’s nothing christian in their hate, and if they say there is they lie. the heart of christianity is lots and lots of love, as you well know. this is not something that can be dispensed with. anything that is not love is not christian. intolerance is not christian, punishment is not christian, inflicting avoidable pain on people (unlike, say, when you have to cut them up to operate on them) is not christian.
sorry about your folks. it sounds pretty bad. yikes.
I too appreciate Mike’s honesty and his willingness not to cast stones (and it sounds like he has ample reason to do so, which makes his comments all the more profound). I grew up in a tolerant, loving and open Protestant tradition (Presbyterian USA). My mom was the director of Christian education and the reverend was a former agnostic newspaperman who discovered Christ through existential philosphy (Karl Jaspers or someone in his circle). Still, I wandered from the church myself (though I feel as if I may be missing out on something useful these days). I also feel there are as many if not more young men and women (middle aged men and women, elderly men and women) who suffer from body disorder dysfunctions/diseases (anorexia, bulemia, steroid use, face lifts, boob jobs, muscle implants) and depression due to a profound disconnect between how they see themselves and the ideological norms enforced upon them by an all-pervasive late-modern capitalist ethos. “Hail Coca Cola” the Hamletmachine screams out.
I’m not sure I understand this notion of choosing between the critique of consumer ideology or that of fundamentalist ideology. Aren’t they interrelated, perhaps in complex ways. And if the goal is change and a better society, wouldn’t one have to critique both? especially, say, the strands of Christianity in the USA that greet social upheaval with the invocation of supernatural events like “the end times” and “the rapture.” Do I overrate people’s allegiance to these ideas? I’m also not sure about the need to come through religion in order to critique it “honestly” or the idea that Christianity gets a pass from its noxious elements because those elements aren’t really “christian.” The idea that one is superior to other folks because in the possession of the truth seems to be a fairly inextricable element of most religions, one that underwrites a host of offenses. And I have a fear of those doctrines of violent ultimate closure because they defer change to the next world and take it out of human hands. I’m not saying all Christians take the doctrine of the apocalypse as an excuse for quietism, but certainly in many cases a pre-determined endpoint for history takes the sting out of the need for social decisionmaking, or, worse, allows one to take the status quo as the necessary stage in the inevitable sequence.