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Suffer, Little Children
By bukkhead | July 22, 2007
FILM REVIEW: ‘JESUS CAMP’
Directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady
Rated PG-13
84 mins.
It’s tough to mention documentaries in general without mentioning Michael Moore. Fine. There’s two types of documentaries—those that just “document” something and let you take away your own opinion, and those with a heavy editorial slant. Moore makes the latter. Jesus Camp is the former. What I’d like to do is provide a review that itself does not have much an editorial slant. That’s going to be difficult.
Jesus Camp loosely follows a few kids who are very much involved in their mid-western spiritual life. Levi is home-schooled by his evangelical mother, and is very strong, and happy, in his faith. He’s obviously a special kid, has a self-confidence and cool enthusiasm that you quickly come to appreciate. At the camp in North Dakota, run by Pentecostal Becky Fischer, Levi even gets up and gives a prepared sermon, calling other kids to be strong in their faith and to not give in to temptation.
Raechel, also, seems like a well-adjusted girl. What she lacks in confidence she makes up for in bravery, overcoming her fears to talk to complete strangers about the goals Jesus has for them. She too, attends the camp; she reads her Chick tracts at the bowling alley, checks in with God, and heeds to the call to speak with a pretty blond woman, or later, a group of black men sitting in a DC park.
Directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady don’t provide narration for the film in any form, though the do provide some counter-thoughts by way of Mike Papantonio, a radio talk-show host who is a Christian but speaks to a very liberal outlook. Juxtaposed with Becky Fischer’s wonder and awe at the potential in children coming to God’s army, Papantonio decries the sad state of an America becoming battered and controlled by the religious right. Towards the end of the documentary, she is briefly interviewed on his Ring of Fire show.
Between them, there is no resolution or even understanding. And that was my own take-away from the film. I was left with nothing new by way of information—I knew all of this before, about parents who willingly indoctrinate as opposed to educate, church leaders who seduce rather than induce. I was left only with more frustration that this still exists in a self-proclaimed free-thinking nation.
But I do believe that Ewing and Grady chose to show lingering shots of children crying in order to make a statement about what kind of depravity some churches perpetrate. Children crying at their own sinfulness, crying and begging for Jesus to make them better and holy: I’m not the only one who likens this to child abuse.
However, I bet if you showed this documentary to a dedicated evangelical conservative Christian, their reaction would the opposite. So even if Ewing and Grady are not editorializing, they nevertheless are providing a polemic. Jesus Camp will make you weep: for joy that the children are so easily programmed, or out of sadness for the same reason.
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