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A review
Posted by Qasrani (Guest) - Thursday, September 21 2006, 20:10:06 (CEST)
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"Jesus Camp": Christian soldiers or an engaged citizenry? We report, you decide
By Andrew O'Henir

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady were bound to piss people off with their explosive documentary "Jesus Camp," which I first saw several months ago at the Tribeca Film Festival. It was just a question of who, when and how much. The film follows a group of Midwestern kids who attend an evangelical Christian summer camp in North Dakota led by Becky Fischer, a leading Pentecostal youth minister with an avowedly political mission.

It's a glimpse into a world most secular, metropolitan liberals never see, and it's likely to induce howls of both terror and hilarity from big-city audiences. (For more on the evangelical movement of young hipsters that's sweeping through the culture right now, read Lauren Sandler's recent story in Salon, "Come as You Are.") Fischer tells her charges that their mission is to remake America, urging them to be just as ready to give up their lives for Jesus' sake as Muslim kids in Palestine are (she says) to kill themselves for the Prophet. She prays over her Macintosh and her PowerPoint presentations. She leads her kids in praying over a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush, who is openly and repeatedly acknowledged as their movement's political avatar.

"Jesus Camp" has now come under attack from the Rev. Ted Haggard, the powerful pastor of a Colorado megachurch, and head of the National Association of Evangelicals, who appears in the film. Haggard's real problem may be that he comes off like a cynical, showbizzy creep, especially compared to the profoundly committed and idealistic kids at the heart of the film (and even compared with Fischer, who may be frightening but is certainly authentic in her beliefs). Be that as it may, Haggard has urged all evangelical Christians not to see the film, which Ewing and Grady clearly hoped would speak, perhaps in different ways, to religious and non-religious audiences of all political persuasions.

In an attempt to short-circuit exactly this kind of criticism, Magnolia Pictures opened "Jesus Camp" first in Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas, hoping that strong word of mouth in evangelical-rich communities might counteract the big-city reviews. So far, it hasn't worked. Heartland audiences have been sparse, and when I meet Ewing and Grady (also the directors of "The Boys of Baraka") for coffee at New York's fabled Algonquin Hotel, they're fired up to defend their integrity.

"Haggard has said that you can learn as much about Catholicism from seeing 'Nacho Libre' as you can learn about evangelicalism from 'Jesus Camp,'" Grady says, "and that it was made in the same spirit as a Michael Moore movie, which I totally disagree with."

"And then he said he didn't like the camera angles. He said it was shot like 'Blair Witch,'" Ewing snaps. "What is he, a movie critic? Excuse me! He should go back on message."

Grady elaborates, in a more modulated tone. "We really took pains to show this community with our point of view out of it as much as possible, and also with compassion. There was a human dimension we made sure to include. I think that's part of why the extremes [in American life] don't have a conversation. Everybody forgets that there's real people on the other side of those ideologies."

"It would have been so easy to make a farce, to ridicule these people, to do a liberal lynching," Ewing says. "We could have done it in our sleep, with the material we had. Instead, we edited this film for 10 months to make sure that we were being fair, so that we could sleep at night. Being fair is all you owe your subject. And the subjects of our film, Ted Haggard aside, believe that it's fair and accurate. We're showing them the way they are in their lives."

The filmmakers saw Becky Fischer in Kansas City last week and report that she is "thrilled" with her presentation in the film. She always understood, they say, that they were secular people from New York with a worldview quite different from hers. (Grady is Jewish, and Ewing describes herself as a lapsed Catholic.)

"We wouldn't want to go into that situation, or any situation, by saying, 'This is my box. I'm a liberal, I'm a Democrat, this is my stance on religion,'" Grady says. "We make documentaries to learn, personally. To go on journeys, personally. You've got to leave all that stuff at the door, because it's boring if you're just going in there to prove a point. Our approach is to walk with people who have been gracious enough, and brave enough, to let us into their world. So it's a shame that this guy who is the most powerful person we have in the film, and who has the biggest soapbox to speak to evangelicals, is telling them not to see it. Not even to see it and make their own decisions. Just not to see it."

Ewing says, "It's funny that the political leadership of the religious right appears to be galvanizing against this film. They're ready to reject this movie, when their constituents, at least the ones we show in the film, love the movie and are unashamed about what they're doing and how they worship. These believers are being dismissed by the leadership, as if they can't understand what has happened to them, as if they've been taken advantage of."

One criticism that's been launched against "Jesus Camp," by both secular and evangelical viewers, is that Fischer's ministry belongs to the charismatic Pentecostal movement, which holds extreme theological and (in some cases) political views, and is regarded as a fringe movement by many other Christians. At Fischer's "Kids on Fire" services, worshipers are slain in the spirit, speak in tongues and prophesy the future. Many Pentecostalists believe that the sick can be healed, and the dead raised, through the laying on of hands (beliefs other evangelicals and fundamentalists do not widely share).

"We want to be clear," says Grady, "that the people in our movie are part of a subset, you might say, of the evangelical world. I would not use the word 'fringe,' because I don't want to dismiss them. But the entire evangelical world might be 100 million people. It's huge, and it's not a monolith. The people we spent time with, I think the high level of political activism participation, and the patriotism, as they express it, is very much intertwined with the way they worship. That's what we saw."

Secular liberals may see these believers, who openly espouse a spiritual renewal in political and public life, as outside the American mainstream tradition. "The American tradition of what?" Grady snorts. "Civic involvement? They're embracing it."

"Look, a majority of people in this country do not really believe that the separation of church and state was the intention of the Founding Fathers," says Ewing. "There is a huge percentage of people in this country who do not worship in the style of the people in our film but who question the separation of church and state, and who do not believe we evolved from earlier species. The people in our film may seem extreme in some ways. But they agree with, possibly, a majority of the American people on these questions.

"They take their civic duty more seriously than anyone I've ever met. There's such cynicism among a lot of liberals and seculars, who aren't voting and who don't believe they can make a difference. A large segment of the evangelical movement does not feel cynical about politics. They feel they can make a difference. They vote and they run for local office. They work in the library, they serve on the PTA. Well, it's a democracy. People who vote get to make the deal. I hate to break it to the secular, liberal audience, but what they're doing ain't illegal."

"Jesus Camp" is now playing in Colorado Springs, Dallas, Independence, Mo., Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Springfield, Mo., and Tulsa, Okla. It opens Sept. 22 in New York; Sept. 29 in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington; and Oct. 6 in Austin, Texas, Boston, Charlotte, N.C., Cleveland, Columbus, Ohio, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Knoxville, Tenn., Minneapolis, Nashville, Palm Springs, Calif., Portland, Ore., San Diego and Seattle, with more cities to follow.



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