Is Jesus Camp an anti-Christian film?

Film makers, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, plainly intended the average non-churched person to identify with the fears of liberal commentator, Mike Papantonio. The viewer is supposed to find the Christians, “scary,” in spite of the film makers’ professed fondness for Pentecostal children’s minister Becky Fischer, who is the primary subject of the movie.

But there are more categories than “liberal non-churched” and “conservative Pentecostal.” At the beginning of the movie, I identified myself as a heady Catholic, an outsider to the noisy Pentecostals. But as the movie became more a political commentary than a religious description, I identified myself in opposition to the ham-fisted secular commentator.

I felt myself in alien territory through the first half of the film. I was  profoundly disturbed by the heavy emphasis on emotions in worship. The film depicted Pentecostal worship as a continual search for a spiritual buzz.

I fear for these children and their faith when they no longer feel anything. They may believe that God has abandoned them, when really, it is they who have changed, not God. Catholics know from long experience of the lives of the saints than many great and holy people had long periods of spiritual aridity, times when they felt nothing from God.  We have recently learned that even Mother Theresa of Calcutta experienced this. She, like countless others, knew that serving God was intrinsically worth doing, regardless of their feelings. Just as every married couple has days when they don’t feel loving toward each other, these holy men and women persevered in loving God even when they didn’t feel like it.

Will these children, trained exclusively in the Pentecostal forms of expression, ever grow up spiritually? This is what initially troubled me about this film. But as the movie wore on, the political “message” became more blatant and heavy-handed. And I came to identify myself as one of the beleaguered Christians.

Air America radio host Mike Papantonio’s “commentary” on the political significance of the Religious Right amounted to wall-to-wall left-wing clichés. He was painful to listen to. Michael Novak or Richard John Neuhaus or Robert George would have made mince-meat of him.

The real fear of the radical Secularist is that the Religious Right will overturn Roe v. Wade.  Roe was the dominant political image of the film. The children at the camp held little plastic models of the fetus at various stages of development and chanted, “righteous judges, righteous judges,” as their prayer.

The radical Secularist is completely unable to understand the significance of Roe v. Wade for the Christian community. The Religious Right as a political phenomenon is entirely a creature of Roe. Without it, Catholics would still be New Deal Democrats, and Fundamentalists would still be abstaining from politics. It was Roe v. Wade that activated them, precisely because it conveyed the message that their values and beliefs were not welcome in the public square.

In the process, orthodox Christians of all denominations have been driven closer to one another.  Evangelicals and Catholics work together with far greater respect and appreciation than would have been possible forty years ago. Even though this went unnoticed in Jesus Camp, the “righteous judge” the kids prayed for, turned out not to be one their co-religionists, but Sam Alito, a Catholic.

So the question this film raises is: with whom do you most closely identify? Jesus Camp made me realize just how deeply Roe v. Wade has changed the face of American politics and American religious life. People who used to think the pope was the Anti-Christ are now grateful for the leadership of Pope John Paul II and now Pope Benedict. Catholics have become grateful for the enthusiasm and energy of their Evangelical and Pentecostal brothers and sisters. These changes in attitude would have been totally unpredictable a generation ago. Some might even call it miraculous.

Another disturbing charge made by Jesus Camp is that the parents and the minister are brainwashing the children. One of the more hysterical comments was by Richard Dawkins, saying that “If the adults decided to hand out the special Kool-Aid at this camp, the children would all unquestionably partake.”  Except for the small fact that no adults showed any inclination to give kids anything like Kool-Aid, this is a wise and witty observation.

The fact is that in today’s society, children are force-fed all manner of nonsense in taxpayer supported schools. The courts have made it clear that parents can not remove their children from lessons they disagree with. So parents are forced to look on, while their tax dollars are used to teach their children things with which they profoundly disagree: little things like sexual practices, and the meaning of life. Children have been penalized in school for drawing a picture of Jesus when asked to draw a hero.  It is episodes of grotesque disrespect for the values of parents that have driven so many people to remove their children from the schools. And while it is true that individual people left to themselves can become unaccountable, it is equally true that the combination of other people’s money, tenured instructors and compulsory attendance has made public schools completely unaccountable to the average parent. If the schools were more accountable to parents and more respectful toward their religious beliefs, parents wouldn’t feel the need to remove their children and shoulder the whole educational burden themselves.

But Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, the producers of Jesus Camp, are unable to see this. Neither their sympathy with Becky Fischer nor their interest in children’s spiritual experiences is enough to overcome their fear of losing Roe. They may sincerely believe their film is not anti-Christian. But the scary music and dark images they insert at key moments tell a different story.

In another era, Ewing and Grady might have been able to play the role of anthropologists, giving an objective report about an unfamiliar religious tribe. But because Roe has created such a poisonous political atmosphere, that level of understanding is not really possible.

Jesus Camp is an anti-Christian film.   More precisely, it is an anti-Christian parent film.  Whether Erwin and Grady intended this or not, that is what they produced.

"Students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft (rule) of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents. …Parents ought to be forewarned that we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable."

Professor Richard Rorty

How dare you "brainwash" those kids!

The term "brainwashing" is obviously a loaded, inflammatory word. Let me give you my understanding a definition of brainwashing:

Brainwashing is the deliberate, systematic bombardment of ideologies and concepts aimed at a group of people to sway their beliefs. That group of people may be totally unaware that it is happening. But the ideologies and concepts are repeated often enough and convincingly enough that the hearers ultimately believe what they are being told whether there is any truth to the concepts or not.

Based on that definition, the American children and youth are being brainwashed every day through books, movies, television, the internet, the music they listen and our school systems. The issues being perpetrated include sexual morality, situation ethics, evolution, witchcraft, relationships, religion, and many more.

So when the secular community accuses the Christian community of "brainwashing their children" with their own beliefs and worldview, that's a little like the proverbial "pot calling the kettle black!"

I like what the filmmakers have said to the press in interviews when they've been asked if they felt we were brainwashing the kids. Their response was that they had to re-evaluate their position on brainwashing and came to realize the if someone doesn't like what someone else is teaching their children, that's considered brainwashing. But when they teach their own children their own belief system it's just good parenting.

Jesus Camp Response

"You can expect to learn as much about the Catholic Church from Nacho Libre as you can learn about evangelicalism from Jesus Camp. This movie manipulates facts like a Michael Moore film and works the camera like The Blair Witch Project. It's one more 'documentary' that seems to miss the point intentionally."

~Ted Haggard

Question: The directors claim they have no agenda, but you disagree. What do you think the movie's agenda is? What is yellow about it?

Haggard Answer: I believe the agenda it to portray the people in the film as sinister. I believe Secularists are hoping that Evangelical Christians and radicalized Muslims are essentially the same, which is why they will love this film. I guarantee you that the kids will go from this camp to do radical things like... stay sexually pure until marriage... honor their parents... respect authority... refuse to steal and lie. This is the way we Evangelical Christians war against the values of this world.

Question: What concerns you about your portrayal? When you tell the camera to "repent," most people can tell it was in jest. Are you concerned that viewers will take you literally?

Haggard Answer: They taped for hours at New Life and they chose to use the footage where we were playing around with negative stereotypes for the use in the film, which was a major alarm for me. I think the producers want to make the unusual normative.

Question: Anyone who has spent much time with Evangelicals know that Jesus Camp portrays a narrow slice of Evangelicalism. Is that your concern that it doesn't represent evangelicalism? What is concerning that this was the particular subset of evangelicals chosen? Why do you think they chose a Pentecostal spiritual warfare pastor to feature?

Haggard Answer: The group they chose is a sub-group of the charismatic movement portrayed as mainstream, then by using the portion where I am joking around and casually talking about the growth of Evangelicalism, they make us all look like we're dominionists, which we are not. Not only does the movie misrepresent Evangelicalism, but it misrepresents the Charismatic movement. It does represent a small portion of the Charismatic movement, but I think it demonizes it. To learn about Evangelicalism from this movie would be the equivalent to learning about how the Catholic Church funds it's ministry to orphans by watching Nacho Libre.

Question: You're in the charismatic movement, was there anything portrayed that you disagreed with on theological or other grounds?

Haggard Answer: After September 11th, most Christian groups stopped using militaristic language because of the evolution of meaning in the secular world. We've known that anti- Evangelicals would try to portray Bible-believing Christians as radicalized Christians, in order to equate us with violent Muslims. This movie successfully does that.

"What I did see in the faces of those kids I've only seen in one other place - Leni Riefenstahl's film of the 1934 Nazi Party rally at Nurnberg only those kids were older, and went on to invade Poland and run Auschwitz and..."

posted by Anonymous Two
on Richard Dawkins' website

Elementary-age students march in a gay pride event under the banner of a San Diego public school

Worldnet Daily reports that Christian blogger, David Hartline, observed the event and saw the children marching in the midst of triple-X rated behavior by "gay" activists.

"Hartline noted that just a year earlier, there was an investigation into the San Diego Gay Pride organization for allegedly employing numerous pedophiles as volunteers and staff supervisors during its annual parade and festival.

'How the teachers of an elementary school thought it was okay to march as a group under the official banner of the charter school along with children is beyond the pale of anything that the taxpayers and parents of San Diego ever envisioned when they voted to allow the establishment of the public satellite charter schools,' Hartline said."

I once had a second grader tell me that he had learned about Chinese New Year in school. He informed me, in all seriousness, that red is a lucky color. I tried to correct him and say, "the teacher must have meant that the Chinese BELIEVE that red is a lucky color." My little friend wouldn't have any part of that. He was convinced that red is in fact a lucky color because his teacher said so. And when St. Patrick's Day comes around, forget about any objective facts about the person of St. Patrick, his historic significance, and his importance to the Irish who migrated to America. The kids come home with lucky shamrocks, pots of gold at the end of the rainbow and a inchoate belief that St. Patrick must have been a leprechaun.

Jennifer Roback Morse

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