|
Documentary
finds trouble brewing among 'soldiers for God's Army' in 'Jesus
Camp'
By
WILLIAM ARNOLD
P-I MOVIE CRITIC
October 5, 2006
As we all know, the documentary
film has become the great forum for the liberal point of view, and
the same kind of thorn in the side of the current administration as
the New Journalism and alternative press were to Johnson and Nixon
in the '60s and '70s.
And the latest representative of
this phenomenon, "Jesus Camp," goes further than any of its
predecessors in suggesting that the Religious Right constitutes a
treasonous threat to the country, and that its takeover of our
political system is virtually a fait accompli.
The film, which was edited at
Seattle's Alpha Cine studios, focuses on a North Dakota summer Bible
camp run by Becky Fischer, a SUV-driving woman minister who doesn't
believe in the Constitution and happily believes that democracy is
on its way out in America.
With the same intensity with which
Hezbollah trains suicide bombers, Fischer trains the children of the
faithful that the time has come for Christians to "take back the
land" from the Philistines and that George Bush is the Messenger
sent by God for this purpose.
The way she sees it, Christianity
and Islam are in a war to the finish, and it's high time Christian
kids were as committed to their cause as their enemy's kids are to
Islam -- that is, "Willing to lay down their lives." Why? "Because,
excuse me, WE have the truth."
The kids speak in tongues, dance in
orgasmic frenzy before a life-size cardboard cut-out of George W.
and are taught that anti-abortion is the only political issue worth
pursuing. (Global warming and the Earth in general are irrelevant,
since only the afterlife matters.)
Witnessing this spectacle, a
rational viewer's first impulse is, of course, to dismiss Fischer
and her training camp of "soldiers for God's Army" as one more kooky
aberration of Middle American fear and loathing, in the same
department as skinheads and survivalists.
But as the filmmakers follow three
kids through the camp, and then into the wider context of the
American political-evangelical movement, Fischer and her flock begin
to look like the pure crystallization of the Religious Right, and
its cutting edge.
The film's voice of reason is
attorney Mike Papantonio, who charges on his radio talk show that
the New Christianity is not just ugly, intolerant and the very
antithesis of real Christianity, but a genuine subversive threat to
the nation.
Papantonio believes that, while
liberal and middle-of-the-road America has been asleep at the wheel,
Christian extremists have taken over all three branches of the
federal government. Now they're training a generation of Born Again
storm troopers.
The film overestimates the lasting
power of childhood indoctrination. (Think of all those brainwashed
Chinese kids of the Cultural Revolution who grew up to be happy
capitalists). But it makes an unsettling case that America is fast
becoming the thing it professes to hate.
|
