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Los Angeles Times
God's boot camp?
A film on kids' religious
experience creates a furor, divides Christians.
By Gina Piccalo
Times Staff Writer
September 25, 2006
 "Jesus
Camp," a documentary feature film that follows evangelical
Christian children at a religious summer camp, won prizes and
critical praise on the summer festival circuit, but it wasn't
until its quiet opening in the Midwest two weeks ago that a news
clip about the film hit YouTube.com, inciting a whirlwind of
controversy.
Already, the movie, which opens in L.A. this week, has split the
Christian community and horrified those who fear the ascendance
of the religious right on the national stage. "Jesus Camp"
opened Friday in New York and will open in 20 more cities
nationally Oct. 6.
Bloggers of all stripes have been so disgusted by the bits of
the film they have seen on the Web that the film's central
subject, camp founder Pastor Becky Fischer, has become a public
figure, bombarded with hateful e-mails and bracing for her media
appearances next week, including a scheduled appearance on ABC's
"Good Morning America." The A&E Indiefilms/Magnolia Pictures
film follows Rachael, now 10, Levi, now 13, and Tory, now 11,
engaging and articulate children from Midwestern towns who
attend Fischer's "Kids on Fire" Bible camp in Devils Lake, N.D.,
in 2005. The filmmakers, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, take a
straightforward look at their subjects.
The film's cherub-faced children cheer when asked if they'd be
willing to give up their lives for Jesus, pray over a cardboard
cutout of President Bush and sob as they plead for an end to
abortion. One is home-schooled by a mother who teaches that
"science doesn't prove anything."
'This is war!'
At one point in the film, Fischer shouts to the children,
"This is war! Are you part of it or not?" She proudly compares
her work to the indoctrination of young boys by extremist
Muslims in Pakistan and elsewhere. The film intersperses footage
of Fischer and the children with clips of radio talk-show host
Mike Papantonio, a liberal Methodist, excoriating conservative
Christians like Fischer.
Fischer is disappointed by the way she appears in the film. "I
do understand they're out to tell a story and they felt they
found it with some of the political things," she said by phone
from her home in Bismarck, N.D. "And they're out to show the
most dramatic, exotic, extreme things they found in my ministry,
and I'm not ashamed of those things, but without context, it's
really difficult to defend what you're seeing on the screen."
More controversy over the film erupted last week when the Rev.
Ted Haggard — whose constituency at the National Assn. of
Evangelicals is 30 million strong — took a public stance against
it, claiming that the film makes evangelicals look "scary." His
condemnation apparently chilled the film's opening in 13
theaters in Colorado, Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri on
Sept. 15.
Even before its release, lurid fascination with the film's
trailer bloomed on the Internet. A Sept. 17 ABC News report on
the movie turned up on YouTube.com shortly after it aired, and
by the next day, the segment was the website's most-viewed clip,
with about 200,000 downloads in a matter of hours.
When Fischer arrived home Tuesday after a few days touring with
the filmmakers, her e-mail inbox was loaded with hate mail. She
spent the next two days writing lengthy explanations to the most
common accusations — "How dare you brainwash those kids!" and
"Are you raising up Christian terrorists or another Hitler Youth
movement?" — then posted them on her website Thursday.
"I've gotten thousands of hits on my website from those people,"
she said. "I'm wearing sunglasses in the airports. It's really
making me nervous."
Haggard — who appears in the film noting that when evangelicals
vote, they determine an election — acknowledged he "hated" the
film and called it "propaganda" for the far left. He said the
filmmakers take the charismatic, evangelical jargon too
literally and portray the children's and Fischer's "war talk" as
violent and extremist, when it's just allegorical.
"It doesn't mean we're going to establish a theocracy and force
people to obey what they think is God's law," he said. "None of
that's clarified in the movie."
Word about the film initially spread online after the Tribeca
Film Festival screening in New York in April and then again in
June, after former Talking Heads lead singer David Byrne saw it
at the AFI/Discovery Silver Docs Film Festival in Washington,
D.C., and mentioned it on his blog.
"I kept saying to myself, 'OK, these are the Christian version
of the Madrassas (those Islamic religious instructional schools
in Pakistan and elsewhere, often financed by Saudi oil money) …
so both sides are pretty much equally sick," he wrote.
It garnered even more attention in early August when Michael
Moore refused to honor a request by Eamonn Bowles, the head of
Magnolia Pictures, to cancel the film's screening at Moore's
Traverse City Film Festival to avoid alienating conservative
Christian audiences.
Bowles hoped to build interest among conservative Christians for
the film's opening with a word-of-mouth campaign generated by
faith-based publicity firm A. Larry Ross in Carrollton, Texas.
Instead, only handfuls of people turned out.
"We were getting good feedback from a lot of Christian groups
interested in the film," Bowles said. After Haggard's
statements, he said, "it was almost like a switch was flipped
and the people who were going to support it the day before were
like, 'Oh no. We're not going to support the film.' "
The New York-based Ewing and Grady said they want the film to
make a broad statement about how politics and faith have become
inexorably intertwined in America. Yet the conversations that
have been sparked by the movie are less about the stark
differences between people with different ideologies and more
about the interest in bridging them. "No one's going anywhere
and no one's going to change their minds," Grady said. "So some
sort of compromise has to happen, or we're just going to become
more and more divided."
All the controversy surrounding the film, Grady said, "speaks to
the fact that this is a conversation that people are dying to
have."
A political turn
Grady and Ewing, who last year won awards for their
documentary "The Boys of Baraka" about a group of inner-city
American kids attending a school in Africa, said everyone was
enthusiastic about participating in the project. But as Fischer
explained, no one, including the filmmakers, expected the film
to become so overtly political. But after Sandra Day O'Connor
resigned from the Supreme Court during their filming, leaving a
spot open for a more conservative judge, the evangelical
community galvanized around the selection of a replacement, and
Fischer's children chanted, "Righteous judges!" Ultimately,
though, Fischer said, "no one was more shocked or horrified when
they told me that was the turn the film was making."
That's because, like many evangelical Christians, Fischer
doesn't see what she does as political.
The Bible, she said, instructs people to "pray for those in
authority over us and in government positions so we can live a
peaceful life." And Fischer said she's "dumbfounded" that people
would find her anti-abortion lessons disturbing when she sees
them as a way to teach children to value human life.
Despite her reservations about the film, Fischer said she's
still helping to promote it and considers Ewing and Grady
friends. She's also grateful for the national attention the
movie and its controversy have granted her. "I couldn't have
paid for this kind of advertising," she said.
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