Rep Cinema Feature God's army's
youngest recruits
January 4, 2007
By DEIRDRE SWAIN
See also: Jesus Camp Main Page
(click
here)
JESUS CAMP (Heidi Ewing, Rachel
Grady) Rating: NNNN
 Looking
for something fun to do with your kids this summer? Why not join
hundreds of others at Kids on Fire camp at Devil's Lake, North
Dakota, run by evangelical "kids' pastor" Becky Fischer? Singing,
dancing, speaking in tongues: this camp has it all.
In Jesus Camp we meet young
recruits to God's army. Directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady
present the action without comment (rebuttal is provided by a
non-evangelical Christian radio host), but the picture they paint
becomes gradually more terrifying anyway.
The parents want to teach their
kids about character, as one mother says, and good for them. But
they're also taught intolerance of other faiths (even other
Christian denominations), that all science is a lie and, in
Fischer's chilling words, that they should be as ready to die for
the Gospels as Islamist martyrs are for Allah.
If the recent U.S. elections and
the outing of Ted Haggard, the president's spiritual adviser,
renders the film less topical than it was a year ago, it's still a
portrait of a growing and influential subsection of the U.S.
population. It'd be really interesting to revisit these kids in five
years or so to see if, as Fischer says, what they learned as
children stays with them all their lives. (January 10 at the Bloor)
NOW | JANUARY 4 - 10, 2007 | VOL.
26 NO. 18
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