An uncomfortable look at kids, faith|Levi, Rachael and Tory are the young stars of Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s flawed but telling film “Jesus Camp.”
In a world in which candid children have contributed mightily to documentaries like “Spellbound” and “Mad Hot Ballroom,” these three are likely the most articulate, practiced kids you will see onscreen that aren’t professional actors.
One reason for this is that each youngster is already a testifying evangelical Christian.
“Jesus Camp” begins visually on the roadways of Missouri where American flags flap next to the MacDonald’s golden arches and family bowling alleys might be a parking lot over from an “adult superstore.”
Aurally, the movie begins with the twisting of a radio dial. Snatches of barbed radio chatter give way to more of the same. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has resigned, George W. Bush will soon nominate Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.
Such is the charged context in which we meet Becky Fischer, a Pentecostal children’s pastor and the founder of a Christian camp for kids held in Devil’s Lake, N.D.
Fischer has a way with kids. Yet, contrary to her assertions, you don’t have to be an “extreme liberal” to be troubled by her approach. When she celebrates the receptivity of children to the message of Christian soldiering it often sounds purely strategic.
There is a reason Cambodia’s Pol Pot recruited children, a reason boys were forced into military service in Sierra Leone, and, yes, why madrassas get ’em young. They want them before those bedeviling teenage years, children so often ache to please.
“But we’re right” she says about the similarities between her approach and radical Islam’s.
“Jesus Camp” is a more complete film with a less generous point of view than Ewing and Grady’s story of young African- American kids enrolled in an at- risk program in Kenya, “The Boys of Baraka.”
As an exploration of the potent mix of religious feeling and politically charged ideas, the movie intends to make us uncomfortable.
Fear, of course, is one of the tools in Fischer’s curriculum. “This is a pretty sicko world,” she informs her charges. But Ewing and Grady tweak anxieties too. And they get help from their little chatterboxes who seem to grow more strident as the movie goes on.
Radio host Michael Papantonio provides a reasoned and impassioned counterpoint to Fischer’s genial monopoly on faith. A Christian, he’s an intellectually comforting presense. And his Southern twang gives him a kind of populist cred.
“Jesus Camp” is one of those documentaries so well crafted you should wonder what was left on the cutting-room floor.
Too often in a documentary, the sincere questions, the camera’s gaze, the filmmaker’s avid interest give subjects permission to turn themselves into performers.
“Does anyone here believe God can do anything?” Fischer asks at a Children’s Prayer Conference in Missouri. In response, a mother hoists her young daughter’s hand and nudges her son, who’s fidgeting in the next chair. What an effective image of parental direction, if not coercion.
“Way to be obedient,” Rachael’s father tells his daughter after the 9-year-old approached a teen with salvation’s message.
That’s why, although he’s disavowed the documentary, evangelical minister Ted Haggard provides one of the movie’s oddly authentic interactions.
Levi goes backstage after Haggard preaches in Colorado Springs. He tells the fit, energetic pastor that he too preaches.
Haggard asks Levi whether people listen to him because he’s good or because he’s a cute kid?
Blindsided by the question, the 12-year-old with the mullet haircut succumbs to a moment of confusion. In a movie full of children preaching certainty, Levi’s befuddled look comes as a promising relief.
