Product Details

• Actors: Mike Papantonio, Lou Engle, Becky Fischer, Ted Haggard
• Directors: Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady
• Producers: Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady, Jacquelyn Shulman, Jannat Gargi, Laura Bell
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Full Screen, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 2.0)
• Subtitles: Spanish
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Studio: Magnolia
• DVD Release Date: January 23, 2007
• Run Time: 87 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (243 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000KLQUV2
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #20,603 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Jesus Camp" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

JESUS CAMP - DVD Movie

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

191 of 213 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Spiritual Abuse, December 27, 2006

By 

Justin M. Porter "Justin Porter" (Cary,NC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jesus Camp (DVD)

As a former home schooled spirit filled church raised child I was appalled at this movie. The main reason why is because I saw a good bit of my childhood in it. I was a product of brainwashing and spiritual abuse through "camps" like this. Frankly this movie was scarier than any horror movie I have ever seen. I think every Christian should see this movie so they can get a perspective on what it looks like from the outside in. For heavens sake, Ted Haggard was in this movie talking about the secret things people do in their lives right before he was exposed as a closeted homosexual. I hope this documentary opens the eyes of all christian parents about the importance of balance in a childs life and allowing them to make some of the decisions about their christianity on their own and not throwing them to the spiritual wolves like this. I am 30 years old and STILL recovering. I love the Lord with all of my heart and he is so much cooler than the God portrayed in this movie.

37 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Extraordinary, Deeply Disturbing Look at American Evangelicalism, February 17, 2007

By 

Steve Koss (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jesus Camp (DVD)

Midway through this remarkably disturbing documentary film, Jesus Camp founder and director Becky Fischer is shown in what is presumably her own home, studying with the intensity of a college football coach preparing for his team's next game a taped version of one of the children's prayer meetings she leads. Mouth open in thrilled amazement, head shaking gently in approving self-awe, she blurts out the most unintentionally revealing line in this movie: "They [children] are so usable in Christianity." In practically the same breath, she allows that "extreme liberals" must be "shaking in their boots" to see such intense belief in children, that the evangelical Christian indoctrination of children is morally more justified than the same actions among Muslims, Jews, and Palestinians because, "Excuse me, we have the truth," and that the same "we" must "stand up and take back the land [America]."

Although JESUS CAMP spends about half its time at Becky Fischer's Kids on Fire summer camp in (ironically) Devil's Lake, ND, it could perhaps be more aptly titled JESUS WORLD or KIDS FOR JESUS. Co-directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady center their documentary on three young children, all apparently ten years old or younger: Levi, Tory, and Rachael. These three children are followed from church prayer meetings to their homes (where they recite Christianized pledges of allegiance and are schooled by their mothers in creationism and the fallacies of global warming), and later to a Ted Haggard evangelical convention in Colorado Springs and a pro-life demonstration (complete with red duct tape inscribed LIFE fastened over their mouths) in Washington, D.C. Ewing and Grady remain strictly outside observers these events, offering neither voice-over or commentary. Rather, they offer a softened Christian response through extended excerpts from Mike Papantonio's syndicated radio talk show, Ring of Fire, as response to Becky Fischer's Kids on Fire.

In his classic 1963 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, Dr. Robert J. Lifton identified eight conditions of thought reform as he observed them in Communist China:
1. Milieu control - control of human communication through environmental control and limiting all forms of communication with the outside world.
2. Mystical manipulation - the group has a higher purpose, experiences are attributed to spiritual causes, control through planned spontaneity.
3. The demand for purity - absolute purity can be achieved, failures must be confessed and/or punished.
4. The cult of confession - public confessions, minimized privacy, verbalizing all interior fears and anxieties.
5. Aura of sacred science - the cult's rules and regulations are absolute, their dogma is absolutely scientific and morally true.
6. Loading the language - black-and-white thinking, good words and evil words, relentlessly judging.
7. Doctrine over person - the individual is insignificant, the group is all; personal experience and judgment are irrelevant, subordinated to the doctrine.
8. Dispensed existence - an elitist worldview and a sharp division between those who are chosen or saved and those who are lost.

Intentionally or otherwise, directors Ewing and Brady demonstrate all eight of these conditions in JESUS CAMP's treatment of Tory, Levi, Rachael, and their camper peers. They leave little room for doubt that we are witnessing brainwashing pure and simple, cult formation into an intolerant religious radicalism that brooks no questioning and sees all others as enemies. Becky Fischer talks about enemies, and Ted Haggard declares "It's massive warfare every day."

JESUS CAMP will leave you alternately shaking your head and cringing over the brainwashing these impressionable young children are receiving. Ewing and Grady's film is an extraordinarily powerful depiction of innocent young minds being manipulated by adults in the name of a blind religious fervor. The process recalls by comparison other such movements, past and present: radical Islamic fundamentalism, the Taliban, China's Red Guard, North Korea, the Hitler Youth. Dante would have reserved a special circle in his Inferno for adults who rob children of their innocence and opportunity to learn, consider alternatives, and choose for themselves. Thankfully, the directors have inserted a few moments that lighten the overall atmosphere: Rachael's attempt at bowling alley proselytizing, kids praying over a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush, and Ted Haggard's hysterically ironic admonitions in full-face close-up that "I think I know what you did last night; if you send me $[...], I won't tell your wife" and "You need to repent."

Ewing and Grady save their best for last. DON'T TURN OFF YOUR DVD THE MOMENT THE CREDITS START TO ROLL or you'll miss out on the film's best moments when Rachael and Levi reach out to three elderly black men sitting in a shaded park. Rachael's simple response to one old man's confident assurance that he will go to heaven when he dies is priceless and neatly illustrates everything that is wrong about radical evangelicalism. Plopped contentedly in her living room armchair, Becky Fischer sums it all up in an earlier part of the movie. Remarking on the trance-like religious intensity of her charges, she ponders admiringly, "What are these kids going to be like when they grow up?" What indeed?

169 of 205 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Disturbing and Thought Provoking Document, December 2, 2006

By 

Soulboogiealex (Netherlands) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jesus Camp (DVD)

Jesus camp is a rare document. It is one of the few honest portrayals of the right wing evangelist's movement. The documentary follows Pastor Becky Fisher and her congregation, mostly children since she's a children's pastor. In the film both Becky, some of the children and their parents are interviewed. The result is a very disturbing film.

For those of us outside of the movement Fisher's approach to children seems harsh and irresponsible, it has all the markings of brainwashing. One of the most disturbing scenes is where Fisher preaches about double morale, letting the children believe they've let Satan in their heart by prayer in church but acting indifferently to her teachings in school. We see children panicking and bursting out into tears; later when the children start talking in tongues some seem to loose it.

Yet nowhere in the movie there seems to be bad intent from her side, Becky really believes in what she preaches, really believes she's helping those children. The children themselves talk enthusiastically about the sermons and seem determined to convert others or become preachers themselves. At times the people portrayed here seem to live in another universe than yourselves, but at the same time they're completely congruent with their believes. When they denounce science or global warming these people honestly feel others who do are misguided and need saving.

No where in the movie Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, the directors, attempt to explain how their subjects came into believing; their tales of being reborn remain superficial. In doing so the film never gets an judgemental character, but its also ultimately one of the weaknesses in the film. It leaves the viewer with more questions than he bargained for. You can't help but walking out of the theatre with a feeling of unease; pondering the enormous drift that is apparently there between you and these new borne Christians.

The only balance brought to the movie is by a Christian radio show host. He represents a more moderate vein in Christianity and uses his show to ventilate his concerns on this relatively new movement, especially his concerns on how it seems to erode the separation of church and state, especially with the current administration in the White House. The radio show host is important to the movie, it brings balance to our view of Christians and places the movie in our social political times so we have a basis on which to evaluate what we just saw.

Just how well Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady succeeded in remaining impartial became clear during the question round at the recent viewing at the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam. A movie that shocked and disturbed most of the audience their was, according to the directors, perceived by its subject as a means to get the message out. They still remained in contact with Becky Fisher, who is apparently satisfied with the way her church is portrayed. Viewings in the US got different responses than in our Amsterdam audience, outside of the coastlines the audience was divided between those who were shocked and those who shouted out hallelujah during the film; once again making the divide in the States painfully clear.