Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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102 of 116 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Spiritual Abuse, December 27, 2006
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.
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52 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Must be seen to understand a segment of the American population, February 24, 2007
We live in the Golden Age of the movie documentary. While mainstream fictional movies have for a decade been in an ongoing creative and qualitative slump (in fact, if you want great fictional visual narrative, television far surpasses film both in excellence and in intelligence), we have witnessed an explosion in high quality movie documentaries. Part of the reason is certainly technological. Until relatively recently documentary filmmakers were forced to work either with extremely expensive film cameras or low quality video cameras. With the advent of compact high-quality digital cameras, however, any documentarian can product extremely good looking footage that looks great even when blown up to the size of a movie theater screen. The field no longer belongs exclusively to geniuses like Errol Morris but to anyone with a good idea and a camera.
I give this five stars and it deserves this, but I want to stress that this film really is a very limited glimpse into contemporary evangelicalism. The people in this film are not merely evangelicals, but Pentecostals. They actually are quite different from most evangelicals and especially, for instance, Southern Baptists. How? First, Pentecostalism is very much based in emotionalism and feeling and far less in Biblical teachings. This is apparent from watching JESUS CAMP. If one is a student of the Bible one will be stunned at how little the Bible is mentioned by the people in the film and what a small role it plays in their religious experience. In fact, at one point a young girl mocks what she imagines to be the worship experience in a mainstream church, where they sing three hymns and listen to a sermon. But in many of those churches what one hears in the sermon is a careful exegesis of passages of Scripture. Few or no Southern Baptist churches feature the emotionalism found by the kids in JESUS CAMP. This is important to keep in mind since Southern Baptists absolutely dominate the Religious Right in America.
The second thing I want to mention is that the film does not show the way that evangelicalism has begun to fragment in the United States. There are at least three major issues evangelicals are currently splitting over nationally, with promise of many more. First and so far foremost, the environment. Many evangelicals simply cannot accept the absurdity that global warming is not taking place and is not caused by human activity. Even some major figures within the upper echelon of the Religious Right power structure are fragmenting on this issue. Pat Robertson himself has announced that he now believes both that global warming is real and humans cause it. As the mountain of evidence pointing to the reality of global warming is building into a mountain range, more and more evangelicals are accepting the obvious. And with many passages in the Bible speaking of the need to be faithful stewards of the earth and not its exploiters, the pro-environment segment of the evangelical movement is apt to gain more and more traction. Second, although the Religious Right has a near obsession with abortion, the brute fact is that the Bible does not address the issue directly a single time (despite the fact that there were abortive procedures practiced at the time, as John M. Riddle has documented in his excellent book EVE'S HERBS: A HISTORY OF CONTRACEPTION AND ABORTION IN THE WEST). On the other hand, the Bible in general and the New Testament especially speaks incessantly about caring for the poor. Because much of the Religious Right embraces an obsession with the acquisition of material goods, which clashes strongly with everything we see in the New Testament, this has engenders a reaction from many evangelical leaders who feel that Christians are called to both eschew wanton consumerism and to help care for those who lack the basic physical necessities. Thirdly, evangelicals are splitting, like most of the rest of American already has, over Iraq and George Bush. If in this film Bush is presented as an object of almost religious adoration, many evangelicals have come to see Iraq as a hideous mistake and many others are troubled by the way Republican political policies have favored the wealthy at the expense of both the middle classes and the poor.
Nonetheless, this is a vivid portrait of Pentecostal evangelicalism in the United States. As stated in the film evangelicals make up 25% of the electorate. I do not know what percentage Pentecostals make up of evangelicals, but I would be surprised if it was as much as a third. It is probably much less. Most evangelicals most assuredly do not speak in tongues. Still, they do share many beliefs with many other evangelicals, such as the ahistorical belief that America was founded as a Christian nation and that somehow Jesus has been removed from American life (whereas in fact at the time of the ratification of the constitution the Founders intentionally began the preamble with no mention of God but instead stated that the nation was founded by "We, the People"--also, hundreds of Christians and ministers denounced the "Godless" constitution at the time of ratification and afterward for nearly two centuries, until evangelicals beginning in the 1980s began formulating the myth of the founding of the United States as a Christian nation, an idea that would have shocked all the Founders, but in particular the primary architect of the Constitution, the avid supporter of Church-state separation, James Madison). Most evangelicals are also avidly anti-abortion, though most are unaware that for almost a decade after Roe v. Wade virtually no evangelicals leaders made any public statements about. In fact, evangelical icon W. A. Criswell actually praised the decision shortly after it was announced, stating that it was simply common sense for a woman to have control of her body (for those who do not know Criswell, one of the members of the evangelical pantheon, he was Billy Graham's pastor). As Randall Balmer has shown in his marvelous book THY KINGDOM COME, the Religious Right only began to campaign against abortion after the revocation of the tax-exempt status of some religious organizations, a fact that many leaders of the Religious Right are acutely aware (but which fact they certainly do not want to advertise). And like many evangelicals Pentecostals are suspicious of evolution and science. So while the film sloughs over some of the truly significant differences between the various kinds of evangelicals, there are a number of themes that run through all. My only complaint with the film is that you have to already have accumulated a great deal of knowledge about evangelicalism to make these distinctions.
The scenes that filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady shot are frequently chilling. It is obvious that these poor children are being brainwashed and indoctrinated in a manner that is no different than what happens with Islamic extremists. It is frightening that many of them acknowledge this and do not seem troubled by it. It breaks your heart viewing the film because these seem like really, really nice kids. I kept having to fight the sense that what is being done to the poor kids is a form of child abuse. One scene in particular bugged me. A really sweet girl walked up to a beautiful blonde girl in a bowling alley with a gospel tract and gave it to her with the words, "Jesus told me to give this to you." Of course Jesus did no such thing (in fact, history is replete with thousands of horrors that various people inflicted on others because they claimed God had told them to). I was raised in the culture. I understand the pressures that are placed on children to "witness" for Christ and to "share their testimony." As a child I was conscious of how desperately uncomfortable I was with going up to a total stranger and "telling them about Christ," but didn't possess the insight to realize the amount of self-righteousness required to approach someone of whom you know nothing and presume that they lack what you have to give them. So when watching this poor girl, I couldn't help but think of the horrible things that are parents are doing to her.
Unlike some reviewers I did not find Ted Haggard creepy. Knowing now what we do about him it is all too easy to impart a creepiness that we feel simply had to be there. I remember something the Catholic devotional writer Henri Nouwen said to me once (for two years Henri hired me to edit, type, and proofread his manuscripts, and also to clean up his English prose--English was his second language and his first drafts often contained infelicities of expression). The church, he said, is the most sinful place in the world because that is because it is filled with people who acknowledge that they are sinners. I agree that Ted Haggard's are ironical given his constant attacks on homosexuality, but my own feeling is that most people are afflicted by a host of internal inconsistencies. In seeing Ted Haggard I was instead struck by how funny and likable he was. He was witty, friendly, and personable. And yes, in light of his subsequent downfall (the revelations of his involvement with a gay prostitute and drug use and its apparent confirmation when he resigned from his church broke shortly before the 2006 midterm election and the last in a long string of Republican scandals was viewed as a factor in the Democratic victories) a complete hypocrite. But I suppose he is no worse than most of us.
The lone voice of reason in the film is the trial lawyer and radio journalist Mike Papantonio, who is shown during a broadcast of the "Ring of Fire" radio show on Air America, which he cohosts with Robert J. Kennedy Jr. What I like about Papantonio is that he clearly is as devout as any of the people in the film, but the faith he finds in the New Testament is so completely at odds with those...
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153 of 184 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Disturbing and Thought Provoking Document, December 2, 2006
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.
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