Jesus Camp
May 18, 2007
I was prepared to be outraged, or dismayed, or saddened. I was expecting an overtly political movie – the kind that makes fun of people like James Dobson for saying that Fred Thompson (Church of Christ) is “not a Christian”.
Instead, I was impressed by the sincerity and dedication of most of the people we meet. I find their politics deplorable, and I think they’re mistaken about a lot of things, but they seem like good people who are fighting for what they think is right. They really are, in a lot of ways, the salt of the earth.
The movie started out with a purely political introduction. Desolate panoramas of the high plains in early winter were overlaid with news reports of Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement. Then came the grating voice of George Bush announcing Sam Alito’s nomination in that emphatic and petulant way in which the president speaks in public.
Then we get some scary quotes from anonymous liberals about the culture war, and the proposed thesis of the movie: right-wing Christians are undermining our democracy and turning our republic into a theocracy.
That’s a pretty shocking claim, and one that will be hard-pressed to hold up. We start off with an introduction to an extremely conservative Pentecostal church in Lee’s Summit, Missouri (a wealthy exurb of Kansas City that’s 93% white).
There are camouflaged kids dancing in a sanctuary, singing a hymn that is presumably Christian, but that has no theological content at all. The church is long on concepts like the depravity of the world and the evil of the flesh (monophysitism was condemned by the Christian church as heresy roughly 1700 years ago), and rather short on concepts like the resurrection.
The militaristic imagery of the camouflaged kids is horribly disconcerting, in a way that a congregation of Lutherans singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” is not. Is it simple familiarity, or is it because the combat metaphor has been taken too far?
The kids, when they finish jumping around and go back to sit in the pews, look bored and no more interested in the sermon than at any other church. We see people waving their arms around and speaking in tongues, which is freakishly weird if you’re not used to it — it sounds like parseltongue. The filmmakers are emphasizing the sense of otherness.
The sermon is lacking any kind of Biblical or religious grounding. The pastor talks about the “enemies in our schools”. I assume she means the culture war — evil liberals who believe in sex education, or that sexually active teenagers should use condoms.
But no, she’s talking about Muslims in general and Palestinians in particular. They’re terrorists, you know. More precisely, Palestinian children are terrorists in training. The kids in the West Bank are the natural “enemies” of third graders in Missouri.
“President Bush has brought some credibility to the Christian faith.”
The statement is so bizarre and divorced from reality that I had to quote it. Someone begins talking about “dead churches” and how God doesn’t like them. A little girl does a really funny impersonation of an Episcopalian singing a hymn. They’re not called the frozen chosen for nothing. (The fact that George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan both belonged to “dead” churches is not mentioned).
The film now takes a detour into the world of home schooling. This doesn’t seem to relate to anything else in the movie. It’s there because we want to paint these people as weird and Not Like Us. (And in fact, the nonsense these kids are being taught represents, by far, the most awful and objectionable thing in the movie.)
The entire curriculum, or at least the part that we’re shown, is indoctrination into creationism. “Science doesn’t prove anything.” “Galileo made the right choice by giving up science for Christ.” Seriously, where do they find the people who write this stuff?
Our kids read a bogus and logically flawed argument about global warming that no one is making, of course, but here it’s presented as the standard scientific consensus. The kids are then asked to debunk the argument, which they do in a straightforward and logically correct manner. It’s an interesting foray into the scientific method, and one hopes that learning how to analyze an argument will stay with them longer than will the pseudo-scientific garbage that is being presented to them as fact.
Our detour into the world of home school fundamentalism is over, and we head back to the Pentecostal church. They’re holding a summer camp for the kids, somewhere in North Dakota, and we’re talking to the pastor on the day before the kids arrive.
She knows she’s being filmed, and she seems to be putting on a show for the audience; evangelizing, trying to make someone ask what this is all about. (at one point, she argues that “extreme liberals” will be “shaking in their boots” because of the movie, which sort of gives the game away)
Maybe she regularly prays for the electricity to work, and maybe it’s standard operating procedure to lay hands on a seat to bless the people who will sit there later on. Or maybe not. Schrödinger’s cat is dead.
As she welcomes the kids to summer camp, she gives a sermon which presents a version of Christianity suitable for a child of ten. Are the parents in the audience just playing along, like the dads at Boy Scout camp who dress up like Indians? I honestly can’t tell.
“Let me say something about Harry Potter. Warlocks are enemies of God,” she yells. “[In the Old Testament], Harry Potter would have been put to death”.
The audience seems reluctant to commit itself on this point. There’s some lukewarm, bemused applause. Um, okay. The homeschooled family we saw earlier (”It’s a good thing Galileo rejected science.”) had a copy of Lord of the Rings displayed prominently on the kitchen table, so they presumably have no objection to fantasy novels.
What’s striking about the camp is the particular way in which it is manipulative. Kids have more moral capacity and self-awareness than they are generally given credit for. They’re smarter than they are treated by most adults. But they don’t have the independence and confidence to resist the emotional states they’re put in. The pastor’s pitch relies on taking advantage of that incongruity between mental and emotional ability.
The first kid to come forward after the sermon prays that he has doubts about the Bible, and that he’s a skeptic.
The pastor is interviewed while preparing the next day’s sermon. She uses the metaphor of a balloon as your “spirit”. It gets bigger as you go to church, as you refrain from sin, etc. This might be a good metaphor if one didn’t immediately picture the balloon expanding until it pops. She stops blowing the balloon before that happens.
At dinner, everyone has a laugh about one kid who looks like Harry Potter, which suggests that these kids, like everyone else in the western world, are reading the books, regardless of what the pastor says.
A guest speaker with an Australian accent reassures the viewers that Pentecostalism isn’t an exclusively American denomination. The Aussie makes the most explicitly political argument to date, complaining about school prayer and “taking Jesus out of your schools”, and asking for a righteous government.
Later, a woman brings an absurd life-size cardboard cutout of President Bush up onto the stage for people to pray at. It’s ludicrous, and she has a bemused and mischievous look on her face like she can’t believe she’s doing this. This has to be an act for the camera. Schrödinger’s cat is alive.
Now the women leave the stage, and a balding middle-aged guy shows up to give an anti-abortion speech. (Not to imply that the women are pro-choice, but the visual was nevertheless jarring.) Unsurprisingly, the kids are enthusiastic about not killing people. One-third of their friends have been murdered before they were born, it seems. Think of your three best friends! One of them is dead!
The balding guy prays for “righteous judges who will rule over us”. All pretense about how judges should not rule but modestly and “strictly interpret” the Constitution has vanished, which makes sense, since “strictly interpret” is simply code for “will overturn Roe“.
And that’s it. That’s the grand finale of the camp (one gets the sense that we’ve only seen the parts of the week that brought political issues to the fore — is it a fair representation of the whole camp?). We now cut, for no apparent reason, given that the church we’ve been following is in Kansas City, not Colorado, to Ted Haggard, who is preaching against “homosexual activity” and “not telling your wife” when you’re partying with the guys. He makes a joke about how the cameraman is probably living in sin, which is funny in retrospect for all the wrong reasons. When did they film this?
Haggard gives a rawly political sermon, and it’s self-consciouly directed at the film-makers. Of all the people in the movie, only Haggard comes across as a cynical opportunist, dispensing cynical advice to an aspiring preacher and operating his church in a purely political fashion.
He concludes with some meaningless bluster about how “evangelicals will determine every election”. Then we cut to ten kids and the anti-abortion guy singing gospel songs in front of the Supreme Court building to support Justice Alito. And that’s the end of the movie.
Ultimately, this is the sort of thing I’m entirely unable to get worked up about. There are 300 million Americans, and many of them have different political ideas than I do. They have different religious backgrounds, and different priorities. I found the tendency of the film to conflate evangelicals in general with the crazy people in the movie offputting.
I can name some salient reasons why it’s a mistake to tie your religion so tightly to a short-term political agenda, but I don’t think it represents some fundamental threat to American democracy. Very little of the triumphalism that was on display at various points in the movie, and within the Republican movement after their 2002 and 2004 victories, exists two years later.
Some of the kids that went to Jesus Camp will grow up and deepen their faith, and ground it in reality. Some of them will just drift away from the church, and some will reject it altogether. And some will go on to become the next generation of culture warriors.
And we’ll beat them again, not by pretending that they represent a threat to the fabric of American life, but by building a majority around progressive and liberal ideas. There are many different ways to build a winning coaltion in American politics, and very few of them require the sort of hate-mongering that has become the purview of the religious right.
According to a recent Pew survey, people between the ages of 18 and 30 are as likely to be atheists or agnostics (19%) as they are to be Republicans. That spells the demographic end of the political agenda of James Dobson and Pat Robertson, but it also represents a huge challenge and opportunity, not only for the Democratic Party, but for mainstream Christianity.
May 18th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
I felt the tone of the movie veered a little too far towards, “These people are manipulating these kids. The children, God, the children- won’t someone please think of the children?”
Case in point: the little girl evangelizing at a bowling alley. She approaches a woman, asks her if she knows Jesus. The woman, caught a bit off-guard, smiles, says, “Yes I’m a Christian. Thanks.” And this is played off as brain-washing and horrible. Liberals have little to fear from too much religious expressioin, but a lot to fear from too little. Just one WELS Lutheran Democrat’s opinion.
May 18th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
I got that impression sometimes, as well. Another favorite moment in the film was when the kids mustered up the courage to evangelize to the old black men who were sitting in the park. They opened with something like, “Excuse me, sir, do you think you’ll go to heaven when you die?”, and seemed nonplussed when the man immediately answered Yes, as if the script they went over in Sunday School didn’t cover that possibility. It was endearing, and everyone involved came out looking well.
May 18th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
The kid’s reaction after that:
“I think they were Muslim.”
May 29th, 2007 at 9:28 am
Minor correction: Fred Thompson does not appear to be a member of the liberal United Church of Christ. His spokesman told US News he was ‘baptized into the Church of Christ.’”
Based on that locution and on Thompson’s background as a Southern conservative, his denomination is probably one of several loosely connected so-called “Restoration” churches (sometimes known as “Stone/Campbell” churches after the men who were leaders in their formation). See more at the web site listed above.
(Which makes Dobson’s appalling statement that Fred Thompson “is not a Christian” even more absurd.)
May 29th, 2007 at 10:18 am
Thanks for the additional information; I’ve corrected the post.
I’ll also note that Dobson didn’t seem most concerned with distinguishing between conservative and mainline denominations, although that was one subtext of his remarks. He was arguing that non-evangelical Christians aren’t actually Christian (so much for the Catholics), nor are people who don’t actively proselytize. From the link in the post:
A Christian, in other words, is not someone who professes to believe in the creeds of the Christian faith, but is someone whom James Dobson, through some inscrutable process of divination, knows to “be a committed Christian”. The theological implications of the idea that James Dobson is some kind of gatekeeper and arbiter of the true faith, are, as you note, appalling.