Delayed Reaction: Jesus Camp

Premise: A documentary about an especially extreme sect of the Evangelical movement in the US.

 

The mid-2000s just aren't my era for documentaries. A mix of fallout over the controversial 2000 election, the dot-com bust, 9/11, and the Iraq war just really messed with liberals then. It created this wave of documentaries that I can only describe as "liberal fear porn". These are movies like Super-Size-Me, An Inconvenient Truth, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Jesus Camp that seem designed to scare liberals about some aspect of the state of the world. Like a weird confirmation bias. There really isn't the equivalent of this for conservatives. There aren't as many conservatives making movies, and they tend to take stances that don't sound as good in a sound bite. "McDonalds is trying to kill you" is stickier than "Why is it McDonalds' fault that people choose to get a lot of food there?". There's an obviousness of the intent to these movies that bother the hell out of me. They answer questions that the people who are willing to listen already know*.

 

*Again, I ask, did anyone actually think eating nothing by McDonalds for a month was healthy?

 

Look, the stuff that Jesus Camp is about makes me uncomfortable too. I'm an atheist. I'm uncomfortable when I see parents teach kids willfully ignorant stuff. Most of the stuff in this movie strikes me as somewhere between silly and dangerous. The whole movie felt like gawking though. I get that the Evangelical base was especially powerful in the mid-2000s, but what about this movie feels powerful? The Jesus camp is in a shack in North Dakota. Even at the camp, the kids are talking about how they watch Harry Potter anyway. It hardly feels like they are winning the culture war. The "scarier" thing would've been to follow people attending these super churches who are also running major companies. Seeing some kids who are home schooled, occasionally watching really shitty kids programming and stumbling through attempts to recruit strangers is just, kind of sad. It doesn't line up with the foreboding radio host talk of how these radical evangelicals are taking over the country and dictating policy. That might've been true, but all I'm seeing in the movie is a group of particularly extreme evangelicals. They don't feel that representative of a movement.

 

Honestly, I wish they gave this the 7 Up series treatment and followed up with these kids a decade later to see how they turned out. How many are still that religious? How many snapped and went extreme the other way? How many of the adults in charge had skeletons in their closest?* I don't think I learned that much from this documentary. It was just an outrage machine with the purpose of telling people how different they are from the "other side".

 

*OK. From the little research I've done, one kid now lives with an alternative religious commune. He broke after his dad came out. And, if you remember, there was the Ted Haggard meth and gay sex scandal shortly after the film was released. Many of the kids remain super religious though.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend