From the mouths of babes comes ‘Jesus Camp’
The most telling moment in
”
Jesus Camp,
”
the Academy Award nominated documentary about a fundamentalist
Christian summer camp for kids, comes very close to the end. One of
the main characters, 10-year-old Rachael, tries to hand a pamphlet
to a group of African-American men at a park in Washington,
D.C.
”
If you died today, where would you go?
”
she asks them.
When they don’t answer her, she walks away and says,
”
I think they were Muslim.
”
From the mouths of babes comes ‘Jesus Camp’
The most telling moment in “Jesus Camp,” the Academy Award nominated documentary about a fundamentalist Christian summer camp for kids, comes very close to the end. One of the main characters, 10-year-old Rachael, tries to hand a pamphlet to a group of African-American men at a park in Washington, D.C.
“If you died today, where would you go?” she asks them.
When they don’t answer her, she walks away and says, “I think they were Muslim.”
While Rachael talks about not judging people because that is for God to do, she has made a snap judgment about the men in the park. The participants in the documentary tend to dismiss anyone with different beliefs than their own.
The documentary focuses on Becky Fischer who runs a summer camp called Kids on Fire in Devil’s Lake, N.D, and three children who attend the camp. The children are from families with a strong belief in the fundamentalist movement. The three children profiled in the documentary all have “gifts” from God – some believe they have the gift of prophesy, others the gift to preach and one says she has a calling to stop abortions. The filmmakers spent a year with their subjects, following them during the camp, at their homes and on a field trip to the Nation’s Capitol. According to the 2001 U.S. Census, nearly 80 percent of Americans identified themselves as Christian with the largest chunk saying they were Catholic. Evangelicals made up .5 percent of the pie, and are often associated with fundamentalist beliefs.
Levi’s family is part of that .5 percent. He was saved when he was 5. At 13, he is a cute, bright-faced kid who has such a way with words that if he loses the rattail down the back of his neck, he certainly has a future in politics. And that is the scary part.
While the filmmakers kept talk of politics to a minimum in the edited version of the movie released in theaters, deleted scenes are available for viewing on the DVD. They show the movement has as much a political agenda as a religious one. The Rev. Ted Haggard, a former Evangelical preacher who founded the New Life Church, says if all the fundamentalists got out to vote, they could win every election.
One topic that is especially important to the preachers and children is abortion. One preacher wears a red T-shirt with the word life on it. He shows models of babies in utero as young as seven weeks old. But these babies clearly are not accurate models as embryos at that stage still look as much like tadpoles as newborns. The lecture included children Levi’s age as well as kids who looked like they couldn’t be older than 4 or 5. I wonder if kids too young to know where babies come from can understand the abortion debate.
After the movie came out, Haggard distanced himself from it, saying that the group depicted in the film was just a small fraction of the fundamentalist movement. His opinion probably doesn’t hold much weight anymore since he has been ousted from his own church because of “sexual immorality.” A Denver man alleged Haggard paid him for sex during a three-year period.
The filmmakers put a statement on their site that most of the participants they interviewed were happy with the outcome of the film. Ewing and Grady said they tried not to put in footage that would be divisive.
In one deleted scene, Tory and other children took a trip to a strip mall. Next to Planned Parenthood, the children enter a Women’s Clinic where they are told their prayer is the reason 50 percent of women who come to the clinic decide to keep their babies. The clinic’s founder says while some of the children may be preachers in the future, others are destined to be politicians.
The only dissenter in the documentary is Mike Papantonio, a lawyer who now hosts an Air America show called “Ring of Fire.” He is an active Methodist who says he has strong moral compass, but he often takes aim at the religious right.
“I come from a pretty strong spiritual center, but it doesn’t change the way I judge people,” he is quoted as saying on the movie’s Web site. “…They have become an element of American politics that threatens our sense of decency as well as our democracy.”
When I was a student I had a chance to travel to two countries where groups of citizens were persecuted for superficial differences such as religion or race – Northern Ireland and South Africa. It made me appreciate the freedom I’ve always felt in America. If the fundamentalists want freedom of religion, they must recognize how important it is for others who worship, or don’t worship, differently to have the same freedom.
