Oracle Online

While Jesus Camp tries to be as evenhanded as it can, it should unnerve even the most traditional conservative. The story of 12-year-old Levi, who at age five was saved from damnation and is as engulfed in the fire and brimstone rhetoric as any of his counselors, feels the need to spread his message to anybody he meets. Levi’s preaching makes even Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson look like first- year seminarians at Bob Jones University.

Through directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, the film looks at the greater issue of religion in recent American politics.

While the fundamentalist branch of Christianity preached by the camp’s leaders takes up a good portion of the time of the film, it makes sure to cover the other side of the argument.

I wished, though, that the filmmakers had spent a little bit more time on opposition to the fundamentalist rhetoric instead of showing so much of action of the church. It becomes banal.

Characters that are at first likeable, like Becky Fischer, who runs the camp, soon break into conversion mode with her well- worn speech on the “devils of homosexuality,” the lies of global warming and evolution, and the belief that President Bush is doing God’s work. What is scariest about the speech is that the children she is entrusted with wholeheartedly accept the propaganda that is fed to them.

Jesus Camp left me unnerved and shaken. I was taught equality, diversity, and community. Fischer, on the other hand, views herself as training the next generation of soldiers in a far-right Christian army in a crusade against all non-believers, including other Christians.

Images of children supposedly speaking in tongues and uncontrollably shaking on the floor becomes hard to watch. At some points the apparent seizures the children seem to be in made me want to vomit. The fanaticism of the children rival even that of their parents.

Nine-year-old Rachel refrains from “dancing for the flesh,” but will break into what can best be described as watching a person sitting in an electric chair while listening to christian metal and other “Christian” bands.

For a girl her age, Rachel acts and speaks more like a woman who has been working the Christian public speaking circuit for 15 years. The religious group that the film follows has stolen children’s childhood and carefree youth.

While most kids are more concerned with dodgeball and recess, the children of Kids on Fire (the camp) are awaiting the return of Jesus while in constant fear of damnation. For any person of any religious or political affiliation who may have even the meekest tolerance for anyone of differing tradition or culture, this film will be a swift kick to the chest to. It knocks you off your feet and keeps pushing.

If I came away from the film with anything, it was the firm belief that the religious right is on the offensive against American pluralism to the point of having hopes to extinguish it.