Jesus Camp Analysis

Derek C. Jones
Professor Romesburg
Freshman Comp. 1
December 16, 2015 Jesus Camp Jesus Camp is a documentary about a Pentecostal Christian children’s summer camp in North Dakota, called “Kids on Fire.” The camp is run by a minister named Becky Fischer. It’s directed by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing. The filmmakers follow three pre-teens, Levi, Rachael and Tory, around the country as they attend the camp, sit in on one of Ted Haggard’s sermons in his New Life mega church in Colorado Springs, CO and travel to Washington, D.C. This is during the nomination process of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. The filmmakers do not narrate these events or otherwise provide an editorial voice during the film, but an important viewpoint is provided
by clips from the radio show of Mike Papantonio. He is a Methodist and the host of Air America Radio’s Ring of Fire.
For an atheist like myself, this was not an easy movie to watch, and I think even many Christians would find it disturbing. The children in this film are subjected to a degree of indoctrination that is sickening and cult-like in its intensity. It is intended to scrub their minds of all traces of independent thoughts and brainwash them into compliance with the religious belief.
In one scene from the film, Fischer leads the children in “praying in tongues”, the babbling of nonsense syllables that supposedly indicates the presence of the Holy Spirit. In another, she publicly chastises the congregation, accusing some people present of being “phonies,” in her words, who falsely profess allegiance to Christianity, until many of the children are crying; she then demands that they come up to the front one by one to confess their sins in front of the church. One boy gets on his knees in front of the entire congregation to admit that he sometimes has trouble believing that God exists or that the stories in the Bible are true.
Extreme politics are also a major part of the indoctrination.
Indoctrination is teaching a certain idea, doctrine, principle, or religion. Fischer and the other ministers often profess their devotion to George W. Bush, because of his supposed born-again Christian beliefs, and at one point bring in a cardboard cutout of him and encouraging all the children to stretch out their hands toward it and pray for him. The children are also taught that abortion is evil. Little dolls are passed around the congregation and are supposed to be fetuses so they can touch and adore. Another scene shows some of the children at home, being taught by their parents to say a different version of the Pledge of Allegiance, not to the American flag but to a “Christian flag” that consists of a blue cross on a field of
white.
My words do not do justice to the insidious and vile coercion used against these poor children. The film shows clearly how all of this activity takes place in an atmosphere of extreme emotion and intense peer pressure, this is used by many cults to break down people’s resistance and then rebuild them in the way the cult wants them to be. The children interviewed for the film appear to be willing subjects who have wholeheartedly internalized the precepts of fundamentalist Christianity, which is not surprising, considering every peer and authority figure in their lives acts likewise and puts them under pressure to behave this way. Most of these students are homeschooled, of course; one scene shows one of them watching a young-earth creationist video and being taught by his mother to say that evolution is “stupid.”
Fischer and the other ministers are unapologetic about their desire to “teach” children.
Fischer praises kids for being “usable” for their cause. Another minister congratulates children who attend the camp, “Way to be obedient!”, and says, with no apparent awareness of irony, that “the devil goes after the young, those who cannot fend for themselves”. Their expressed goal is to raise a new generation of fundamentalist Christians that will outnumber other groups and win the cultural war through population. Stories like this are the best possible evidence for Richard Dawkins’ argument that it should be considered child abuse to indoctrinate children in the religion of their parents and deny them the chance to make up their own minds.
Now that so much has changed, it is still saddening, but mostly because of these children’s lives that are being taken away from them by a warped ideology that tries to turn all its adherents into mindless drones for the cause. Since this film came out, Fischer has closed the camp down, by fears of a backlash, though she has says that she intends to continue her preaching in other ways. I would love a follow up that explores how the children and adults in this documentary have changed after the camp and if any changed at
all.