Horror Movie Review: Jesus Camp

About a month ago, Rich Drees gave me a nondescript-looking disc in an equally nondescript clear plastic case. "I know you like horror," he tells me. "This is the scariest film you'll ever see." I look down at the disc and, scrawled in marker are the words "Jesus Camp."

My first reaction was that this was Rich being snarky, which is something that I can count on a good 100% of the time, but after viewing the movie, I can't help but agree with the sales pitch I was given. Jesus Camp is probably one of the most terrifying things I've ever seen.

Despite the lack of violence or gore in the movie, I think the closest comparison I can draw to Jesus Camp as an experience is probably Hostel. There's an unsettling opening sequence that's quickly washed away by some earnest, slice-of-life stuff that sets up later events and introduces us to the central characters. It seems largely harmless. And then it reaches the point of no return, and the remainder of the film is spent trying to puzzle out why what you're seeing is happening and when it is going to stop.

Jesus Camp is a documentary.

The movie chronicles a summer at the "Kids On Fire" bible camp, which is hosted - for super irony - in Devil's Lake, North Dakota. While I'm not a parent, I think it's safe to say that there is absolutely no way I would ever send a child that I was responsible for to any place where they would be 'On Fire', even in name only. Over the course of the camp, we get to watch little children be shamed and indoctrinated into 'God's Army,' as they are consistently told that there is a war coming, or going on already. Who the war is against, I don't think we're ever told. The climax of the film depicts the campers chanting in tongues and smashing ceramic mugs - with the word 'government' scrawled on them in marker - with a hammer, which is according to the camp's founder, Pastor Becky, a prayer for God to install a righteous government. Which I have to assume means a government full of nothing but evangelical Christians.

There are some sad truths in Jesus Camp, not the least of which is that these children have abominable parents who are happy to teach their children willful ignorance and intolerance. "How would you feel about a school that didn't teach evolution?" A home-schooling mother asks her son. "I think I'd be okay with that," he replies with a cherubic chuckle. The same mother also points out that science "doesn't prove anything" and drills her children on statistics that can be used to disprove global warming. If there has ever been proof of anti-intellectualism permeating the American right, this movie is it. Another unfortunate realization is that some of these children are probably suffering from mental illness and will never receive treatment or medication for it.

Normally, I'm not one to trust documentaries. Morgan Spurlock and Michael Moore have done a grand job of teaching me that they are almost total artifice and not the glimpse of verisimilitude the genre appears to be. However, despite some editing tricks and the subtle application of some ominous music at just the right parts, I can accept a lot of what I see in Jesus Camp at face value. There's no way to take a lot of the insanity that Pastor Becky teaches out of context, no way to misinterpret the agenda of the adults in this film and no way not to pity the awkward, earnest kids who are their victims.