by Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D
Published at ToTheSource.org October 11, 2006.
Is Jesus Camp an anti-Christian film?
Film makers, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, plainly intended the average non-churched person to identify with the fears of liberal commentator, Mike Papantonio. The viewer is supposed to find the Christians “scary,” in spite of the film makers’ professed fondness for Pentecostal children’s minister Becky Fischer, who is the primary subject of the movie.
But there are more categories than “liberal non-churched” and “conservative Pentecostal.” At the beginning of the movie, I identified myself as a heady Catholic, an outsider to the noisy Pentecostals. But as the movie became more a political commentary than a religious description, I identified myself in opposition to the ham-fisted secular commentator.
I felt myself in alien territory through the first half of the film. I was profoundly disturbed by the heavy emphasis on emotions in worship. The film depicted Pentecostal worship as a continual search for a spiritual buzz.
I fear for these children and their faith when they no longer feel anything. They may believe that God has abandoned them, when really, it is they who have changed, not God. Catholics know from long experience of the lives of the saints than many great and holy people had long periods of spiritual aridity, times when they felt nothing from God. We have recently learned that even Mother Theresa of Calcutta experienced this. She, like countless others, knew that serving God was intrinsically worth doing, regardless of their feelings. Just as every married couple has days when they don’t feel loving toward each other, these holy men and women persevered in loving God even when they didn’t feel like it.
Will these children, trained exclusively in the Pentecostal forms of expression, ever grow up spiritually? This is what initially troubled me about this film. But as the movie wore on, the political “message” became more blatant and heavy-handed. And I came to identify myself as one of the beleaguered Christians.
Air America radio host Mike Papantonio’s “commentary” on the political significance of the Religious Right amounted to wall-to-wall left-wing clichés. He was painful to listen to. Michael Novak or Richard John Neuhaus or Robert George would have made mince-meat of him.
The real fear of the radical Secularist is that the Religious Right will overturn Roe v. Wade. Roe was the dominant political image of the film. The children at the camp held little plastic models of the fetus at various stages of development and chanted, “righteous judges, righteous judges,” as their prayer.
The radical Secularist is completely unable to understand the significance of Roe v. Wade for the Christian community. The Religious Right as a political phenomenon is entirely a creature of Roe. Without it, Catholics would still be New Deal Democrats, and Fundamentalists would still be abstaining from politics. It was Roe v. Wade that activated them, precisely because it conveyed the message that their values and beliefs were not welcome in the public square.
In the process, orthodox Christians of all denominations have been driven closer to one another. Evangelicals and Catholics work together with far greater respect and appreciation than would have been possible forty years ago. Even though this went unnoticed in Jesus Camp, the “righteous judge” the kids prayed for, turned out not to be one their co-religionists, but Sam Alito, a Catholic.
So the question this film raises is: with whom do you most closely identify? Jesus Camp made me realize just how deeply Roe v. Wade has changed the face of American politics and American religious life. People who used to think the pope was the Anti-Christ are now grateful for the leadership of Pope John Paul II and now Pope Benedict. Catholics have become grateful for the enthusiasm and energy of their Evangelical and Pentecostal brothers and sisters. These changes in attitude would have been totally unpredictable a generation ago. Some might even call it miraculous.
Another disturbing charge made by Jesus Camp is that the parents and the minister are brainwashing the children. One of the more hysterical comments was by Richard Dawkins, saying that “If the adults decided to hand out the special Kool-Aid at this camp, the children would all unquestionably partake.” Except for the small fact that no adults showed any inclination to give kids anything like Kool-Aid, this is a wise and witty observation.
The fact is that in today’s society, children are force-fed all manner of nonsense in taxpayer supported schools. The courts have made it clear that parents can not remove their children from lessons they disagree with. So parents are forced to look on, while their tax dollars are used to teach their children things with which they profoundly disagree: little things like sexual practices, and the meaning of life. Children have been penalized in school for drawing a picture of Jesus when asked to draw a hero. It is episodes of grotesque disrespect for the values of parents that have driven so many people to remove their children from the schools. And while it is true that individual people left to themselves can become unaccountable, it is equally true that the combination of other people’s money, tenured instructors and compulsory attendance has made public schools completely unaccountable to the average parent. If the schools were more accountable to parents and more respectful toward their religious beliefs, parents wouldn’t feel the need to remove their children and shoulder the whole educational burden themselves.
But Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, the producers of Jesus Camp, are unable to see this. Neither their sympathy with Becky Fischer nor their interest in children’s spiritual experiences is enough to overcome their fear of losing Roe. They may sincerely believe their film is not anti-Christian. But the scary music and dark images they insert at key moments tell a different story.
In another era, Ewing and Grady might have been able to play the role of anthropologists, giving an objective report about an unfamiliar religious tribe. But because Roe has created such a poisonous political atmosphere, that level of understanding is not really possible.
Jesus Camp is an anti-Christian film. More precisely, it is an anti-Christian parent film. Whether Erwin and Grady intended this or not, that is what they produced.
