Premiere wrote:
Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, whose documentary The Boys of Baraka spotlighted 20 inner-city Baltimore boys sent to school in Kenya, now turn their camera on a summer camp for evangelical Christian families. The comparison between the two films is an interesting one: Baraka followed boys whose very hometown almost always condemns them to jail, poverty, or death; Jesus Camp focuses on children whose parents are so vigilantly sheltering and indoctrinating that they might not know those kids in Baltimore exist.In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I was raised in a mainline Protestant Church and have always felt deeply uncomfortable when faced with outright evangelism. That said, it would be virtually impossible to find a person of any faith who comes into Jesus Camp with a neutral outlook. The religion's views on science, the role of women in the church, and politics are so polarizing that almost any viewer, whether Orthodox, agnostic, or atheist, is bound to have an elemental reaction from the first shot of six-year-olds weeping in religious ecstasy. The nature of that reaction will probably depend on how the viewer feels about churches indoctrinating children; at one point, a church leader espouses the view that if Muslim parents can teach their children to be suicide bombers, Christian parents can teach their children to be equally fervent, if less violent (the latter point is implied, and the cultural sensitivity of the analogy isn't explored).
Jesus Camp's two main voices are Pastor Becky Fischer, who leads the Kids on Fire retreat every summer in North Dakota (and who made the above comparison); and Mike Papantonio, an Air America talker, practicing Christian, and vocal advocate of the separation of church and state. Papantonio spends his screen time talking into a void, essentially questioning the preceding scenes of Fischer and her flock of earnest ankle-biters. His function as a dissenting voice is blunted somewhat, since he's never seen doing anything but preaching to the converted, something Fischer does equally well. Her converted include Levi, Tory, and Rachael, remarkably erudite kids with varying levels of enthusiasm, commitment, and opinion. "Out of the mouths of babes" never seemed like such an ominous phrase as when ten-year-old Rachael brought up a friend's father, a missionary, whose children would chant "martyr" before he left on proselytizing trips.
The Rev. Ted Haggard, head of the National Association of Evangelicals, also makes an appearance, and this is when the political arm of the evangelical movement makes its appearance. Religious leaders taking part in government is a practice older than Western civilization, but that doesn't make it less unsettling when the children pray over a cardboard cutout of President Bush and a guest speaker hands out tiny plastic fetuses as part of his anti-abortion lecture.
Jesus Camp, finally, doesn't function particularly well as a documentary; it lacks a strong editorial point of view and doesn't really comment on the evangelical movement so much as it just portrays a selection of people and their views. I'm sure the filmmakers expect a politically leftist audience to recoil in horror from some of the views espoused (Levi's mother teaching his science lesson is particularly ripe for satire), but without any sort of opinion from the filmmakers, the viewer is left to his own conclusions, some of which might include dismissing the film and the people in it out of hand simply for how different they are. That would be a mistake, and it would be equally unfortunate for an audience unfamiliar with this world to believe that all Christians, or even all evangelicals, are like those spotlighted in Jesus Camp.
-Sara Brady
http://rapidshare.com/files/12527646/Jesus.Camp.LIMITED.DVDRip.XviD-iMBT..avi.001
http://rapidshare.com/files/12527648/Jesus.Camp.LIMITED.DVDRip.XviD-iMBT..avi.002
http://rapidshare.com/files/12527657/Jesus.Camp.LIMITED.DVDRip.XviD-iMBT..avi.003
http://rapidshare.com/files/12527632/Jesus.Camp.LIMITED.DVDRip.XviD-iMBT..avi.004
http://rapidshare.com/files/12527622/Jesus.Camp.LIMITED.DVDRip.XviD-iMBT..avi.005
http://rapidshare.com/files/12527669/Jesus.Camp.LIMITED.DVDRip.XviD-iMBT..avi.006
http://rapidshare.com/files/12527615/Jesus.Camp.LIMITED.DVDRip.XviD-iMBT..avi.007
no pass
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