The movie Jesus Camp finally opened in Des Moines this weekend, and I saw it on the same Sunday that Ted Haggard, who briefly appears in the film, was officially kicked out of the mega-church he ran in Colorado. His appearance is predictably hilarious, smug, condescending, and it makes you wonder how anybody could have fallen under this goofball's power.
Yet if Haggard is clearly a charlatan, the lines aren't quite so clear when it comes to Becky Fischer, the youth minister who is the center of the film. She's dumpy, prim but charismatic, and the Bible camp she runs for kids in a desolate patch of North Dakota is clearly wildly popular. The film explores why.
Directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady subtly mock Fischer on occasion--she looks downright foolish and she prays over every part of the bunker in which she stages her sermons, offering the deathless line, "Lord, bless our Power Point presentation"--but she's given plenty of time to talk, to state clearly her beliefs. The fact that these beliefs should terrify anyone with a brain and a soul--her peculiar fundamentalist Christianity will triumph over Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and even mainstream Christianity because, "Excuse me, but what we say is true"--is beside the point, and Fischer likely doesn't care what anyone else thinks. She is clearly sincere in her beliefs, but her methods are unsound.
We see her whipping a crowd of kids, most of them under twelve, into such a quivering mass of fervid belief that you can easily imagine her offering up poisoned Kool-Aid to test their faith, and these followers would down it with pleasure. (Well, no, not pleasure, since pleasure is a feeling of the flesh. I should have said joy, the good feeling that Jesus is okay with.) This is a disturbing spectacle, no doubt, yet the triumph of Jesus Camp is that it clearly shows that the kids could get something out of this, an irrational but still understandable response to a world that seemingly presents them with no other options.
