Few conversations happening in the civic sphere find the conversants using the same language or sharing a common starting point. Labels like "liberal" and "conservative" reduce the conversants to simple caricatures and serve as a fait accompli for their eventual disagreement. Before the conversation starts, it's already over.
Enter the film "Jesus Camp," an engrossing new documentary about children who attend a camp run by evangelical Christians where they learn to fight the culture wars and engage in a savvy and partisan version of civic life. This is must-viewing for anyone who has read Sharon Crowley's Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism.
What fascinates me about this film is its reception. The, err, liberal media loves Jesus Camp, as evidenced by positive reviews in, err, elite publications like the New York Times. (See, you can't even analyze the trend without using the divisive buzz words.) The pentacostal pastors that run the camp--notably Becky Fischer, who becomes the film's central figure--ALSO love the film.
Klosterman and other cultural critics talk about the "Hey Ya!" moment a few years back when the ubiquitous Outkast song briefly appealed to soccer moms and critics and hip hop kids and rabbis and indie rock fans and the cranky guy in the apartment down the hall and your Aunt Sally and first graders and everybody else. The rare pop culture text consumed and enjoyed by diverse members of a fragmented culture.
Jesus Camp doesn't quite rise to the level of a "Hey Ya!" moment. For one thing, there were three people at the Maple Art Theatre's matinee yesterday and they were vocally anti-Becky Fischer. (To be fair, I joined the crowd of three in an audible gasp when the ministers rolled an actual-sized cardboard cutout of George W. Bush in front of the pulpit for what can only be described as a little old-fashioned idolatry.)
But here's a film about divisive and reductive red-state/blue-state mentalities that manages to appeal to a broad spectrum of the culture. One of the reasons for that appeal is the filmmakers' lack of intervention. I don't believe there's any such thing as objectivity, but directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady do the impossible in the post-Michael Moore age: they largely retreat from the foreground and document something that's interesting and surreal.
The aforementioned Becky Fischer comes off as genuine in her beliefs--beliefs that include notions like the constitution ought to amend the separation of church and state, beliefs like the idea that democracy's fatal (literally DEADLY) flaw is giving people who are "wrong" an equal voice. Only during a scene that showcases Fischer applying liberal doses of hairspray do the filmmakers seem to be poking fun. We see the children at the camp speaking in tongues, flailing, and sobbing during a gruesome sermon about abortion. We hear a sermon that calls Harry Potter an evil warlock. We see a little girl who feels it's her vocation to approach strangers at bowling alleys and adults in public parks to evangelize them (her father praises her for "obeying" after one such brush with what the secular world would surely deem "stranger danger"). We hear Fischer try to convince the young children to take action from a young age since--and this is damn near a direct quotation--our enemies teach their children to fast during Ramadan from the age of five.
But, again, what is interesting is that Fischer loves how the film turned out. Ted Haggard, a preacher and political operative who, according to the film, meets with President Bush once a week, appears in the film to be cynical and manipulative. He mentors an earnest little boy who wants to be a preacher, urging him to exploit his cuteness until he's 30. He speaks with hostility about "liberals" and "secularists" with hostility.
Not surprisingly, he's called for a boycott of the film, which is a shame because his call decreases the likelihood of "Jesus Camp" becoming a shared cultural moment, maybe even a moment for dialogue that goes beyond divisive labels.
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