Jesus Camp

I saw the movie "Jesus Camp" on Friday night. In it the camp director, Becky Fischer, mentions some websites that describe Palestinians training their children as terrorists. Her Christian Zionist sympathies are in rare form. The film is a provocative experience. Watching it was reliving a lot of really bad spiritual experiences from my own youth. From the website I noticed that it was screened in Springfield Missouri (aka. "Jesus Land"). That's intense. I would not agree with Ted Haggard who said the film was hateful. (Of course he's agin it. He's in it!) I would say that it is incendiary, but no more so than GodStuff on the Daily Show. Charismatic Evangelicals should have the experience of viewing themselves through the eyes of their critics, especially when their "B.S. button" is apparently broken. We need the reminder that we have no special patent on the words "Thus saith the Lord" and that indeed we fall under the usual judgment every time we presume to speak for God.

The hullabaloo on youtube over kids praying to GWB is a misinterpretation. That particular scene in the film is provocative, but it's also clear when you see the whole clip that the kids are not praying to Bush. They are pronouncing a blessing on him and praying for him. But the trailer edit is quick enough to give a wrong impression. Even so the use of the Christian flag, the US flag, and the words spoken are enough that I'd consider it blasphemous. Another scene that I found worse in a way was when the kids are given ceramic cups with the word "government" on them and told to smash them in the name of the Lord. Somehow that's not anarchist, but prophetic in nature. But I'm sure the whole thing is not meant to be analyzed in great detail. We're supposed to be in the Spirit and not use our brains.

Therein lies the true escape hatch for all that goes on in the Jesus Camp services. These are ecstatic spiritual moments which the viewer must share in order to rightly interpret. The scenes are shocking because we're not in the "Spirit." Unbelievers have no right to judge. I can see and feel the reasoning in this. When I'm speaking in tongues I don't care to have a camera on me. I wouldn't care to have a camera follow my seven year old daughter around. When Rachael is speaking about dead churches or people who don't know Jesus you have to take it at face value. This is a child speaking of her experience, of things she's been told, of the way she percieves life. At age seven your world is pretty small. Things are very simple and that's ok.
On the other hand, when a mom says "There are two kinds of people in the world, those who love Jesus and those who don't" I can honestly say this woman is willfully choosing a small world that, though said to be out of love for Jesus, is blissfully ignorant of His work in the world. When she teaches her son to be ignorant of evolution and American history she is doing him a dis-service.

These are the kind of hard issues in the film. See it if you can. Rich Tatum, former webmaster for the General Council of the Assemblies of God, has a review of Jesus Camp up on the Christianity Today website. I think he's being very hopeful about a mainstream Pentecostal position, but unless things have changed a whooooole lot in Springfield since I lived there--the AoG is still very anti-left.

Tags: Jesus Camp movie, George W. Bush, Ted Haggard, God Stuff, Evangelicalism, Charismatics, Becky Fischer