The Ottery
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Jesus Camp: A Few Reflections, Sight Unseen

September 30th, 2006

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been following, as I’m sure many of you have, the discussions and controversy about the new documentary Jesus Camp. Since few big-screen documentaries actually make it to the theaters in my town, I’m probably not going to be able to review this one until it comes out on DVD. But I do have to put my two cents in on what I’ve heard and read so far.

If you don’t know much about Jesus Camp, take a quick look at this video report, which should help orient you (sorry about the scary talking head). If you’re interested, Christianity Today also has an interesting interview with the filmmakers, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady.

So far it seems that the general impression the movie leaves you with is: this is why our politics are as messed up as they are, and watch out for these scary evangelical kids who are going to be the leaders of tomorrow!

There are several problems with this message. First of all, as many who critique the film have already pointed out, Jesus Camp only focuses on one kids’ camp (in Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, actually), run by one Pentecostal preacher. Lots of evangelicals have been protesting that this doesn’t accurately represent the diversity within evangelicalism, and even Pentecostals have been pointing out that Pastor Becky Fischer and her camp are fairly unusual among Pentecostals.

So I have a very suspicious reaction to Ewing’s response when Christianity Today interviewer Peter Chattaway suggests that the film may promote a stereotype about evangelical Christians and politics, mentioning that he knows evangelicals who voted for John Kerry. Ewing rather condescendingly replies, “But really, Peter, if you look at the numbers, the vast majority vote Republican. So to find the needle in the haystack, you know, I don’t know if that’s our responsibility. I don’t know if that’s very accurate, to portray that there’s a lot of liberal evangelical Christians that vote Democratic, either. If you look at the numbers, conservative people, religious, will usually vote conservative politics.”

But in focusing on this one, on-the-fringe Pentecostal camp and suggesting that it’s the emblem of Christian involvement in politics, isn’t that sort of finding a different kind of needle in the haystack? Plus, Ewing’s comment blatantly ignores African American evangelical Christians, who in large part vote Democrat. Why has “evangelical” suddenly come to mean “white”?

My other big beef here is that, historically speaking, Pentecostals have not occupied the upper echelons of political power. In fact, many lower middle-class or poor whites (or the poor in Latin America, for that matter) are drawn to Pentecostalism because it gives them a sense of worth and agency that they’re not going to find elsewhere. So, in other words, realistically speaking, these kids are not going to be the movers and shakers of tomorrow. They’re not going to have the chance. If you want to look at who’s already got the political power and influence, look at the sleek, middle-class white evangelicals—who have little in common with their poorer, more charismatic cousins.

There’s my little diatribe. The timing of Jesus Camp is kind of funny, because, just having returned from a trip to Arkansas, I’ve been fuming for much of the week about how “monolithic evangelical subculture” has been taking over the more local, more varied expressions of Christian faith that I remember from my childhood. For example, my parents have had such a hard time winning the trust of Christians in their area because they (my parents) are not on the “approved” list of evangelical teachers and writers whose books and DVDs are distributed throughout the country. It’s sort of like a “we can’t trust it unless it comes from Colorado Springs” mentality. Which means that the politics of Colorado Springs get exported, too, and now white Southern evangelicals seem to think they should all vote Republican (whereas many blue-collar evangelicals used to be staunch Democrats).

The furor around Jesus Camp is at least making people (including me) think about how there is diversity within evangelicalism. Who knows? It might even occur to people that there are black evangelicals, too.

Just this week, I came across a Flannery O’Connor quote that struck me in a new way. In her essay “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” O’Connor advises aspiring Catholic writers to draw their primary inspiration from their region, not from the abstract aspects of their religion. The religion, she trusted, would be embodied within the characters and the story, if the writer really took incarnation seriously. The failed Catholic novel, she writes, tried “to make a culture out of the Church, but this is always a mistake because the Church is not a culture.” Rather, the Church must be embedded within a local culture, with different expression of the same faith in different locales. For O’Connor, this goes back to the Incarnation, which validates the particularity of place, and thus Christ is best represented through local particulars.

So maybe we just need a proliferation of needles in haystacks to remind us of the variety within the body of Christ.

Entry Filed under: Movies