A controversial documentary, Jesus Camp, is confirming the worst fears of American liberals about the fundamentalist counterculture, reports Dan Glaister from Los Angeles
The children at the Kids on Fire summer camp are intent as they pray over a cardboard cutout of President George Bush. They raise their hands in the air and sway, eyes closed, as they join the chant for "righteous judges". Tears stream down their faces as they are told that they are "phonies" and "hypocrites" and must wash their hands in bottled water to drive out the devil.
The documentary film, Jesus Camp, follows three children at the Kids on Fire Pentecostal summer camp in the small city of Devil's Lake, North Dakota.
Tory (aged 10) tells the camera why she likes "Christian, heavy metal rock'n'roll" rather than Britney Spears.
"When I dance," she says, as she cavorts around her bedroom, "I have to make sure that that's God. People will notice when I'm just dancing for the flesh."
Filmed over a year by two New York-based documentary-makers, the film has caused a furore since it opened in the American Midwest two weeks ago, setting evangelical Christians against non-believers and causing conflict between Pentecostal and non-Pentecostal evangelicals.
After a television news report about the film became popular on YouTube.com, it attracted media attention across the country before opening in Los Angeles this week.
Some critics say that the often raw approach used by the camp's founder, Pastor Becky Fischer, as she prepares the children for "war", is too "scary". Others accuse the documentary-makers of distorting Pastor Fischer's message. Jesus Camp is "a sarcastic documentary that paints evangelical, fundamentalist, charismatic and politically concerned Christians as very shrill, warlike and dangerous", a critic wrote on the Christian website, MovieGuide.org.
At one point Pastor Fischer equates the preparation she is giving children to the training of terrorists in the Middle East. "I want to see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as the young people are to the cause of Islam," she says to camera. "I want to see them radically laying down their lives for the gospel, as they are over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine."
Those comments caught the eye of Talking Heads singer David Byrne, who saw the film at a festival in Washington in June. "I kept saying to myself, okay, these are the Christian version of the madrasas [schools of Islamic instruction, often seen as hotbeds of radicalism]," he wrote on his blog. "So both sides are pretty much equally sick."
THE FILM GARNERED more publicity when Michael Moore screened it, against the distributor's wishes, at his Traverse City Film Festival. One member of the festival audience said after seeing it: "The people in the film were so bizarre, yet they were so sincere - they were like Leslie Nielsen in Airplane." The film won the festival's Scariest Film Award.
"Extreme liberals who look at this should be quaking in their boots," Pastor Fischer says at one point in the film. She goes on to tell the children, mostly aged from seven to 12: "This is a sick old world. Kids, you got to change things. This means war. Are you part of it?"
Despite her sometimes unsympathetic portrayal in Jesus Camp, Fischer helped the film's makers, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, to promote the film.
"They're out to tell a story and they felt they found it with some of the political things," she told the Los Angeles Times. "And they're out to show the most dramatic, exotic, extreme things they found in my ministry, and I'm not ashamed of those things, but without context, it's really difficult to defend what you're seeing on the screen."
The film-makers say that they set out to examine the two cultures in the contemporary US. "Clearly there are two parallel Americas," they say on the film's website. "One is a conservative counterculture comprised of tens of millions of evangelical Christians who feel engaged in a culture war with what they perceive as immorality and godless liberalism."
But they deny that they deliberately misrepresented their subjects, or even took sides in the debate.
"We intentionally made a film that was devoid of a point of view," said co-director Rachel Grady. "We did expect different reactions, but how stark those differences are has been fascinating. One camp watches it and want to send their kids to the camp; on the other end there are people who want to call the cops."
BUT THE REACTION from some evangelical groups has already harmed the film, which opened two weeks ago in some Midwest states. The Rev Ted Haggard, who runs the 30 million-strong National Association of Evangelicals and appears in the film, called on his followers to shun the documentary. The box-office takings in the Midwest did not meet the distributor's expectations.
The Rev Haggard said the film was too literal in its presentation of some of the opinions of Pastor Fischer.
"My concern is . . . that those on the far left will use it to reinforce their most negative stereotypes of Christian believers," he told Christianity Today. The "war talk", he said, was allegorical. "It doesn't mean we're going to establish a theocracy and force people to obey what they think is God's law."
Rev Haggard does, however, articulate one of the film-makers' key points, saying that when evangelicals vote they can determine the outcome of an election.
"I really did not know how intertwined the politics was with the theology," said Grady. "We were surprised at how much they really dovetail."
With the US mid-term elections just over a month away, she added: "It's playing out before our eyes. There are a lot of contested seats. They vote. They know the people who have the same position as they do."