Jesus Camp
Some folks at the church community I'm a part of, MissioDei (it's Latin for Mission of God, I'm just saying because a lot of people ask), set up a monthly gathering to watch a movie and discuss. The guy who arranged it picked this movie to start with. The idea for each movie was to have a certain theme within it to discuss afterwards, not necessarily picking apart the movie so much as expanding the idea of the themes to how they relate to our lives and neighborhoods. The movie we actually did after this one was Iron Man where we talked about redemption.
I was sort of dreading this movie because so many people talked about how angry it would make you. I guess I was prepared for something a lot worse. I wasn't too surprised that stuff like this was going on in our country though. It wasn't any kind of revelation to me. Not that it isn't upsetting to see children indoctrinated from such a young age into an "us vs. them" kind of mentality with all of the battle metaphors.
But the consideration as Christians in our community wasn't to point at these people and say, "Wow what a bunch of wackos. They really give Christ a bad name." but to say how much are we really like them in some of the ways that we would like to criticize. We had some really good and long conversations about different church communities each of us had grown up in. How much of what we believe is something just because we were taught it at a young age, and how much if it is something we have come to know and believe through our own adult experience and person journey through our spiritual life? When do we try to mix up church with our political beliefs and try to use one of them for or against the other?
I guess some of the most shocking stuff in this movie is the political stuff. Abortion is such a flagship political issue for so many people that embody an entire larger set of political agendas. (See the fantastic documentary Lake of Fire which I will blog about at a later date). To see these kids basically used for the political purposes of adults is rather frustrating. At one of the anti-abortion rallies or whatever you call them, they had all of the children there with big strips of tape over their mouths. I can't remember exactly their reason for doing this. Maybe to represent the unborn children that had been silenced by being aborted. But to me the image of these children with tape over their mouth seemed more to reveal how these children had no voice of their own. Their own voice was covered up so other people's words could come out of their mouths instead.
So again, maybe this will be an eye opener of a movie for some people, although not anything as shocking to me as I was anticipating from what I'd been hearing. What I would find interesting though is a documentary made maybe fifteen or twenty years from now showing what some of the primary children featured in this movie are like by that time in their lives. Will they retain their zeal? If so will their opinions on many of these political issues become more varied? I guess everyone is different, but there's no doubt that what happens to you at a young age will shape to some extent forever.
Rating: 7/10