Jesus Camp (trailer), rated PG-13, the film that features pre-teen evangelical Christian campgoers praying to a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush opens today at the Brooklyn Heights Cinema I & II. The controversial film follows events at Becky Fischer's "Kids on Fire" summer camp in Devil's Lake, North Dakota. Ms. Fischer has been actively promoting the film and has appeared on network TV including ABC's Good Morning America.
Stephen Holden writes in the New York Times: “Jesus Camp” doesn’t pretend to be a comprehensive survey of the charismatic-evangelical phenomenon. It offers no history or sociology and only scattered statistics about its growth. It analyzes the political agenda only glancingly, centering on abortion but not on homosexuality or other items. Because it focuses on the education of children, Ms. Fischer speaks of the evils of Harry Potter. But there is no analysis of Biblical teaching nor mention of “end times” or the rapture. Who would deny that the movement’s surging vitality is partly a response to the steady coarsening of mass culture, in which the dominant values are commercial and the worldview is Darwinian in its amorality? Spread globally by television, the least-common-denominator brand of “secular humanism” — the evangelicals’ perceived enemy — is indeed repugnant. It wasn’t so long ago that another puritanical youth army, Mao Zedong’s Red Guards, turned the world’s most populous country inside out. Nowadays the possibility of a right-wing Christian American version of what happened in China no longer seems entirely far-fetched.
Brooklyn Heights Cinemas I & II
70 Henry Street
718-596-7070
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