Friday, September 4, 2009

"Jesus Camp": Who Are These People (The Ones Who Made This Insipid Schlock, I Mean)?

The documentary "Jesus Camp" self-congratulatorily refers to itself as trying to present an even-handed picture of children and the role of faith in their lives--I'm the producers thought that would sell--but the result is a very shallow bit of drivel as seen through the broad, open vision of cosmopolitanism. I suppose that the people in the film are as much to blame as the documentarians (after all, they volunteered themselves for mockery). But they are constrained to the ethics of journalism as are documentary filmmakers. How anyone thought that they might be able to present an objective portrait of the religious rites of the Religious Right by filming a Pentacostal Bible camp which is believed by many, and with some justification, to be heretical is beyond me. Then again, you won't see the heretical charges pointed out in the film, unless it's from a member of the very safe United Methodist Church. One could just as easily make the City Year kids look like fascists. I wouldn't recommend it, though; that would be equally stupid.

2 comments:

Thomas Banks said...

While we're talking documentaries, have heard that Oliver Stone is doing a piece on Hugo "Golf Must Go" Chavez?

Notes from the Underground said...

That doesn't surprise me. Someone ought to trace Oliver Stone's toady-ism on a time-line scale.