Review of Jesus Camp (2006) by Chads. — 05 Nov 2006

"Jesus Camp" doesn't need a liberal talk show-host to connect the dots for us, but at least the final dot is left to the audience. We know what the big picture is. You can give the filmmakers a little credit by exercising some restraint by elbowing its viewers towards the proverbial elephant.

There's absolutely no polemics about stem-cell research. The words are never uttered, only inferred at, when, (gulp), a camp speaker hands out fetuses for the children to contemplate at. The Christian evangelical right have been attacked before in film, and "Jesus Camp" does nothing to deter us from our, perhaps, elitist assertion that the "Jesus freaks" live in another world from us.

But really, what does it say about your ideology when one of its constituents, the genuine article, appears to be more of an end result of some liberal filmmaker's satirical rendering than its actual fictional counterpart? Mama Sunshine in Todd Solondz's "Palindromes" seems relatively sane compared to her real-life counterpart in "Jesus Camp", where truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction.

This documentary makes Brian Dannelly's "Saved" look like a p.r. campaign for the Christian right.