Hitler Youth for the 21st Century

Over the weekend, I saw a really disturbing film. It was not one of these nouveau slasher flicks or the latest Japanese monster movie remake. It was a documentary. A quiet, not at all flashy documentary. It was not a Michael Moore-style muckraking piece. It just involved a camera and a very compelling subject.

The name of the film is Jesus Camp and the subject is a Missouri woman named Becky Fisher. Fisher runs a sort of outreach program and summer camp for young evangelical Christian kids (hence the title). She is driven. She is charismatic. And she is frightening as hell. Fisher is not simply a church leader. She is not simply a teacher, trying to impart the story and tenets of her faith to a new generation. She is a recruiter, assembling an army for God. What is most disturbing is that Fisher is completely up front about what she is doing and why she is doing it. Just when you start thinking that she sounds like a fundamentalist imam in a Saudi madrassa, she says:

It's no wonder, with that kind of intense training and discipling, that those young people are ready to kill themselves for the cause of Islam. I wanna see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as the young people are to the cause of Islam. I wanna see them as radically laying down their lives for the Gospel as they are over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine and all those different places, you know, because we have... excuse me, but we have the truth!

Granted, her faith is pure and genuine - she is not using religion as a tool to get rich or build her own empire (Ted Haggard shows up and fills that role, making many ironic comments in light of his recent troubles). It also a bit twisted up with some decidedly rose-colored ideas about the world:

He [President Bush] has really brought some real credibility, um, to the Christian faith.

Lines like that make you laugh out loud and even feel a bit sorry for her. But that doesn't keep her from being dangerous. In the end, its the kids, so ready to march off the cliff for a cause they can't possibly understand, for whom you feel sorry.

A note to the IMDB commenters - you cannot judge the quality of a documentary by the repulsiveness of its subject. Many folks given the film a 1 or 2 rating (out of 10) and then praise it in the comments, noting their objection to Fisher and her tactics. If anything, that shows the quality of the film and isn't a reason to downrate it.