In a way, you can’t blame the fundamentalist Christians in this great documentary for playing dirty by indoctrinating their ten-year-olds into the Pro-Life, Bible-beating, spread-the-word way. These people see the world changing around them—and changing fast. And they’re not leading the changes. They’re following them. Like a climate-change expert who notes the gradual rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide, God experts see The Bible’s influence dwindle little by little over time. They don’t have scientific instruments, but they do have television and the internet. God is less cool than ever in popular culture. When the top movie star promoting your cause is Kirk Cameron, something’s wrong and it’s time to take action.
Me, I’m an atheist, so I’m part of the problem for almost everyone in this film. That’s okay, though. I’m not hurt. Rather, I’m fascinated. This movie shows how the sausage is made when it comes to forming extremist Christianity. It has no narrator. Radio show host Mike Papantonio, for the now-defunct Air America, provides a sprinkle of bookend critical commentary live on the air, but directors Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing spend most of their time as a fly on the wall at the kiddie Jesus Camp, letting everyone speak and cry and sell their wares. Grady and Ewing are so good at it that the movie’s main “villain”, fiery kid’s camp leader Becky Fischer, didn’t see a thing wrong with the film at first and thought it made her methods look good.
Then the film became an arthouse hit and the hate e-mails rained on her like frogs. From that, Fischer learned her own lesson in not always believing what you’re sold.