Critics reviews

Film-makers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady join a long line of liberals visiting America's Bible Belt in order to be appalled... Some lively material - but nothing new.

Jesus Camp tells a small-scale story with a massive subtext. In approaching their subject so delicately, its makers have managed to capture the kind of moments which previous documentary makers, like Richard Dawkins, could only dream of... [a] compelling piece of work which will stay with you for a long time.

Opening with scenes of children giddily proclaiming how much they love the Lord, it’s soon evident that ‘Jesus Camp’ is only superficially interested in the methods of the American religious right. Its key concerns are with the susceptibility of young minds and the enthusiasm of some institutions to influence and exploit them to disseminate their own agendas.

In Louis Theroux's hands this might have been ripe for blackly comic satire. But filmmakers Ewing and Grady aren't laughing. In fact, they can barely hide their appalled horror at how these kids are being groomed into a pro-Republican Jesus Army.

Despite its pithy name, Jesus Camp doesn’t trivialize or exploit its child subjects nor their spirituality; for the most part, the film maintains a patient, unobtrusive outlook from the D.A. Pennebaker school.

"Jesus Camp" is often funny (just listen to Becky fulminate against Harry Potter), but it's also a scary, sobering inside look at the attempts of an increasingly powerful group to erode the separation of church and state.

“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.

For documentary filmmakers, one of the nice things about finding a subjects who believe they are absolutely right is that they tend not to be camera-shy. So it is with the subjects of Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's Jesus Camp...

And in its astute visual juxtapositions of belligerent fire-and-brimstone preachers and the rapt, absorbent countenances of their fresh-faced spectators, Jesus Camp—a piercing portrait of innocence perverted—devastatingly corroborates Fischer’s statement that “The Devil goes after the young. Those who cannot fend for themselves.”

“Jesus Camp,” from documakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (“Boys of Baraka”), may shock many viewers, especially political liberals, when it shows children speaking in tongues, their faces glowing with ecstasy and tears running down their cheeks.