JESUS CAMP: very creepy and disturbing campers

When I was a teenager I lived next door to a family of missionaries. They'd spent many years working overseas but they were now back in the UK and spreading the word on the streets of my hometown - literally on the streets. Each weekend the husband would set up his easel and paint pots in the town centre shopping precinct and preach to passing shoppers, using his easel and paints to illustrate his message. He was a very mild mannered man but the courage of his convictions gave him the strength to draw attention to himself in crowded places by talking at the top of his voice.

He and his wife had three young kids and family life revolved around religion. There were strict limits on what the children could and couldn't do. The eldest was a girl in her early teens and one evening I heard a noise coming from their backyard. It was her.. She was upset and storming around apparently after having a row with her parents. The noise was her shouting over and over "Bloody Jesus, bloody Jesus, bloody Jesus!"
Whatever the row was about had pushed her to lash out at the way of life and the message that had been imposed on her since birth.
I'm not a religious man but I pray that something similar happens to Tory, Rachel, Levi and the other poor brainwashed Midwestern kids we meet in JESUS CAMP.12 year old Levi (who claims he was 'saved' at the age of 5) is homeschooled by his Evangelical Christian mom who believes she can do a better job educating him than the godless public school system. He wants to be a preacher when he grows up so, as a treat, his family sends him to an Evangelical Christian summer camp called 'Kids on Fire' based at the ironically named Devil's Lake in North Dakota.
There, under the relentless hectoring and cajoling of Pastor Becky Fisher, Levi and his fellow campers are repeatedly reduced to tears as they admit their sins and pledge to become soldiers of Jesus. The scenes of children as young as four and five speaking in tongues and becoming hysterical with fear, guilt and who knows what else over their imagined sinfulness is truly disturbing, and one has to wonder at the sanity of the parents and other adults who believe this is a positive environment for impressionable young children.
Many of these children come across as prepubescent Stepford Wives, dutiful parroting their pastor and parents' views on global warming, the separation of church and state, abortion, atheists, and Darwinism which they can't possibly properly understand.
JESUS CAMP is billed as a documentary but it's clear where the sympathies of directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady lie, and it's not with the creepy Evangelicals they've somehow persuaded to let them into their world. The strength of their case is undermined by some careless editing which reveals sequences aren't always as contiguous as they appear, and by an over-reliance on one Christian radio talk show host to present the opposing viewpoint.
Even with its flaws this window on homegrown religious extremists is creepier and scarier than most horror films. Unlike those Hollywood concoctions this is real and it's happening here and now.