Jesus Camp (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The 2006 documentary Jesus Camp should have been a movie called The Religious Lives of Children—whose subject is exactly that—since that’s partly what the film is, anyway.  The religious lives of Christian children are in full swing here.  Instead, what directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady have engendered is a basically anti-right-wing scare-fest about an evangelical, pentecostalist camp for young kids, sent there by their born-again parents.

In all fairness, never do Ewing and Grady mock or sneer at the Christian people in Jesus Camp, and Pastor Ted Haggard, who became a sad case after a gay sex scandal, plays into the filmmakers’ hands by making a buffoon of himself before their cameras.  That hardly keeps the film, however, from being tendentious secularist hogwash.