The U.S. vs. John Lennon s
The U.S. vs. John Lennon
Of course, Lennon had his own problems with the religious right: his first real brush with controversy came in 1966 when an American fan magazine reprinted his remarks to a British reporter that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus” and that Christianity would “vanish and shrink.” The U.S. vs. John Lennon treats this incident briefly, reprising old news footage of Bible Belt disc jockeys condemning the band, the Ku Klux Klan hosting bonfires of Beatles merchandise, and Lennon finally backing down at a press conference in Chicago. In retrospect his crack seems like the opening shot in a war that’s still raging in America today, and though he couldn’t have been more wrong about Christianity vanishing and shrinking, his clear understanding of his own power over kids must have scared the hell out of some people.
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Though far more relevant than the Lennon movie, Jesus Camp is also hamstrung by its polemics. Filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady lump all evangelicals together, failing to distinguish the more fundamentalist Pentecostals, and they’ve clumsily inserted some unnecessary editorializing from talk-radio host Mike Papantonio, shown holding forth on his Air America show Ring of Fire. Unlike Hell House (2001), a much better documentary about the religious right, Jesus Camp seems less interested in understanding evangelicals than in making secular viewers wet their drawers. But this is undeniably scary stuff: children chanting, weeping, and speaking in tongues like little zombies. Levi, a bright and charming 12-year-old who emerges as the kid most on fire, explains that he was “saved” at age five, and he clearly aspires to a ministry of his own. Ewing and Grady show him at home watching a creationism video and being homeschooled by his mother, who prods him to the conclusion that global warming is a myth. (An intertitle reports that three-quarters of all homeschooled children are evangelicals.)
