Here’s The LA Times on the hubbub over Jesus Camp, and how the subjects of the film are responding to it.
When Fischer arrived home Tuesday after a few days touring with the filmmakers, her e-mail inbox was loaded with hate mail. She spent the next two days writing lengthy explanations to the most common accusations — “How dare you brainwash those kids!” and “Are you raising up Christian terrorists or another Hitler Youth movement?” — then posted them on her website Thursday.
“I’ve gotten thousands of hits on my website from those people,” she said. “I’m wearing sunglasses in the airports. It’s really making me nervous.”
…
Bowles hoped to build interest among conservative Christians for the film’s opening with a word-of-mouth campaign generated by faith-based publicity firm A. Larry Ross in Carrollton, Texas. Instead, only handfuls of people turned out.”We were getting good feedback from a lot of Christian groups interested in the film,” Bowles said. After Haggard’s statements, he said, “it was almost like a switch was flipped and the people who were going to support it the day before were like, ‘Oh no. We’re not going to support the film.’ “
It seems a bit too easy to blame the failure of Jesus Camp to draw audiences on Ted Haggard’s remarks. I’m a died-in-the-blood conservative evangelical and I had no desire to see the film. I had seen the trailers, a preview on TV, and read several reviews both pro and con, and it was a no-show from the get-go for me. I made that decision long before Ted Haggard made his comments to the Denver Post.
Could it be the makers simply wrongly assumed that red-state evangelicals could be marketed into this film just because it was about Christians? I would suggest the film is failing on its own merits and marketing flubs, and not because, as I understand the filmmakers to suggest, there is a conservative Christian campaign to kill it. Even if that were true, which it is not, it only means the makers completely misread the evangelical audience they thought they could sell the film to. It seems disengenous to me that the filmmakers assign such power to Haggard, who is really only a local church pastor (albeit of a big one) and has no national television audience or media empire at his disposal. He made some comments to the Denver Post, and as far as I can tell that was all he did. If the film could be derailed by a little bad press, it begs the question of whether the film was ever really what it claimed to be.
I do not question the filmmakers’ integrity, who frankly sound very sincere and intelligent in the Salon piece, and I will allow that they are skillful at their craft. I just question their marketing savvy. Could it be they completely misread the market, and now they want to blame the failure of their film on anything other than their own bad decisions and misguided assumptions?
It seems to me that Jesus Camp would be fine on PBS, or maybe even marketed in limited theatrical release to the progressives and non-evangelicals who want ammunition to criticize the evangelical movement. But contrary to what the filmmakers apparently assumed and the MSM might want to portray, evangelicals will not be manipulated into supporting a film just becasue it has “Jesus” in the title. If they feel it presents a distorted view of the evangelicalism they hold dear, whether that view is intentional or not, they will stay away. Sell it to PBS, but don’t expect me to subsidize what I would never endorse or promote.