Jesus Camp looks at evangelical followers of the Christian faith who believe that the future of religion is their children. Kids as young as six years old are being groomed to believe in God and to follow blindly as a soldier in his army. Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing’s film is captivating – not because the hypocritical evangelist Becky Fischer is so frightening; not because of the massed sight of young children crying when being brain-washed to fight against abortion and not because of the footage of an overly precocious nine-year-old walking up to a complete stranger in a bowling alley and telling the adult that everything is going to be okay because God has a special plan for her. Those are all magical moments, and crucial to an understanding of this film’s motive – but what makes the movie is Ewing and Grady’s fly-on-the-wall approach.

Rather than inserting themselves in to the film, as a Broomfield or a Theroux might, the two female filmmakers sit back and let the evangelists do the talking (that which they do best, regardless of whether it makes complete sense or not). Jesus Camp deals with a wider issue, that the extreme religious right is promulgating the ignorance and war-mongering of the current American government, but the movie never mires itself in this murky polemic, choosing instead to show raw footage from Fischer’s summer (“Kids on Fire”) camp in the deliciously named region of Devil’s Lake, North Dakota. And brilliantly allowing the audience to choose a side of the fence, and sit and observe from there.

I found the movie to be frequently hilarious and often downright frightening. The blind ignorance was close to hypnotic in places. But then, the subjects of the film probably feel they are well served by a seamless depiction of them attempting to spread their message. And that is the real genius of the movie; the fact that – as should be the case with religion – we are left to our own devices to decide what is best for us. Ironically, evangelism, as a concept, pushes and probes far deeper than this film does – and so perhaps Fischer feels that we never really get to see the real her. But that’s not true, as watchers of this documentary we are privy to all we need to see. Yes, underneath the fly-on-the-wall approach is an undertone, but that is always the way with investigatory documentary. Jesus Camp is another winner from the people who made the acclaimed film The Boys Of Baraka.—Simon Sweetman