And these signs shall follow them that believe

In 1966-67, then-twentysomething filmmaker Peter Adair and his crew spent a year with a Pentecostal Holiness congregation in rural Scrabble Creek, West Virginia. Shot on a shoestring budget, the resulting 53-minute documentary Holy Ghost People (1967) was not released to cinemas* but made some critical waves and survived on the rental market. (Today it's in the public domain, so you are without excuse.)

Adair went on to carve out a career far from the mainstream with Word Is Out (1977), the first significant documentary to present LGBTQ people on their own terms. His later films, The AIDS Show: Artists Involved in Death and Survival (1986) and Absolutely Positive (1991), chronicled the impact of the disease on the gay community, as well as Adair's own life under the shadow of being HIV-positive. He died in 1996, aged fifty-two.

Holy Ghost People opens with decontextualised snapshots of a Pentecostal service: music is played, a girl dances frantically, someone holds a serpent, an old woman looks at the camera, a Bible reading is cut off mid-sentence by the editing. It's not too bold, I think, to call it a critique of the sort of sensationalist reporting on extreme religious phenomena that leaves us understanding less, not more. The rest of the film is a careful examination of the forces shaping the church's practices, an aetiology of Pentecostal worship in Appalachia as much as it is a record.

The film steps back, and Adair's narration sets the scene over footage of the area around Scrabble Creek shot from a moving car. The poverty of rural West Virginia in the sixties is frankly shocking: in the heart of the world's richest nation, these communities look more like the villages I've seen in the backwoods of Bolivia and Paraguay. Adair explains that while the church's raucous, unstructured worship practices are legal in West Virginia (but not in neighbouring states), adherents are often ostracised by their own communities. He stresses that snakebite, though common, is not usually fatal.

Most of the film is taken up by a lengthy service that unites the Scrabble Creek congregation with fellow believers who have travelled over sixty miles from Virginia. Adair starts us off slowly, showing most of the worship leader's somewhat rambling notices - tributes to those in attendance, prayer requests, and remarks on the film crew in attendance. (In classic cinéma vérité style, Adair draws attention to the presence of the camera.) From there, the service gradually escalates from singing and testimonies to wild dancing, speaking in tongues, convulsions, falling over ('being slain in the Spirit') and eventually snake-handling.

A key part of the film comes just before that, though, in the form of individual interviews with four congregants. One man first spoke in tongues at the age of thirteen, but grew up to be 'a very mean fellow' and spent a year praying in vain for the return of the gift after his release from prison, before finally receiving tongues again during a service. Another was dissatisfied with the evangelical churches he attended, and eventually found 'the Holiness way' through his father-in-law's influence and the powerful experience of a supernatural wind sweeping through his body at night. A woman talks about the happiness brought by the Holy Spirit, and her first experience drinking strychnine during a worship meeting. The last interviewee is a middle-aged woman who is wracked by convulsions and breaks into glossolalia in the middle of sentences she shouts with a preacher's cadence and inflection, rendering her all but incoherent.

Letting these people explain themselves in their own words, without interruption or cuts, is indispensable in setting out the background against which their worship takes place. It turns them from an incomprehensible - and, given their practices, possibly terrifying - Other into ordinary, sympathetic protagonists. As anthropologist Margaret Mead, who invited Adair to introduce the film to her students at Columbia, writes: 'The people in the film are work-worn and show the marks of malnutrition, poverty, and poor medical care, and yet, on a recent showing to a very sophisticated audience, someone on my right exclaimed: "What beautiful people!"' That's a privileged perspective, of course. But it reflects Adair's success in breaking through the liberal sneer at rural people preferred by the light entertainment that passes for public discourse.

In the face of their small number, legal trouble and hostility from neighbours, adherents resist by appealing to authenticity: the free, unfettered flow of God's spirit. In worship at least, the myriad hierarchies and restrictions on their lives disappear. In his testimony, one congregant lambastes people who 'think it's a disgrace to touch a serpent'. He is unashamed because 'I don't want to be highly esteemed among men. I gotta be just what I am, glory be to God.'

While Adair emphasises that serpent-handling only occurs when adherents feel led by the Spirit and far more time is dedicated to prayer and other charismatic manifestations, the congregation eventually do pick up venomous snakes, lifting them in the air, throwing them across the room and dancing with them. It's unsurprising that this requires hype, but it's still an astonishing display of faith (at least quantitatively). Near the end of the meeting the worship leader is bitten by a copperhead on camera. While he cleans the blood from his hand with a borrowed handkerchief he calmly declares: 'If I die with this snakebite, it's still God's word, just the same. God's word is just the same... Whether we die by it or live by it, it's still God's word.' Is that an impressive reliance on God's grace - whatever the folly of deliberately provoking venomous snakes - or a deeply problematic flirting with death?

Shot on the cheapest 16mm film stock known to man, Holy Ghost People's rough and ready look reinforces its down-to-earth setting. (The poor lighting and sound recording is inevitable in a low-budget documentary, but the awful digitisation isn't - what is this 'file size' you speak of?) Structured carefully and without sensationalism, Holy Ghost People nonetheless transports the wild atmosphere and sense of real danger to the screen (I challenge you not to squirm during the snake-handling scenes.)

The first charismatic service I went to ended with an altar call to come forward and receive the Holy Spirit. I stayed in my seat, not just because I was a firmer cessationist then than I am now but because I was frankly intimidated by the manifestations I'd just witnessed. Yes, they could easily be explained by appeal to religious euphoria, but it wasn't just implausibility. Charismatic worship requires an abandonment of self-control that is pretty alien to the bourgeois ideal of the individual (which is why it appeals to so many people). Holy Ghost People lays bare both why I find the charismatic movement fascinating and why it isn't for me.

*So far as I know, at least; I've been able to find woefully little information on the film online. Anyone who knows more, don't hesitate to pitch in.

I've got that old time religion in my hoard

Marjoe (1972) may have won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, but Cinema 5 did their damnedest to release the film as stealthily as possible, and all but buried it afterwards. There was a 1983 VHS release, but the film itself was thought lost until the negative was rediscovered in a vault, restored, screened and released on DVD in the 2000s. Which is obviously to the good: you won't watch a documentary like Marjoe this side of glory, so it'd be a shame if it was lost forever.

It's hardly surprising, though, that the distributor feared a backlash and virtually declined to release the film in the Bible Belt. Featuring an entirely faithless evangelist raking in the cash from Pentecostal congregations and casually sharing the tricks of the trade, Marjoe was sure to infuriate both the duped and the protagonist's, er, colleagues. But Marjoe wouldn't be very interesting if it was only an exposé. Its power comes from the real questions it asks about faith, showmanship, suffering and ethics.

Marjoe Gortner began preaching in tent revival meetings at the age of four, after his ambitious evangelist parents discovered his flair for the dramatic and confidence in front of crowds. Billed as 'the youngest ordained minister in history' and ruthlessly drilled in money-making tricks by his parents, Marjoe travelled the revival circuit and appeared on television until his mid-teens. When his father absconded with the family's money, a disillusioned Gortner drifted to the West Coast and immersed himself in hippie culture for several years. Lacking the education or formal training for a 'normal' job, in the mid-sixties Gortner went back to what he did best: he began working as a preacher again.

This time, though, he kept the money himself, and was able to work just six months a year thanks to donations and the sale of prayer cloths and other paraphernalia. It was a living, but Gortner was tired of it, and hoped to change careers to acting. So when he travelled the American South preaching, prophesying, and healing the sick one last time in 1971 he allowed a team of documentary filmmakers to follow him around, constantly sharing the tricks of the trade behind the scenes - unbeknownst to congregations, other preachers and even Gortner's own father, all of whom were given the impression of a straight documentary.

Certainly, Marjoe's greatest asset is its morally ambiguous protagonist. Gortner's transformation from his 'real self' to screaming revival preacher - complete with a totally different cadence and inflection - is astonishing. By showing off his acting chops and everyday persona, Marjoe doubles as an audition tape for Gortner's anticipated career in showbiz (his record, for which he exploited his renewed post-Marjoe fame, flopped but he was able to carve out a moderately successful career in genre films and television). So there's real doubt, I think, as to whether such an expert self-publicist ever lets us see the 'real' Gortner. But he's so darn likeable it hardly matters.

Gortner cheerfully admits that even as a child he never believed in God, but enjoyed the attention and did as he was told. (He still uses the story of his prophetic calling made up by his parents in later meetings.) Like many people who aren't required to subscribe to doctrinal statements, Gortner holds pretty vague beliefs in reality: he'd like people to love and forgive each other. He'd even be content to preach Jesus, he says, if he didn't have to go on about hell. He doesn't think he's a particularly moral person, but not actively malevolent either: 'I'm bad, but not evil'.

There's no denying, though, that Gortner is essentially a fraud, using mass psychology and carefully engineered religious ecstasy to persuade people to open their wallets. Asked point-blank if he is a conman late in the film, Gortner's girlfriend gets a little embarrassed. It's not just Marjoe who is living a double life, though. His preacher colleagues may genuinely believe in Jesus and the Holy Spirit, but they also know the importance of a well-executed meeting to their bottom line. I prefer Gortner's open lack of faith, in fact: after all, it's not the cold that Jesus warns, it's the lukewarm.

Fred Clark distinguishes between two types of Christian conservatives: true believers, who sincerely believe in the amalgamation of Christianity and conservatism peddled by the Religious Right, and hucksters, who are in it for the money and the power. Marjoe suggests a third type: the semi-true believer, who has faith in the work of the Holy Spirit but also in the power of emotional manipulation to fill the pews and his coffers. This type, surely, is found everywhere in modern evangelicalism and is the raison d'être of the church growth movement.

In Marjoe, itinerant preachers emerge as a community resembling magicians, sharing tricks of the trade. There's a lot of fascinating stuff. For example, Gortner mentions creating the illusion of a glowing cross on his forehead by smearing his skin with transparent dye that would react with his perspiration during the sermon. Then there are the movements he's adapted from Mick Jagger and his strategic use of repetition, shouting and surprise to induce religious trance and falling over ('being slain in the Spirit') when he lays hands on people coming up during the altar call. Similar tricks are in use today.

I've only been to a couple of charismatic worship services and they freaked me out, so, being unadventurous, I returned to what I liked best: silently judging people in a traditional church setting. There's no denying, though, that Gortner's servies fulfil real needs: joy, peace and healing, even if it is only for a few hours, for people who are otherwise downtrodden and sick. (Another preacher gives a nauseous sermon in which he thanks God for his brand-new Cadillac - go prosperity gospel!)

In that sense, perhaps Gortner can't be considered a fraud at all: don't attendees get the exact same experience with him as they would with a more sincere preacher? (And, theologically speaking, is not God's spirit quite independent of human machinations, and hardly frustrated in his work by a fraud?) Preying on people in the vulnerable state induced by religious ecstasy - however legitimate, even beneficial that experience may be in itself - is not improved morally by the sincerity of practitioners. Give me an honest fraud like Marjoe Gortner over a semi-true believer any day.

Let the little children come unto me

When I was seventeen, I spent three weeks serving as a 'senior camper' at a Christian summer camp. The purpose of Iwerne Holidays was to present the gospel to teenagers from independent schools in a fun environment including sports, excursions, and all sorts of activities. It was just like being a 'camp counselor' across the pond, except we weren't hacked to pieces by machete-wielding madmen.*

It was, however, nothing at all like Jesus Camp. Therein lies much of what makes the film so fascinating and irritating.

Jesus Camp, released in 2006, is an artifact of the culture wars of the 2000s, that appalling time in history when 'religion' (whatever that means) was at the forefront of public debate in the Anglo-Saxon world. The days of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, James Dobson and Pat Robertson, all of them thankfully increasingly irrelevant in an age where culture war has dissolved into the naked class struggle whose halo it was from the beginning.

Anyway! The film follows evangelical culture around a Pentecostal children's camp called 'Kids on Fire' in North Dakota. There, pastor Becky Fischer 'equips' children to be 'warriors for Christ' to 'take America back' by evangelism as well as fighting abortion and other forms of ungodliness in the public sphere. Directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady focus on three of the children: twelve-year-old Levi, homeschooled by his mother, who teaches him that evolution is a hoax; nine-year-old Rachael, who regularly engages in evangelism towards strangers; and ten-year-old Tory, who breakdances to Christian metal.

At Kids on Fire, these and other children are taught to be wary because 'the devil goes after the young' and to distrust secular entertainment ('Had it been in the Old Testament, Harry Potter would've been put to death!'). Among themselves, the children discuss their feelings about films and books, revealing their struggles with what they're being taught. In a service that can in good conscience only be described as mass hysteria, the children break down weeping and pledge to end abortion by political activism and asking God for 'righteous judges'.

We meet Levi again at New Life Church in Colorado Springs. In an interview, Pastor Ted Haggard expresses his delight at evangelical Christians forming a decisive voting bloc against homosexuality, abortion and the teaching of evolution. This scene, of course, now has a potency the filmmakers couldn't be aware of at the time: just a few months later, Haggard fell from grace when it was revealed he'd indulged in adulterous gay sex and illegal drugs for years.

As you'll have guessed by now, Jesus Camp is a liberal message picture. Despite the lack of a narrator, Ewing and Grady clearly think the formation of a political evangelicalism focused on anti-abortion, anti-homosexual 'family values' is a very bad thing, and I agree with them. Even so, I didn't really need the constant scare music they lather on every scene of Pentecostal worship. The snippets of Mike Papantonio's radio show, in which he criticises the Religious Right, are editorialising I welcome: it's good to see a Christian offer an alternative view to the one pushed by the film's subjects.

Even while Jesus Camp sternly disapproves of its subject matter, it's a respectful, humane film. When Becky Fischer says, offhand, 'I get exhausted doing this' while preparing for another session, it's the rawest, truest moment in the film. While I don't think we learn enough about them (which isn't really excusable, given the film's short running time), the children are never treated as less than full human beings with dreams and ambitions. Levi's worldview may be a mess of cruel lies - if global warming is true, ye are yet in your sins - but we learn to rejoice and mourn with him.

As such, the film's ostensibly simple message constantly rebels against the much more complex response the film actually induces in the viewer - especially if that viewer, like me, is himself an evangelical Christian. Becky Fischer's ministry is horrifying: she's convinced children need to be indoctrinated because most people's Weltanschauung is fixed from a young age, so better get in early; and she's worried because 'the enemy' - Islam - is supposedly training young children to blow themselves up, an amount of dedication she seems to view with envy rather than horror. (It was 2006, remember.)

In Fischer's call that children should be 'warriors' the Christian concept of spiritual warfare thus comes worryingly close to real, physical warfare. The 'Christian pledge of allegiance' one of the families recites at home has nothing to do with the gospel but a lot with a brand of Christian nationalism - something I can't imagine Jesus approving of. Faith in radical, counter-cultural grace - following an executed criminal - does not sit comfortably with colonising the public sphere because 'our nation was founded on Judaeo-Christian values' (Fischer).

Although the film is unmistakeably a product of its time - witness the scene in which the children are invited to bless a cardboard cutout of George Bush by stretching out their hands towards it - it seems prescient in other ways. The language of 'taking back America', now secularised in the Republican Right's crusade against ostensible Marxists, socialists, and liberals, is used here in religious garb. This rhetoric of national rebirth in the face of an ungodly, totalitarian government - a narrative that is a pack of lies, remember, no matter what we might feel about Obama otherwise - has given rise to the uniquely American permutations of fascism that are now flourishing at the even-loonier end of the Tea Party.

Jesus Camp runs into problems in failing to notice that Fischer and her ilk are engaged in intra-evangelical point-scoring, too: Rachael believes that churches with ordered, sedate services are 'dead'. The raucous Pentecostal manifestations of Kids on Fire - dancing, weeping, speaking in tongues, the whole vocabulary of the charismatic movement - would be regarded with bemusement if not outright horror by many evangelicals; fundamentalists, who trace their tradition back to the Puritans and disapprove of both dancing and what Jonathan Edwards called 'enthusiasm', would be especially appalled.**

The filmmakers don't seem to realise that the Religious Right is less a terrifying monolith than a collection of increasingly disparate forces provisionally united around certain political issues: opposing homosexuality, abortion and secularism, championing the military and the death penalty. Just like Fischer herself, Ewing and Grady never investigate the loci of structural power and privilege among their subjects: the power of leaders over followers, adults over children, men over women. Jesus Camp would be a richer film for it, but it remains an eye-opening portrait of the Religious Right.

*What did you expect? Being a Christian summer camp, the experience lacked the weed-smoking and fornication necessary to enrage Norfolk's homicidal maniac population.
**Perhaps more embarrassingly, many evangelicals would not be comfortable with a female pastor.