Is ‘Silhouette City’ this year’s ‘Jesus Camp?’

Clive James, in his review of “American Movie Critics” for the New York Times Book Review in 2006 wrote, “…it’s the movie itself that tells you it means business. It does that by telling a story. No story, no movie.”

“Silhouette City,” a new film by Michael Wilson, is a documentary about the rapid rise of religious extremism in America. It’s a haunting account of where the Christian evangelical movement has been and where it’s going, and it is impeccably researched.

The film begins by covering an obscure Christian survivalist group called The Covent, The Sword and the Arm of the Lord. The CSA created a survival camp near Bull Shoals, Arkansas where they trained, stockpiled weapons and preached an apocalyptic end to the world. “We’re storing food,” one of the young girls in the film says. “We can’t tell you where or how much. We’re preparing.”

In 1985, CSA faced off with the United States government for four days before surrendering peacefully. They trained 500 people and had a collective annual income of less than $50,000. They spread their message and recruited personnel at gun shows, via HAM radio broadcasts and leaflet distribution.

And in 1995, when Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, the CSA resurfaced. The same building had been a CSA target.

I met Mr. Wilson, the film’s director, for the first time over the telephone. He was back in Arkansas preparing for the screening of his film at the Little Rock Film Festival. As we spoke, he indicated that when he sought out to make the film after 9/11 because he began to hear a more vicious rhetoric coming from the far right. He was reminded of the CSA. Their language “reminded me of the nature and the passion I had heard,” he said. “The right seemed to make their voices louder and suddenly they’d gotten the platform.”

Mr. Wilson’s film, smartly told without narration, is guided initially by Kerry Noble, a former CSA leader. Mr. Noble comments that the foundations of the group were rooted in a belief that “it was important to take America back” from the sinful Christians. Supported by an acute hate for “queers” and “homosexuals,” among many other groups, the CSA operated with a curiously paradoxical purpose: “God teaches us how to love and how to hate.”

In looking at the activities of the CSA, Mr. Wilson and his producing partner Natalie Zimmerman seized an opportunity to bring its historical significance into modern day context. “This was supposed to be a smaller film,” said Zimmerman. “But it kept getting larger and larger. The stakes got higher and higher.”

The film leaps from 1985 to 2001 to Rev. Jerry Falwell’s post-9/11 comments: “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen’” in response to the September 11 attacks.”

As perceptive documentary filmmakers, Mr. Wilson and Ms. Zimmerman sought to understand how the far right, led by Rev. Falwell, Pat Roberson, Ted Haggard, John Hagee and others appeared to be “radicalizing a group of disciples and evangelizing a nation,” as Mr. Wilson described.

Upon seeing the film I was instantly reminded of “Jesus Camp,” Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing’s astounding portrait of a Pentecostal summer camp in North Dakota called “Kids on Fire.” At the camp director Becky Fischer urged the children to join the growing army of God. It as closed in 2006 as a result of negative response to the film. “Jesus Camp” was nominated for an Academy Award.

In the same regard, “Silhouette City” explores the use of similar words and symbols. Several leaders of the far right movement today, including Ron Luce, the founder and president of Teen Mania; a youth outreach organization whose mission is to “To provoke a young generation to passionately pursue Jesus Christ and to take His life-giving message to the ends of the earth!,” use words like weapons, war, army, front lines and battle as part of their standard rhetoric.

According to Teen Mania, 205,830 teenagers attended 37 live events in 2007. The organization boasts an elaborate Web site, outreach activities, a Center for Creative Media and a social networking site called “Battle Cry.” According to CodyM, whose Battle Plan is one of those featured, “Let’s go out and fight this battle until the end . . . WILL YOU STAND WITH ME?”

But the most startling component of Mr. Wilson’s film occurs near the end and involves the connection he is able to make between the growth of the far right and the increased evangelical presence in the American military.

“What is happening,” Mr. Wilson observed, “is when soldiers are looking for psychological help it is not ecumenical, but fundamental.” Melinda Morton, a former Air Force Chaplain, notes that there is a becoming “an institutionalization of pervasive evangelicalism in the military.” The organization, Campus Crusades for Christ, has an active military ministry.

On March 5, 2008, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and Specialist Jeremy Hall filed a lawsuit in federal district court against Major Freddy J. Welborn and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. The lawsuit alleges retaliation and reprisal by the U.S. Army against Specialist Hall who, according to MRFF president Mikey Weinstein, “had the rare courage to stand up for his Constitutional rights and guarantees of separation of church and state against a superior officer who was forcefully attempting to intimidate him into accepting fundamentalist Christianity.” Weinstein, a former official in the Regan administration, graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1977 with honors.

“It’s a persuadable piece,” Ms. Zimmerman indicated.

It’s more than that. “Silhouette City” is a tour de force.