Jesus Camp and Pathos, Ethos, and Logos

△ The poster of the film, Jesus Camp

   Beforehand, I want to make clear that I do not have a religion. It doesn't mean that I'm an atheist, but I won't say I do believe in the existence of a god. Still, I'm not the person who has the least interest in religion; I am attracted by all sorts of religions, and like to discuss them with who believes in a typical religion. At a glance, Jesus Camp seemed very interesting, making me curious about two aspects: the content itself about Jesus Camp and the effects what directors will use to appeal their view to the audience. In this post, I will try to focus on the latter component of the film, which are skills that producers of the documentary used to persuade their audience.

   Aristotle suggests three means of persuasion in his book, Rhetoric. The three are ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos is made by the credibility of a speaker. Pathos is related to emotions and senses that audiences get, and logos is the flow of logic and patterns of reasoning throughout the speech. In the documentary, Jesus Camp, the three are not balanced; rather, pathos is highlighted by background music, cinematography, and other types of emotion-makers in the film. Three methods of persuasion will be separately discussed.

△ Aristotle's Rhetoric

Ethos

   The so-called "speaker" in a film is the director of a film. Generally, it is director who picks up a topic, maps out a film, directs cinematographers, and has control over editing. At most times, director's fame makes a great deal of persuasion of the film.

   Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady are the co-directors of the film. They are the founders of Loki Films, a film production company where its purpose of film production is to take an honest, objective picture of an unrevealed world. They are quite noted for their projects, and have been introduced in Time Magazine as innovators of the documentary craft. The most popular film they have produced is Jesus Camp, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2007. It is no exaggeration to say that they are influential film makers influential enough to appeal to ethos.

   On the other hand, even though they are influential and popular, the message that the co-producers of Jesus Camp want to deliver which is "polarization of Christianity in USA" will definitely be weakened if they, themselves are evangelists or antichristians, so it is crucial to find out how much directors are put into Christianity. In one of the interviews they had, the interviewer asks with curiosity, "Do you guys come from religious backgrounds?"; both Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady answers, "No." Heidi Ewing claims that she was raised a catholic, attending missionary school in her whole life. However, she does not practice Catholicism. With similar questions in other interviews, she says that Rachel Grady and she was not familiar with born-again Christians before they took the film, 

△ The co-directors of Jesus Camp, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady

Pathos

   "We were never going to make fun of the characters in our film but it was interesting because in the edit, things, if you take out a line or add a line, something could seem somehow funny, or it was easy to fall of that cliff," says Heidi Ewing in her interview with Suchin Pak. Usually in editing process, producers try to accentuate pathos by putting in agreeable background sounds and taking out some moderate clips that are not necessary or that can weaken the purpose of a film. Camera works, or how cameras capture characters, are one of the factors of ethos, too.

   From the beginning to the end, peculiar background music dominates the film. The music boosts the feelings with the screen. Uncomfortable emotions gets bigger by the help of background sounds. For example, there's a scene where nine-year-old Rachael, who stammers badly and who prays to Jesus every moment, goes to a bowling alley and does missionary work there. Without a strange sound ringing, her words and actions wouldn't be a big deal; rather, it would be a familiar scene seen everywhere throughout the country. However, with the sound, her mission works became odd and distorted.

   The scenes and camera works that filmed the scenes also bring out audiences' emotions. Even though the actual Jesus Camp possibly contains some "normal" camp activities, it is deleted and never shown throughout the documentary. What film contains are scenes what people will be astonished after watching them, such as children screaming out absurd words and crying badly after Becky Fischer's lecture about sin. The picture keeps shaking to create anxiety to watchers' minds.

△ The scene where the influence of background music is obvious; Rachael is doing mission work in bowling alley

△ The original clip: compare your emotions with the latter clip

△ The edited clip by myself: the difference is clear enough, but the only thing different is the music

△ The selected scenes and shaking camera work arouses extreme emotions

Logos

   Sometimes, after watching a documentary, people feel confused because they could not understand the flow of the film. This is due to lack of logic of the film; to appeal to logos, captions of facts are used and same radio show is inserted many times in Jesus Camp.
   Objective data such as statistics and facts assists the film to keep its objectivity. Many parts of the scenes contain factual data which helps audience to understand the purpose of the documentary. For example, before getting into the real sense of Jesus camp, caption informs you that "43% of Evangelical Christians become "born-again" before the age of 13." Also, the captions do not contain any opinions or arguments; rather, it gives watchers the minimum explanations of the scenes. These captions helps the film to keep track of its logic flow.

   "Ring of Fire" on WCBT is inserted four times throughout the film. In the radio show, Mike Papantonio, the host of "Ring of Fire", criticizes religious fanatics who wants to make an army of Jesus filled with children. With these scenes put in, the documentary seems to be arranged neatly; they give stability to the flow of the film.

△ facts appear frequently in the film by caption

△ "Ring of Fire" radio show that appeared frequently throughout the film

   Jesus Camp directed by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing uses all three means of persuasion to convey their thoughts to the audience. Co-director's purpose of making Jesus Camp was to inform Americans that there are very different Christians around them; it was to show differences between Christianity. They used their fame and objectivity to appeal to pathos, adds creepy background music, select pictures that can produce strong emotions and chooses shaking techniques for shooting to appeal to ethos, and inserts factual captions and similar radio scenes to appeal to logos.