Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady built Jesus Camp entirely from observation, with no narrator telling the audience what to think of what it sees. The camera follows three children, Levi, Rachael and Tory, through Pastor Becky Fischer's charismatic evangelical "Kids on Fire" summer camp in Devil's Lake, North Dakota, where campers as young as six are taught they carry personal prophetic gifts, encouraged to speak in tongues and to weep in intercessory prayer over issues including abortion, and told their generation is meant to lead a revival that will "take America back for Christ."
The filmmakers' own account of their method emphasizes access rather than argument: Fischer and the children's families agreed to be filmed candidly, believing the film would present their movement fairly, and the finished cut lets scenes of the camp's intensity, a rally against abortion staged outside a government building, a child weeping in prayer over a cardboard cutout of a president, play out largely without editorial commentary layered over them. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2006 and reached theaters through Magnolia Pictures on 15 September 2006.
Ewing and Grady, an experienced documentary team by that point, structured the film around its three child subjects rather than around Fischer herself, so the camp's effect on the children carries most of the film's emotional weight.