The children at the Kids on Fire summer camp are intent as they pray over a cardboard cutout of President George Bush. They raise their hands in the air and sway, eyes closed, as they join the chant for "righteous judges". Tears stream down their faces as they are told that they are "phonies" and "hypocrites" and must wash their hands in bottled water to drive out the devil.

The documentary film Jesus Camp follows three children at the Kids on Fire Pentecostal summer camp in the small city of Devil's Lake, North Dakota.

Tory, aged 10, tells the camera why she likes "Christian, heavy metal rock and roll", rather than Britney Spears. "When I dance", she says, as she cavorts around her bedroom, "I have to make sure that that's God. People will notice when I'm just dancing for the flesh."

Filmed over a year by two New York-based documentary makers, the film has caused a furore since it opened in the mid-west two weeks ago, setting evangelical Christians against non-believers, and separating Pentecostal from non-Pentecostal evangelicals.

Too scary

After a television news report about the film became a hit on YouTube.com, it attracted media attention across the country and opens in Los Angeles today.

Some critics say that the often raw approach used by the camp's founder, Pastor Becky Fischer, as she prepares the children for "war", is too "scary". Others accuse the documentary makers of distorting Pastor Fischer's message.

Jesus Camp is "a sarcastic documentary that paints evangelical, fundamentalist, charismatic, and politically concerned Christians as very shrill, warlike and dangerous," a critic wrote on the Christian website MovieGuide.org.

At one point Pastor Fischer equates the preparation she is giving children with the training of terrorists in the Middle East. "I want to see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as the young people are to the cause of Islam," she tells the camera. "I want to see them radically laying down their lives for the gospel, as they are over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine."

Those comments caught the eye of Talking Heads singer David Byrne, who saw the film at a festival in Washington in June. "I kept saying to myself, OK, these are the Christian version of the Madrasas," he wrote on his blog. "So both sides are pretty much equally sick."

The film garnered more publicity when Michael Moore screened it, against the distributor's wishes, at his Traverse City film festival. One member of the audience there said after seeing it: "The people in the film were so bizarre, yet they were so sincere, they were like Leslie Neilsen in Airplane." The film won the festival's Scariest Movie award.

"Extreme liberals who look at this should be quaking in their boots," Pastor Fischer says at one point in the film. She goes on to tell the children, mostly aged from seven to 12: "This is a sick old world. Kids, you got to change things. This means war. Are you part of it?"

Not ashamed

Despite her sometimes unsympathetic portrayal in Jesus Camp, she helped the makers, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, to promote the film. "They're out to tell a story and they felt they found it with some of the political things," she told the Los Angeles Times. "And they're out to show the most dramatic, exotic, extreme things they found in my ministry, and I'm not ashamed of those things, but without context, it's really difficult to defend what you're seeing on the screen."

The film-makers say that they set out to examine the two cultures in contemporary America. "Clearly there are two parallel Americas," they say on the film's website. "One is a conservative counterculture comprised of tens of millions of evangelical Christians who feel engaged in a culture war with what they perceive as immorality and godless liberalism." But they deny that they deliberately misrepresented their subjects, or even took sides in the debate.

"We intentionally made a film that was devoid of a point of view," said the co-director, Rachel Grady. "We did expect different reactions, but how stark those differences are has been fascinating. One camp watches it and want to send their kids to the camp; on the other end there are people who want to call the cops."

But the reaction from some evangelical groups has already harmed the film, which opened two weeks ago in some midwestern states. The Reverend Ted Haggard, who runs the 30 million-strong National Association of Evangelicals and appears in the film, called on his followers to shun the film. The box-office in the midwest did not meet the distributor's expectations.

The Rev Haggard said the film was too literal in its presentation of some of the opinions of Pastor Fischer. "My concern is ... that those on the far left will use it to reinforce their most negative stereotypes of Christian believers," he told Christianity Today. The "war talk", he said, was allegorical. "It doesn't mean we're going to establish a theocracy and force people to obey what they think is God's law."

Very disappointed

Ms Grady said she was disappointed by his reaction. "We're very disappointed that someone with such clout has rejected the movie. I think he doesn't like how he comes across in the movie."

The Rev Haggard does, however, articulate one of the film-makers' key points: saying that when evangelicals vote they can determine the outcome of an election.

"I really did not know how intertwined the politics was with the theology," said Ms Grady. "We were surprised at how much they really dovetail." With the US mid-term elections just over a month away, she added, "It's playing out before our eyes. There are a lot of contested seats. They vote. They know the people who have the same position as they do."

Profile: Becky Fischer

Pastor Becky Fischer seems to be enjoying her moment of celebrity. "I've gotten thousands of hits on my website," she told the Los Angeles Times. "I'm wearing sunglasses in the airports. It's really making me nervous."

According to the website Pastor Fischer worked in business for 23 years before taking up a full time ministry. She managed two family enterprises, a motel and an FM radio station, for 10 years and then owned a custom sign shop and worked part-time as a children's pastor at her local church in Bismark, North Dakota.

Her Kids Ministry International states on its website: "We believe that childhood is the time that God designed for people to receive the gospel." Amid all the controversy generated by the film, Pastor Fischer has defended herself. "Excuse me," she says in the film, "but we have the truth."