Jeff Sharlet: Jesus Camp, a new documentary, opens in New York City this Friday. I’ve assigned a review of the film for The Revealer, but in the meantime, I can’t recommend it strongly enough. Jesus Camp turns out to be perhaps the best work of journalism — or art — dealing with contemporary Christian conservatism. It’s a film of bleak beauty, to borrow a phrase from the great photographer Danny Lyon, and like Lyon’s work, Jesus Camp is both unsentimental and heartbreaking, harrowing and absurd at the same time. It’s a movie about the Christian Right and that movement’s political ambitions, but it’s also a story about kids and what they believe and how they absorb the beliefs of the adults around them. Jesus Camp transcends its moment even as it reports on it with precision. This is a film of scriptural intensity; see it if you can.

On roughly the same subject, there are a couple of new books on my desk worth mentioning: Lauren Sandler’s Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement, and Jeffery L. Sheler’s Believers: A Journey Into Evangelical America. Like Jesus Camp, both books deserve more attention than this brief notice. I hope we’ll have more on them soon.

In the meantime, you can get a sense of Sandler’s work from “Come As You Are,” her recent Salon profile of the Mars Hill Church in Seattle. Mars Hill is one of those churches that gets a lot of attention for being hip, but not much for its actual influence on the evangelical movement. Sandler’s portrait is considerably darker than the usual “emerging church” story, and a whole lot sharper. Sandler’s has no mercy for the church’s bullyish pastor, but her relationship to some of the church’s members is more complex. What she reveals is a church that is far more radical in its politics than in its aesthetic borrowings from hip hop and indie rock. You might even call it innovative, in a sense — Mars Hill twists an evangelicalized liberation theology into a prescription for women’s submission to male authority.

Sheler’s a contributing editor for U.S. News and World Report and one of the grand middle-aged men of religion journalism. His writing is to Sandler’s as U.S. News is to Salon — more conservative, politically and stylistically, and more favorable to Sheler’s evangelical subjects. But that’s a culture he knows very, very well, and he has enjoyed tremendous access to its leaders over the years.

The Revealer will have more on all of the above soon.