The most frightening movie you will ever see is coming soon to a theater near you.

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.

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."

What the Reverend Haggard really means is that "we certainly do want to establish a theocracy but we are not ready yet to reveal our plans to the unbelievers."

Anybody who sees this movie and does not immediately see through the apologists denials is a moron. These people are brainwashing children and tapping into their still developing emotions to create Christian robots designed to spread this type of dangerous theology around the country and possibly the world.

This is the worst type of child abuse because it comes from people who are trusted by both the children and their parents.

I have not seen the entire film yet, but what I have seen on YouTube and various news programs makes my blood run cold. These are truly horrible people.