Church Camp
Trigger warning for Christian campers
I don’t know if it will end up staying, but as of now, my next book opens with a scene from my own childhood: seventh-grade Calvinette Camp. No spoilers here, but when I first heard of Cara Meredith’s new book Church Camp, I knew I wasn’t alone in having a formative experience at a Christian camp. (Mine was apparently far less traumatic than some!)
I love that someone finally thought to write a book about the subject. Countless parents turned their children over to camp counselors, but to what end? What was the purpose of these camps, how did they affect generations of campers?
Cara’s subtitle gives a clue where she’s going with this: Bad Skits, Cry Night, & How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation.
Church Camp releases this Tuesday, but Cara was kind enough to provide us with a sneak peak here.
But be warned: for some of you, this may hit a little close to home.
An Excerpt from Chapter 5 of Church Camp, “Cry Night” by Cara Meredith
I interviewed nearly fifty individuals over the course of fifteen months in my research for this book. When prompted with the questions What do you see as problematic or manipulative that you wish you could take back now? What does this make you think about your camp experience in general? nearly every interviewee responded with similar sentiments—and nearly every sentiment involved a memory of one particular night at camp. Some called it Cry Night, while others referred to it as Serious Night; a couple of former charismatics referred to it as Speak in Tongues night, while a lifelong Presbyterian referred to it as Confession Night. Although part of me wonders if subsequent answers came with the territory of asking such a biased (objection, Your Honor, leading) question in the first place, when the experiences of dozens of individuals echo a kindred refrain, you wonder if you’re on to something.
“I killed Jesus!” one interviewee remembered thinking to himself on this particular night at camp. Although Jackson grew up in a Southern Baptist home, Christ became real to him in a new way at Windy Gap, a Young Life camp. “Even though I already knew the story of Jesus, it was like I heard it again for the first time. Afterwards, I lay there on the grass, tears streaming down my face. They poured the emotions and imagery on thick. They took me there. As a thirteen-year-old kid, the only thing I could do was say ‘yes’ because of course I’d say yes: I thought I’d killed Jesus. I had to say ‘yes.’”
Another interviewee recalled the accompanying dread of the evening, both as a camper and as a camp counselor: “We all knew what was coming. And I know this sounds terrible, but I just wanted to get the whole thing over with. We were church kids. They were church kids. All of us already believed, but there we were, making another decision for Christ.” For this person (who wished to remain anonymous) and others like them, it was hard to separate this night from what felt like a curated agenda, which is to say, from the ultimate goal of conversion.
Yet another interviewee, Evelyn, remembered the moment it all changed for her. Decision Night, as she called it, had always been a very moving experience. Her third summer at camp, she recalls opening her eyes at a time when everyone, staff included, was expected to keep their heads bowed and their eyes closed. In this moment, she noticed the camp director counting how many campers raised their hands to make a first-time decision for Jesus and then how many raised their hands to rededicate their lives to Jesus. He jotted those numbers down in a small notebook, which he tucked into the back pocket of his jeans.
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When Olivia and I lined up an interview during her lunch hour at school, I was eager to connect. As I waited for her to hop on the Zoom call, my mind tumbled down a rabbit hole of memories—of her innate ability to rally the people around her and make others laugh, of the summer she and I crossed paths. I was a twenty-one-year-old lifeguard; six years my senior, she was part of the program team, who led all the programmatic elements of a week at camp. If it was time for the camp-wide beach ball volleyball tournament, Olivia would no doubt be found decked out in a black-and-white referee uniform and blue wig with a whistle around her neck and a wide assortment of witty commentary spewed into the microphone. If the Fourth of July happened to dot the calendar when she was at camp, she didn’t hesitate to dress in head-to-toe red, white, and blue spandex, fashion a scrap of Americana fabric around her neck as a cape, and zip line through the dining room while “American Woman” by Lenny Kravitz played in the background. When this same woman, who is certifiably one of the funniest humans I’ve ever met, took me under her wing, our friendship extended past the superficialities of our outside selves: I got to know the real Olivia, the one who yearned for me to know Jesus in an intimate, personal way, and she, I think, got to know me in turn. We built a friendship that extended beyond the four weeks of camp; we asked the hard questions; we became our most real selves.
“Olivia Lewis!” I declared, my own Alice in Wonderland reveries put to rest.
“Why, hello there!” She boomed back with enthusiasm.
Smiles spread wide across both of our faces, I listened as she dove into the conversation: She described her “all-in” personality and classified camp as one of the most formative parts of her faith. Olivia started attending camp when she was eight years old and didn’t leave until her late thirties. Except for four summers (when she was instead going on mission trips), camp marked both her calendar and her identity—but it also marked her faith when, as a camper, she accepted Jesus into her heart at least seven years in a row following the “cross talk” at Calvin Crest, a PCA (Presbyterian Church in America) camp:
Every year you thought, “Oh, I’m gonna do this again,” not because I wanted to but because it was like all the forced emotion welled up to the surface, and you couldn’t not accept him into your heart again. When I think about it now, it’s like the expectation was that campers would get really emotional. Even if people weren’t feeling a particular way about God or about the night as a whole, you knew you had to start pretending to feel that way. So we said yes to Jesus, and we threw our pine cones into the fire, even if we didn’t have a reason to pick up a pine cone in the first place.
In this setting, pine cones stood for sin: When a camper threw a pine cone into the fire, they acknowledged, named, and released what they perceived as sin in their lives. But it made me wonder: Did throwing a pine cone also point to giving God control of your life? Did it mean Jesus was in the business of “burning up” all the bad things too? Whatever the symbolism, Olivia remembered how pine cone sessions often started when the camp guitarist began strumming quietly in the background. In later years, she recalled the sessions commencing when someone hit the play button on a portable boom box, the contralto voice of Jennifer Knapp soon filling the air instead. “She just gets ya every time,” Olivia said of the Kansas-born musician, whose music topped GMA Dove Awards charts until she burnt out, took nearly a decade off from the public eye, and came out as a lesbian in 2010. “But also, you’ve stayed up until two every morning. You’re hyped up on sugar. How can you not throw your pine cone into the fire and weep at the emotionality of it all?”
I could only nod my head—this night really was deeply impactful for many of us. I remember giving my life to Jesus again, and again, and probably a thousand times again, but I also remember what it felt like to sit on the concrete stairs on the side of the campfire pit and wonder which campers would stay behind to talk to their counselors at the end of the night. The cross is powerful, to say the least: even if, as a summer staffer, you tune out the message when you hear it for the eleventh week in a row, you wake up again when you see the reaction of those campers who are absorbing the message for the very first time—who are, perhaps, encountering the one whose “crucifixion was the day the revolution began.”[i] I also remember the weight and the honor I felt when I was asked to deliver this message as a camp speaker: This was a big deal, a huge responsibility. Was I up for the job? Could I put the pieces of the puzzle together in a way that would make sense and invite children to open their hearts to Jesus? When all was said and done, regardless of my words, would any campers stay behind to talk to their counselors and ask Jesus into their hearts? Even if the message might sound different today than it did when I delivered it twenty years ago, Jesus’s death on the cross—and the reaction of those who are reminded of this historical event—still packs a punch.
“It’s a both/and,” Olivia finally said. “I have these wonderful memories. I don’t have any regrets. But then, on the flip side of the coin, I look back and go, whether all of that happened on purpose or not. Whether I was one of the campers or the one standing up front with a microphone in my hand, it was kind of a manipulative experience.”
My head bobbled up and down in acknowledgment. But then, I couldn’t help but wonder, at what point does an experience become manipulative? Does it become manipulative when someone forces it on you or when you start to fake it? Is it still manipulative when you do what’s expected of you? These are the questions I find myself asking when two things are true.
I think of the word emotionality Olivia used to describe this night at camp: when people threw pine cones into the fire, even if they didn’t need to throw a pine cone to burn up all that sin, it felt like something bigger was at play. I’d like to call this “something” the Holy Ghost, but there may be more to it than the third person of the trinity swooping a giant hand down from the sky to lob a pine cone from the far reaches of starry skies into a campfire pit.
On the one hand, the word emotionality is defined as “the state of being bright and radiant,” but on the other hand, its meaning extends to “the quality or state of being emotional or highly emotional.”[ii] Emotionality, in other words, is the emotional response that happens in any given situation because emotionality acts as a complex reaction pattern, the emotions of a particular person, situation, or experience often building on the emotions of another. Is it no wonder that emotionality would become a word used to define the white evangelical church camp experience?
Perhaps I am projecting, but a camper couldn’t not know there was something different about this night—not when every staff member wore equal expressions of hope and sadness, of joyful expectation and weary resignation about the night ahead. Like a dog that naturally picks up on its master’s emotions, campers are not immune to the fact that something is in the air, that there’s something different about this night. When sleep is riddled by late-night activities and the daytime hours are filled to the brim with constant activity—when a camper is “hyped up on sugar,” as Olivia recalled, and far from the familiarity of their family, the speaker is but a cog in the wheel in a story of emotionality. Add to this a message that takes a child or adolescent from the heights of love to the depths of wretchedness, that maximizes on fear-based black-and-white choices of faith and focuses on the violence Jesus experienced on the cross, all in an effort to define love. It’s no wonder that at least one person in that room or around that campfire pit would experience a heightened state of emotion—and after that one person experiences such emotionality, that a number of persons would subsequently begin to feel a similar effect, the emotions of one camper building on another and then another and another. Like a giant train of dominoes stacked upright on the sports field in the center of camp, when one falls, you know a hundred more are soon to follow suit. And it’s going to be one hell of a mess for the activities director to clean up afterward.
How far we’ve strayed from the truth, from the big idea of how much God loves the world. Far from the gift of a Son, a one and only Son, we’ve been found curating and manipulating, churning out Little Christs not for the sake of leaning into a revolution but for the sake of boosting numbers on a conversion scale.
[i] “crucifixion was the day the revolution began”: Wright. The Day the Revolution Began, 39.
[ii] “state of being emotional”: Merriam-Webster, “emotionality,” accessed July 15, 2024, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/emotionality.
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You can order Church Camp at your favorite local bookstore, or click here to order from my Bookshop.
Also, listen here for our latest Convocation Unscripted. We had some fun talking about the new “Anti-Christian Bias” Task Force. It’s serious stuff, but also absurd, and every once in a while it does good to acknowledge the absurdity. Enjoy:
I read this piece out of curiosity because my camp experience was short lived. Shut down by the asian flu of 1955. But my own three children attended church camp in the late 80's and early 90's. While my girls didn't articulate any questionable experiences, my son did. He was asked so many times if he had accepted Jesus? or have you been saved? Both questions he said he didn't understand or why it was being asked. When he had the courage to say that he didn't know, he was hounded by councillors for the rest of the week. Upon arriving to bring him home I discovered a child (he was about 10) who was determined never to go back to camp and refused to answer what he said was a question that he just didn't understand. He also refused to accept that he was responsible for killing Jesus. I fully supported him in his decision and that was the end of camp and youth group.
You see the thing was my son actually asked serious questions which were dismissed as not important in the scheme of things. Well ,they were important to him and in not being taken seriously he felt dismissed, marginalized and different. And in fact his questions were too advanced for the councillors to even begin to answer because of their own lack of insight , experience and education. Although my children continued to attend church well into their teens none of them attends church now. That is a whole other story. As PKs they were expected to be perfect, tow the line and certainly not ask insightful questions. My experience is that these three kids had fine theological and philosophical minds at such an early age that they felt like freaks in this manipulative environment. My son ended up doing an undergrad degree in philosophy a subject in which he excelled.
I have fond memories of church camp, as someone who didn't grow up in the church from a familial perspective. Some do sound cringe or inappropriate. But I also know countless folks who have had their trajectories shaped for the better during formative years. I've also been to "secular" camps, and I wonder if some of the stated pitfalls are byproducts of the camp system by-and-large.
Beyond the religious perspective, I think camp, when done right, reinforces social bonds in an age of mass alienation. An interesting question, no matter the perspective, is how those bonds can be fostered and strengthened.