As I mentioned in Wednesday’s post, I have been tracking Millennial Evangelical Memoirs for about a decade. Every time I get word of a new one, it gets added to my shelf.
I met Cara Meredith when Holly Berkley Fletcher asked us to participate in a Zoom book chat about Eliza Griswold’s Circle of Hope. I had reviewed the book last year for Englewood Review of Books. During that conversation, I learned that Cara had a book coming out about Church Camp. As there is an unwritten rule that authors of recently published books should also buy the books of others — it’s got something to do with appeasing the publishing gods — I ordered a copy of her book, which arrived last week.
Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, & How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation (Broadleaf Books) doesn’t technically fit my collection because Cara is really late Gen X. But so is Sarah Bessey and I counted her. So I’ll take a broad definition of millennial and focus on what the book shows us about white evangelical culture.
Her love for church camp is evident throughout the book. She frames her work in the prologue:
Camp was the place I felt most at home, the place where the most authentic version of me came out to play. It was the place I became my silliest and, perhaps, most real self: I donned brightly colored Hawaiian muumuus and baseball hats with pig snouts sent into the bill from the costume closet. I belted out songs about how King Jesus is all, armpits sweaty from the complicated, accompanying motions. Camp was the place I most deeply felt the presence of God, where nature offered a peek into the holy, if you were just willing to open your eyes and see. The greens of the willow trees and the brown of the towering redwoods spoke a calming peace; rolling hills, dotted by a hundred different trail combinations, lay scattered against a faultless backdrop of cerulean skies. There was no place on earth quite like this sacred playground — and somehow it was almost as if this very place had chosen me in return. The essence of my faith, my story, my very being, camp was the epitome of me. (x)
(She can really write!)
Cara spent years as a camp speaker. My camp experience was limited to chaperoning a childrens’ denominational camp shortly after my wife and I were married. I really wasn’t up to speed on all of the dynamics of evangelical church camp and the ways that all of the activities combine to encourage young people to find Jesus. Or to find Him again. Or again. Or again.
She provides a rich ethnographic look at how the church camps she experienced as camper, counselor, staff, and speaker really work. At what makes them tick and what questions we might have asked about them.
The book chapters are organized around the seven talks given by the camp speaker: Welcome to Camp, God the Mostly Father, Superhero Jesus, Dirty Rotten Little Sinners, Cry Night, Rose Again, and Go and Live the Way of Jesus. Most of the chapters follow a similar structure: Cara describing the essence of her evening talk, reflections on how those messages impacted herself and her interviewees over the years, and — my favorite part — how we might have better structured the messages.
To take one example: On night two, the focus in on God the Loving Father. It’s a means of connecting the Creator to the Creation and to raise the campers’ awareness of their relationship (or not) to God. Yet she reflects that the God they celebrated was mostly an Old White Man and that there was no room made for those who either lacked a father or lacked a loving one. She explores the implicit connections between purity culture (which is why I count her as millennial) and the male God. She ends with the consideration of God decentered from Whiteness and Patriarchy.
Here’s another: In Superhero Jesus, the message is that Jesus loves everybody and nobody will be left out. But the implicit message at camp is that this is especially true if you are White and Straight. Belonging is a key part of the camp experience which also communicates to those who, if they belong, are relegated to the fringes while pretending they fit. In the cry night chapter, she explores how the messages of Substitutionary Atonement Theory (Happy Good Friday!) unravel the messaging of the prior nights. This cognitive dissonance — remarkably difficult for adolescents whose prefrontal cortex is mush — is almost too much to bear and borders on cruelty (my words, not hers).
In all of this, there were better options if we were willing to look for them. If the focus was not on counting conversions (or reconversions) to report to the Powers the Be, maybe the camp experience could provide a type of faith development that lasted longer than the next camp year. What, she asks, if we talked more about Jesus’ resurrection and that a new Kingdom was born Easter morning and the campers were invited into it?
Here’s what I liked so much about Church Camp. Throughout the book, Cara looks back on her past performance and evaluates. She acknowledges the good intentions of what she was doing but sadly explores that she had other options. Today she would give a different series of evening talks. There is a through-line that shouts, “It didn’t have to be this way!”
There is another takeaway that’s about evangelical culture writ large. As much as I loved Cara’s reflective stance, I’m bothered by how rare it is. I’m hard pressed to think of a major evangelical preacher who said, “Back in the day I preached like this, but today…”. Or a celebrity author who said, “That first book, even though popular, really needed some nuance and elaboration.” Maybe that unwillingness to critique the belief structure — in spite of contemporary social changes and how individuals were impacted — tells us all we need to know about contemporary evangelicalism.
I became markedly alienated from my faith years ago, and the sweeteners that faith sometimes offers are, on closer inspection, chimerical and false.
For example, in this essay, I show that Mary Magdalene is not nearly as merciful as Christians pretend it is.
https://open.substack.com/pub/davidgottfried/p/mary-magdalene-salvation-on-a-suckers?r=87ef5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Good review, I might have to check it out. As a millennial, I should have been the target demographic for church camp, but was inoculated against it by two horrible experiences at church camp in late elementary school and early middle school. (Turns out being the weird kid at church camp who doesn’t fit in makes you a target!) I can definitely see and resonate with church camp being for a very specific type of kid, so in addition to white and straight I would add some layer of “socially normal.” Not sure what the right descriptor is exactly.