Going Back to Church Camp

One of the perks of editing Grow Christians is celebrating the successes of our contributors. I’m thrilled to see their bylines in other online publications and eagerly await pub dates for their books. When that content overlaps with the mission of Grow Christians, I joyfully share it with all of you.

Cara Meredith has been a member of the Grow Christians community for years. She writes regularly about her faith intersecting with parenting, gardening, protesting, and education. Cara has spent the last few years deconstructing the faith of her childhood and young adult years in the white evangelical church and its camping programs, as well as interviewing dozens of former campers and staff members about their own experiences. The result of this introspection, conversation, and research is her recently published book Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, and How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation.

I cannot recommend this book enough, particularly for folks who spent summers in white evangelical church camps. The experiences Cara describes in Church Camp differ from my Episcopal church camp experiences. Her memories tore at my heart and left me with questions I could not wait to ask. I’m incredibly grateful Cara took time out of her book launch schedule to answer some of them so I could share her insights with our Grow Christians Community.

Allison: I knew Church Camp would be a powerful read when I began underlining entire paragraphs in the prologue. You write early in the book, “Within my body, church camp has housed my greatest joy and greatest grief. Nowhere have I felt more alive, more in tune with the presence of God. And nowhere have I also mourned the damage done to others and the damage done to me, too often in the name of Jesus…Church camp has been the source of some of my deepest hurts, just as it has been the foundation of some of the sincerest kindness and generosities I have ever known.”  How have you been able to hold on to the kindness and joy you experienced at church while grieving and recovering from the pain you also experienced there? I know from reading the rest of the book that you didn’t do this by simply sweeping the negative parts under the proverbial rug. 

Cara: I often think of the line from Madeleine L’Engle, which I also quote in the book: “I am still every age I have been.” In this way, there’s a grace toward myself when and as I hold the tension of the both/and, particularly in the life of faith. I am still the ten-year-old who rededicated her life to Jesus at a Baptist summer camp; I am still the zealous twenty-year-old who believed I had to convince others of their need for God; I am still the thirty-year-old who believed she had to present a shame-filled version of the Good News in order for people to understand God’s love for them. And, I am an evolved version of myself who finds a home in quieter, more mysterious, and perhaps even simpler versions of the Christian faith, who holds these tensions and seeks to extend abundant grace. 

Allison: This ties into a line near the end of Church Camp, “leaving white evangelicalism behind didn’t mean renouncing religion altogether: instead, it meant falling more in love with the God who loved me first—because this God made the feasting table wider than ever before.” This “spiritual evolution” of yours feels astonishing and inspiring. Were there many folks in your interviews who were able to say they fell more in love with God once they left white evangelicalism behind? Do you have any words of wisdom or solidarity with people still on this journey of finding God after leaving the church of their childhood behind? 

Cara: I’ve had several folks note that my book is part of the “deconstruction tome” of books, but it’s different in that I didn’t leave the Christian faith altogether — instead, I found a home in the Episcopal Church. In that way, those I interviewed were all over the map: Just as a good number of folks had left Christianity altogether (to the point that they wanted to burn it all down), a fair number of folks found a home in more progressive traditions, and a good number still found a home in evangelical environments. As far as imparted words of wisdom, I’ll just say this: God is big enough for your questions, your wonderings, and your wrestlings. And if God is big enough, then God is also still present in our world today and perhaps can still be found. 

Allison: You describe the theology communicated to you at camp with such detail that, for better or worse, I could picture myself at camp listening around the campfires, in the cabins, and sitting before the speakers. I teared up reading your interviewees’ experiences on pages 88-89. When did you start pushing back against the concept of human depravity that you say is “baked into the framework of white evangelicalism.” How was that pushback received by the larger camp structure?

Cara: I remember specifically starting to push back on concepts of human depravity and this harmful theology while I was still very much in that world and still very much still speaking at camps, which was probably around 2007 or 2008. I questioned why it was necessary to “leave” campers in their sin in order to share the Good News about Jesus and why there was an overemphasis on the cross instead of the resurrection, but my queries were simply met with the response, “Well, this is what we do. So you need to either get in line or get out.” Even if I disagreed, this was both my job and my identity. So, I fell in line. 

Allison: As a parent, how have you fostered a sense of curiosity and questioning faith in your kids that wasn’t offered to you growing up? How do you communicate to them that faith isn’t a precious, delicate thing that will completely unravel once a single thread is pulled? 

Cara: That’s a great question. My parents, who are still alive and who I love even if we disagree, very much employed and put into practice a version of conservative Christianity that was also rather black and white. I now recognize this duality as an innate part of white evangelicalism, so for my husband and me, we really do seek to foster curiosity and allow for big questions, even in (especially in) the life of faith. For us, this has meant believing that God is going to squeeze into their lives and make God’s self known, sometimes, oftentimes, apart from us drilling particular belief systems into their heads. They’re going to absorb this in our conversations and in the books we read; they’re going to experience this when they walk forward to take communion on Sunday mornings and when they build relationships with adults who love them, who are also a part of our faith community. So when big questions or pushback come, we then try and take it in stride — that this is natural and normal and we don’t have to fear everything unraveling if belief doesn’t come perfectly packaged and beautifully manicured. There’s room for messiness.   

Allison: This isn’t exactly a question, but I want to share that I heavily underlined two points you make on p. 115 that summed up the chapter Cry Night for me. You write, “More than any other night, this particular evening tends to go down in the history books…not as one of holy intimacy with darkness and light but as inauthentic and performative, a manipulative deluge of grace.” And then NT Wright’s quote about John 3:16, “Look at the last two verbs. God so loved the world that he gave his son. The trouble with the popular version I have described is that it can easily be heard as saying instead, that God so hated the world that he killed his only son.”  The chasm between the Episcopal Church’s theology and that of cry night feels so vast.

Cara: Yes, the chasm is quite vast! And as a theological nerd and a postulant for Holy Orders in the Episcopal Church, I come face-to-face with this chasm on a regular basis. Whether I’m writing a sermon or sitting down to coffee with a parishioner, the chasm keeps me on my toes — precisely because there’s a constant rewriting happening in my mind about what particular passages really mean or how it might be interpreted differently (rightly? Correctly?) in light of the tradition I now call home. 

Allison: You ask at what point does an experience become manipulative? When it’s forced upon you or when it’s faked? Do you find yourself asking these questions as an adult in the Episcopal Church? Are you closer to getting an answer?

Cara: Emotional manipulation can happen in a number of different spiritual environments, which is to say, that a whole lot of traditions can “go there” when they curate experiences, seek to get humans from Point A to Point B, or even orchestrate music to produce a particular response. I am certainly sensitive to this, both for myself and for others, which is also why and how I go back to an innate belief that God is going to do what God wants to do regardless of what we humans also do along the way. How might we then leave room for agency, intellectualism, mystery, and curiosity in faith spaces? Perhaps it sometimes starts with getting out of the way.  

Allison: How do you differentiate camp’s version of the story from THE story that you “still accept as truth” (p.113)? 

Cara: I suppose I’ve somewhat already said this, but I believe in a God that is love, who is Love, through and through. This God does no harm and this God is big enough for all my questions — and because this God is thoroughly love, shame and exclusion have no room at the table. Instead, the table is wide enough and big enough and deep enough for each one of us to pull up a chair and be welcomed in for exactly who we are, as we are. I think this is what a lot of camps originally intended to do (or believe they’re doing now), even if they’ve gotten it wrong along the way. 

Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, and How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation is out now and available for purchase through Broadleaf Books, Cokesbury, and Amazon.