‘Church Camp’ book calls out conversion efforts, ‘cry night’ at evangelical summer camps
Published By admin with Comments 0
(RNS) — For many Christian kids, church camp — with nightly s’mores, goofy skits and Jesus-y singalongs — is an oasis that welcomes them each summer. For decades, that was the case for Cara Meredith, who grew up evangelical and spent 25 years as a camper, seasonal staff worker and staff speaker.
But looking back years later, the lighthearted memories sit alongside upsetting ones. She remembers being 10 years old at an evangelical church camp in Oregon, when her counselor and cabinmates mistook her shivering outside due to the cold for having some kind of religious experience.
“I ended up playing into that, hyping up my own emotions and what I thought they wanted me to do,” Meredith told RNS. After all, “if you didn’t have a specific story of salvific impact on the pinnacle night of the week, then it was easy to believe you weren’t doing what you were supposed to be doing,” she writes in her new book, “Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, & How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation.”
“I’m writing about white evangelical church camps, and all of them share a focus on conversion. It’s a very different ethos than, for instance, you’d find in a mainline church camp,” Meredith told RNS. “Because conversion is the end goal, there are a lot of similarities that happen along the way, oftentimes in a progression of messages that are preached to try to get campers from a point of disbelief to belief, or from a point of being a ‘lukewarm Christian’ to being on fire for Jesus.
Meredith emphasized that at white evangelical church camps, leaders often practiced a “commonality of exclusion” which meant shutting out and ostracizing “women, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community.” And she likewise observed that there was implicit “belonging” for campers who “played by the rules” like “adhering to straightness,” acknowledging “norms of whiteness” and “den[ying] their sexuality or their gender.”
Content retrieved from: https://religionnews.com/2025/05/21/church-camp-book-calls-out-conversion-efforts-cry-night-at-evangelical-summer-camps/.
