The Best Faith EVER!!!!

Cara Meredith's book Church Camp

Every summer, thousands of evangelical kids go to “church camp,” or evangelical Christian camp. Growing up overseas, this is not an experience I ever had. Well, strictly speaking. As I told author

Cara Meredith

in the (forthcoming) podcast interview I did with her, my entire childhood—much of it spent at an evangelical mission-run boarding school—was kind of a year-round church camp. Except we had to go to school. Compared to all the spiritual indoctrination we received, that did seem like a minor point sometimes. Reading Cara’s new book, Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, and How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation, I found a lot of parallels with my own experiences, half a world away but somehow within the same American theological sub-culture.

There was the good—spending time in a beautiful natural setting with no modern entertainment, playing games and goofing off with friends, singing beloved songs around bonfires. Cara says camp for her growing up was a cherished place, “a sacred playground,” and that is what my school was to me, too.

Then there was the bad. And one thing Cara’s book does so artfully is refuse to choose between them, embracing the complexity of experience, letting it all stand as valid. At camp, that meant the fun and games and beauty and togetherness was paired with a highly manipulative presentation of a rigid, conformist, fear-based theological framework.

A theological agenda, really. And in evangelicalism, there is ALWAYS an agenda. At the end of the day, that’s probably what I hated most about it. Every relationship, every encounter, every service, every message, every experience is an opportunity to either convert you to the program or keep you in its narrow lane. Or it’s an opportunity when you are supposed to perform that function in someone else’s life. It’s exhausting, it suffocates genuine relationship, and I think it’s the opposite of true faith in a God that moves regardless of any human agenda.

As Cara demonstrates with regards to camp, and what I have observed in evangelical life in general, that culture features an almost frantic pursuit of a grand spiritual experience—something you’re supposed to feel, some way you’re supposed to be, a special calling you’re supposed to identify, a soul you’re supposed to save, a kind of life you’re supposed to live. And in America these days for many evangelicals—a country you’re supposed to make into your own image, by undemocratic means if necessary. All of is is supposed to “pay off,” through unwavering faith, solid belonging in a homogenous community, a meaningful life, the triumph of the Gospel, and the removal of doubt, temptation, and moral complexity.

The God of church camp can’t be trusted to reveal himself on his own or through his beautiful creation. Or even through simple faith practice or basic human love. He may be all-powerful, but he requires someone put on some real fireworks to be of interest to anyone. As the founder of Young Life, the organization Cara worked for, instructed (as quoted by Cara), “It is a crime to bore anyone with the Gospel.”

Likewise the God of church camp may be all-loving, as presented in nights one through three, but his love can’t overcome the depravity of “dirty, rotten sinners” without Jesus having to die. And even after sinners are saved, God will probably need them to continue checking the boxes of evangelical life to truly find his favor. Like a pharmaceutical ad that promises to heal you before listing off a million possible side effects, the evangelical God supposedly loves you unconditionally, but he comes with pages and pages of fine print.

Cara insightfully lays out that fine print and the many contradictions of the evangelical message and the experience of church camp by taking the reader through its formulaic program, a program she herself helped orchestrate week after week as a camp counselor and speaker for many years. The genuine fun of camp was the spoonful of sugar that helped the eventual medicine of camp—its ultimate agenda—a confrontation with one’s sinfulness, Jesus’s violent death, and one’s eternal damnation without converting and conforming to white evangelical culture—go down more easily.

Every night’s theme was carefully designed to build up to that, before a last—and very brief—joyful revel in Christ’s resurrection before putting campers back in their parents’ minivan to go live good evangelical lives. The penultimate night, and the climax of camp, was Cry Night, when campers were invited/pressured to reckon with the wages of their sin and, well, manipulated into an emotional response.

The goal is ultimately that any “lost” campers are converted to Christian faith, but in truth, the vast majority of campers are evangelical church kids who have already been steeped in the Gospel message. Most of them have long since been “born again.” But that doesn’t relieve the pressure to make some kind of “decision”,” perhaps a rededication of one’s faith or a dramatic swearing off of some adolescent vice. Cara recalls herself as a camper inviting Jesus into her heart over and over again (I didn’t require a camp meeting to do this, I pretty much started and ended each day with the Sinner’s Prayer, just in case). She quotes one former camper, who dreaded Cry Night and “just wanted to get it over with.” As a former camp staffer, Cara reveals that tallies of these decisions/conversions made their way into camp promotional materials and metrics.

At my school, the fun, games, and silliness were more diffuse. We weren’t there for a week, we lived there, and we had work to do in addition to our play. The spiritual inculcation was normally less emotionally intense, too, but no less relentless. We had daily chapel, Bible class as an academic subject, evangelical teachings woven into many other classes, dorm devotions, individual “quiet time,” Sunday School, church, Sunday night praise group, and various other religiously-based activities. Most of my social conversations with my friends involved some discussion of faith, Bible study, “accountability” (basically peer-to-peer confession), prayer requests, and the like. We ate, slept, and breathed evangelical Christianity, all day, every day, for 9 months a year (and at home, many of us had equally zealous parents).

But there was one week a year that was spiritually super-charged. It played out much like Cara’s church camps. I wrote about it in an earlier post (slightly edited here):

They brought in a speaker from America, or sometimes Canada or Britain, to preach every night for a week, and also every day during chapel. He (because, obviously) was invariably some wannabe cool dude/80's version of a hipster that could “connect with the youth.” One year, it was the now famous mega-church pastor Andy Stanley, but back then he was better known as the otherwise unknown son of mega-church pastor Charles Stanley. A friend of mine recounted a recent visit to Andy's church near Atlanta, which is attended by tens of thousands. Andy only appeared physically before part of the congregation due to space constraints, and everyone else saw a hologram of him. I told my friend I felt pretty certain that Jesus never intended for his disciples to convey the good news via hologram, but who knows. Back in the 80's, the demand for Andy was not so great as to necessitate any form of teleportation, and we got him in his 30-year-old flesh, all the way over in Africa.

This week was called Spiritual Emphasis Week, or SEW, without even a hint of irony. Because, you know, the rest of the time at the school, no one gave a crap about peoples' spiritual lives….

SEW unfolded like a well-made burrito every year, revealing the familiar layers of inspiration, manipulation, guilt, shame, peer pressure, redemption (until next time!), and sometimes topped off with ritual banned cassette tape destruction. Honestly, the whole thing could have been an elaborate scheme to get us to hand over our satanic music, since most of the staff was unable to identify it by sound and generally couldn't be bothered to hunt for it.

On nights/days one through six, the speaker gradually ramped up the heat surrounding whatever scripture/theme had been selected, probably in consultation with the staff, probably centered around whatever sin was particularly contagious on campus at the time. On day/night one, things were pretty casual. The speaker cracked all their best jokes, made all their best teenager-cool references, and reeled us in. Then he expertly and gradually shifted over to earnest authority figure before we even knew what was happening. So by the end of the week, when he was telling us to burn our tapes, we were like, well, this hip dude is telling us AC/DC will fry our souls right up so it must be true.

I always approached the final night with a combination of foreboding and hopeful expectation. I knew exactly what was going to happen every year. I had experienced it so many times before, at RVA and other evangelical revival services over the course of my young life. The message was always the same, the crescendo of an emotional pitch that built through the week and basically boiled down to: Whatever kind of Christian life you've been living, it's not good enough. There is some part of your heart you aren't giving over to God, some hidden sin you aren't confessing, some bad habit you won't give up, some divine directive you are ignoring, some lost soul you aren't saving, some messed up room in the home of your life that needs a good cleaning. And definitely some Madonna cassette tapes under your bed you need to fork over. And that was on the mild end of the spectrum. On the more severe side of things, you were a total fraud, a “nominal Christian," who went through the motions without real commitment to Jesus….

The last service ended with a somber altar call. The speaker called people forward to accept Christ as their Savior or to "rededicate" their lives to Christ. This was when I started to get nervous, and not because I was thinking, this whole thing is a massive con and everyone is going to know I think so. No, I was a true believer, or rather, I wanted to be, more than I wanted anything in life. I wanted so badly for lightning to strike, to feel the spirit move as so many of my friends seemed to do. They wept uncontrollably and went forward joyfully and seemed remade at least for a time. They enthusiastically got up extra early to have their precious quiet times with their BFF Jesus and waxed eloquently in dorm devotions about all God was teaching them. Every year, there was always a particularly shocking case of a kid who seemed to be a model Christian, a spiritual leader on campus, who went forward and testified to the fake life he or she had been leading and tearfully pledged their entire life to Christ, the whole thing this time! And they seemed to almost glow with joy and peace.

But I had never felt that genuinely. And year after year at SEW I hoped and prayed I would experience a miracle, like Saul on the road to Damascus, that Jesus would just knock me off my horse and change my life forever. Then I would KNOW I was saved and accepted, and I would be healed of all my fears and failures. Year after year I sat waiting, watching streams of my peers go forward in apparently genuine faith, getting more and more anxious as the time passed, frantically trying to conjure a spiritual awakening. Finally, I would rise from my seat and walk dutifully to the front, trying to look enraptured but honestly feeling not much at all.

Cara’s book spelled out in black-and-white how unabashedly programmatic such evangelical revival is, and what SEW was for me. At the time, she believed she was doing something good by spreading the Gospel of Christ and saving souls from hell. Now, she looks back on that time with a fair amount of queasiness, about the use of fear to produce a reaction, the performative nature of it all, the enforced conformity, the wielding of previously built trust for a desired end. A more positive spin might be that camp simply sets the stage or assembles the ingredients for someone to have a spiritual experience, it doesn’t produce that experience, the way a romantic restaurant doesn’t guarantee romance. But Cara is dubious. “At what point does an experience become manipulative?…When someone forces it on you or when you start to fake it? …When you do what’s expected of you?”

Relatedly, the camp experience reveals the salesmanship/consumerism aspect of evangelicalism writ large. The Christian life is portrayed as something grand and “over the top,” an experience like no other. If you do it right, it will meet every need and fulfill every yearning you could possibly have. At camp, this meant going all out with theatrics (Cara rode a zipline over the audience in a red-white-and-blue outfit, bombarding them with watermelon chunks while the song “American Woman” blared), crazy games, yards long ice cream sundaes, side-splitting skits, and breathtaking stories. Camp promotional materials promised “a life-changing summer” and “the best week of your life.” The whole thing left Cara feeling like she was “selling Jesus” as if he were a product on QVC.

One sees a similar dynamic in the mega-church phenomenon, with their myriad of social activities, coffee bars, light shows, charismatic speakers, and rock bands. Anything to make things “exciting” and to draw a crowd. You see it in the various forms of the prosperity gospel, which encompasses everything from literal promises of richness in exchange for devotion to promises of higher marital satisfaction from following evangelical teachings about sex, parenting, and gender roles (including female subordination.)

And, as my book will discuss, you see it in the fascination with missions, the idea that God has a “special” calling for you with the eternal fate of millions of souls in the balance. The greater the sacrifice the greater the reward, the more remote and rugged the bigger the adventure and the more fantastical the spiritual heroism.

Consider this promotion by the Southern Baptist mission board for a campaign it calls “The Great Pursuit.” The board invites Christians to become Missionary Explorers: to “journey to the edge of lostness” in order to share the gospel with more than 3,000 communities the board has identified as “unengaged, unreached people groups.” The website includes a statement from one such Explorer—name and location concealed for their protection—that reads like Magellan’s log or something out of Indiana Jones:

I’m hiking very deep into a jungle region, a place apparently no foreigner has gone before. . . . I am in a village of about 200 people where there is no church, no Christians, and they are very closed to hearing or learning about the gospel... I have also found some families of one of the unengaged, unreached people group(s) I traveled here to find and spoke with locals and gathered information on where they may be. I will walk that direction and try to find them two days from now. We are going to sleep now on sheets of plywood. Goodnight from here.

The truth is, living a life of faith doesn’t have to be some kind of extreme sport. It doesn’t require being moved to tears. You don’t have to discern some kind of “special” calling for your life. The people you encounter don’t have to be spiritual projects, and you don’t have to be anyone else’s.

You can love people without trying to change them. In fact, I’d argue it’s hard to love people if you’re trying to change them. You can drink up this present life with joy and peace without fixating on the next. In fact, I’d argue it’s hard to truly live if you fixate on dying.

And you sure as hell don’t have to wear yourself out hawking a God who is quite capable of speaking for themself.

Cara quotes the late author Rachel Held Evans, describing how she found rest in the Episcopal Church after a hard-core evangelical upbringing: “No one’s trying to sell me anything. No one’s desperate trying to make the Gospel hip or relevant or cool. They’re just joining me in proclaiming the great mystery of faith.”

What if faith is walking the road in front of you, because that is what you can see.

What if God really is love.

What if this life is already meaningful, just by its existence.

What if God wants you to stop and breathe and notice instead of go and do and achieve.

What if you really can rest in the knowledge of your inherent worth and the impact of your love.

What if calling is being the most authentic, courageous version of who you were born to be.

What if mission is validating that in other people, no matter who they are or what they believe.

And what if camp is staring up at the stars and finding oneness in difference and hearing the quiet and stopping the show.

What if it’s all meant to teach us to let go and believe that it will all work out in the end.

Now that’s a ride worth going on.