As I write these words, I’m on hallowed ground: I’m at Seneca Hills Bible Camp and Retreat Center, the summer camp where my husband is executive director, and our first campers of the season have just arrived.
This year marks Seneca Hills’ 90th year and my family’s 10th at this interdenominational camp in rural Pennsylvania. Each summer, we move onsite for ten weeks, weaving our family life into the rhythm of camp. And while we’re here, I get to watch the Lord at work: bringing campers to saving faith, stretching the counselors, forging lifelong friendships, and calling campers and staff alike to consider serving in ministry or the mission field.
Seneca Hills is special to me, but it’s not unique. Over the past century, Christian summer camps—or “church camps”—have figured into the lives of millions of children and teens in the US every year. And as is inevitable with something on this scale, some of those campers have bad experiences.
Cara Meredith explores that kind of experience in Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, and How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation. The book examines ways some church camps have missed the mark over the years, particularly in the last couple decades. Because of my connection to Seneca Hills, this is an account I want to hear, a conversation I want to join—but I’m not sure Meredith would be interested in a perspective like mine.
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Church Camp draws on Meredith’s own experience working in camp settings and on interviews with nearly 50 former church-camp staffers and campers. She seeks to build the case that these camps harm campers, even inflicting spiritual trauma, by creating a culture where belonging is contingent on believing a certain way. Spiritual instruction too often comes through emotional manipulation, she alleges, and teaches kids about an angry and violent Father God and a reduction of biblical sexual ethics to the crude, purity-culture idea that “girls are pink and boys are blue—and camp isn’t the place to make purple, campers!”
As a counselor and later a chapel speaker at camps that seem to have all been in California, Meredith was probably a fantastic communicator. She’s a great storyteller, and it’s easy to imagine her capturing campers’ attention with her humor and antics, only to spin around to demonstrate how her silliness made a serious point, urging campers to commit or recommit their lives to Christ by the end of the week.
That call to conversion or rededication is Meredith’s main objection to the camps she enjoyed for years before deconstructing her faith and rebuilding it around more progressive ideas of God. “I think if we could rid camps of the need of conversion, that would be enough,” she said in an interview with Religion News Service, arguing that church camps should promote a message of love and acceptance rather than salvation:
What if it was just simply kids being out in nature with other grownups who love them, where creation and creator can meet, where God could just show up on God’s own time?
If I were to speak as a camp speaker now in one of those environments, I think the message I would give over and over again would simply be a message of love. God loves you for exactly who you are, as you are. God is love, and who you are as a young person is exactly who God celebrates.
The problem with Meredith’s revised message—and one of the problems with Church Camp—is that her model is not what we see in Scripture. Yes, God loves people and is calling us to himself. Yes, Jesus sees people as we are and is willing to enter our messiness. But his message is still “repent.”
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Meredith’s use of the story of Zacchaeus is telling. “When the Great Teacher peered through a thick covering of leaves, he saw [Zacchaeus] for who he actually was—a man he wanted to share a meal with, a man who was worthy of belonging,” she writes … and stops there. She doesn’t continue with the rest of the story, the part where Zacchaeus repents and vows to repay everyone he has cheated. She doesn’t mention that it is only after Zacchaeus renounces his former ways that Jesus declares that salvation has come to his house (Luke 19:8–10).
In this engagement with Scripture and in her interviews, Meredith finds what she’s looking for. She doesn’t keep her cards close to the chest when crafting questions like this one, which she said she asked dozens of interviewees: “True or false: Church camp was made for white, straight, evangelical kids.” Some interviewees objected to the question:
Some waffled in their response, earnest for a third option that didn’t throw those camps that did primarily serve white, straight, and evangelical campers under the bus. Others called me out on the pointedness of my statement: “Your position is clear when you ask us to make a choice here,” one interviewee said. He believed I wouldn’t voice such a strong opinion unless I believed it was true. “That could very well be the case,” I replied. “So is the statement true? Is it false? Can you choose a side, even if you don’t want to or don’t agree with my position?” His lack of response became his answer.
Even when camp staff members believed they had worked in diverse contexts, Meredith had the final say. She determined that a camp serving mostly white, evangelical kids over the summer and groups that don’t identify as white or evangelical during retreat season represented a “modicum of diversity.”
But some former campers who identify as LGBTQ agreed wholeheartedly with her statement, and Meredith tells their stories at length: campers who weren’t allowed to return to camp after coming out, staffers who were pushed out after their sexuality became known, and staff who look back with regret on decisions not to include gay volunteers in these ministries.
Reading stories of people who feel rejected by their church camps saddened me. But the stories also left me with questions: Did Meredith try to verify their accounts? Did she reach out to the camps for comment? (I found just one indication of this in an endnote about one camp.) Would it even be feasible to get to the truth about these situations, many of them years or decades in the past? These accounts may be true—or they may be just one side of a difficult and complicated situation, perhaps even a side remembered from a child’s limited vantage. In Church Camp, readers are simply asked to trust the storytellers’ memories.
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This gets to a structural flaw in the book: There are a lot of Christian summer camps. Christian camp researcher Jake Sorenson has estimated that by the early 21st century, there were 2,000 such camps in the US serving 1.5 million overnight youth campers each summer and employing 75,000 seasonal staff. Some camps are under denominational supervision, others independent. Some serve families. Some provide support staff and expect churches to supply the chapel speakers and volunteer counselors.
Meredith is a Christian writer but not a journalist or researcher. She’s not trying to paint a comprehensive picture of the experiences of church campers or present a thorough analysis of what camps teach. She is sketching a picture. It’s a picture many may recognize, but there’s no way to know how well it represents reality across those 2,000 camps.
In this sense, Meredith does a disservice to readers and to those whose stories she stewards. She argues that church camps manipulate children into asking Jesus into their hearts and reject those campers and staffers who don’t fit a white evangelical mold. She has nearly 50 interviews to back up her assertions, which might sound like a lot—but it can’t be a representative sample of 1.5 million campers and 75,000 staffers per year.
For readers who don’t recognize their camp summers in Church Camp, then, the book offers little opportunity to interrogate an experience that may well deserve scrutiny. And for readers who either recognize Meredith’s sketch or, lacking any personal church-camp experience, are willing to simply accept it as the norm, there is no prompt to think more deeply about how camps vary or why they might be so eager to invite campers to accept Jesus into their hearts.
In her chapter on the night campers were urged to make a decision for Christ—sometimes known among camp veterans as “Cry Night”—Meredith takes camps to task for playing to campers’ emotions, then counting the number of campers who raised their hands to accept Jesus into their hearts.“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,” she writes, “and nearly every sentiment involved a memory of this particular night at camp.”
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Is it possible that a wider range of interviewees—including current camp staff who design these evenings—and more neutral or open-ended questions could have produced a less uniform response? Could there be some innocent explanation for staffers counting how many kids want to know Jesus? Church Camp doesn’t dwell on that idea for long.
“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,” Meredith muses, “when the experiences of dozens of individuals echo a kindred refrain, you wonder if you’re on to something.”
That’s not to say Meredith has no valid critiques. More than once, I found myself in hearty agreement with her descriptions of some of the problems with camp culture. Given the sheer numbers of campers and staff alike, I have no doubt that sad, difficult, and even evil things happen to them at some church camps.
Thinking back to the early-2000s period on which Church Camp is focused, I have no trouble believing that some camps perpetuated unhelpful purity-culture talking points or did not know what to do with gay campers or staff members. And to this day, there are camps that run kids ragged with nonstop craziness and fun, camps that inappropriately incentivize professions of faith with public praise or gifts, camps that charge parents a fortune yet don’t pay their summer staff.
All of this deserves critique, and camp staffers must understand that what you win people with is what you win people to—that is, if summer camps use delirious exhaustion and emotional messages to win kids to Christ, what will those campers do when they return to ordinary life and all its challenges? If camps never connect kids to local congregations, they’re perpetuating an anemic ecclesiology that benefits the organizations at the expense of the children.
Meredith is right to critique such missteps, excesses, and theological confusion. But camps can do better than her proposed fix of dropping evangelism to teach love without repentance. Church camps can present a bigger vision of the gospel and human flourishing—one that begins with Creation and goes through the Fall, Redemption, and Consummation. Camps can introduce students to the Bible, get them reading it, and help them get plugged into local churches.
We can dial down the artificial adrenaline without losing sight of the real stakes of salvation. We can better equip children for a “long obedience in the same direction” after their week at camp ends. We can talk about how all of life—even our sense of identity—is impacted by the Fall. We can give them a bigger vision of God, Jesus, and themselves.
My friend (and Seneca Hills staff alumna) Marlene taught me to think about camp the way C. S. Lewis described Narnia at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Aslan, the Christ figure, tells Lucy and Edmund that he resides in England too, though there he goes by another name. “This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia,” he explains, “that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”
Church camp is not an end unto itself. It’s not about getting campers to sign on the spiritual dotted line by Friday, but neither is it about welcoming them without asking anything of them.
At camp, we take away the distractions of technology, provide a beautiful setting and supportive friends, and tell the truth about God and what he requires of us. And we pray that by knowing him here for a little, our campers will know him better when they go home.
Megan Fowler is a religion reporter and contributing writer for CT. She spends her summers at Seneca Hills Bible Camp and Retreat Center in Pennsylvania, where her husband serves as executive director.
