Cool new books: Church Camp by Cara Meredith
Your favorite “girl speaker” reflects on penal substitution, patriarchal God-talk, racial homogeneity, and more…and she’s funny, too
The subtitle of
’s new book Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, & and How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation contains three parts. There are the bad skits. There’s the “cry night.” And there’s the way white evangelicalism betrayed so many of us. (And continues to do so.)
I wouldn’t say I’ve attended a church camp exactly like the ones Cara writes about—the ones millions of mostly-white Christian teenagers attend every year; the ones Cara attended as a teen, staffed as a slightly-older teen, and spoke at for years as a young adult.
But “bad skits” make me think of the Christian fellowship group I was super involved in in college. I loved that group at the time but now have complicated feelings about it—not unlike Cara’s feelings about church camp.
One time, the leaders of my campus fellowship group were presenting a new vision for a new school year. Something about boldness; something about taking risks.
They used a skit to introduce this vision to the rest of us. The skit featured different people doing various bold Christian and/or evangelistic things. One student leader narrated the moral of the story after each part of the skit: Pretty bold. Pretty risky.
I took it upon myself to edit this catchy tagline slightly. Pretty bold, pretty risqué, I repeated to friends in the group, raising my eyebrows suggestively. I thought I was very funny. The people loved it. I have no idea why none of the leaders asked me during my senior year if I wanted to go on staff after graduation.
That’s my story about bad skits. Now, cry night—that makes me think of our annual weekend-long fall retreat with this same fellowship group. Saturday night, in particular.
In the church camps Cara writes about, “cry night” is the evening when the speaker does their best to convict teen campers of their deep, despicable sinfulness. They’re “dirty rotten little sinners,” Cara writes—so very very bad that God had to kill Jesus to make redemption possible for them.
Oof. There’s a lot to unpack, there. I don’t remember the “dirty rotten little sinners” bit coming across quite as strongly in my college fellowship group. I think our staff and other speakers had a few different ways of talking about the cross on Saturday night of our fall retreat.
But I do remember often being deeply moved. This was our “cry night,” if we had one. Tears were shed; prayers were prayed. It was a tender, precious time.
And then the evening session would end. And everyone went back to the cafeteria to play Taboo and Mafia.
My sensitive little soul always felt uneasy with this transition. We’d all just felt something together…right? Something powerful and angsty and weepy. The sudden one-eighty toward laughing and joking and happily accusing one another of nighttime game-world murder felt jarring.
(One might make a connection to my ongoing desire for gloomy Good Friday church services.)
Anyhow. That’s my memory of something not unlike “cry night.” You’ll have to read Church Camp for Cara’s memories of hers, and especially for her critiques of the way white evangelicals tend to talk about the cross. They’re spot-on.
I don’t mean to neglect the third part of the book’s subtitle—how white evangelicalism betrayed a generation—but I have no specific stories about this one right now because it’s literally what I think about all the time. (When I’m not thinking about the Roman Empire, anyway. Just kidding. Sort of. It’s all connected, for sure.)
All in all, I loved how I could connect my own experiences of church and other Christian communities to Cara’s book, even though I wasn’t exactly a camper myself. Camp serves as a lens through which Cara examines white-dominated evangelicalism more broadly.
I think this is a book well worth reading if you’re processing any sort of experience you’ve had of evangelicalism, camp or no. And it’s a fascinating look into a world that is a part of gazillions of people’s memories of their teenage years, even if it isn’t a part of yours.
I was delighted to be able to hear from Cara directly on a few questions that the book brought to mind for me, and I’m psyched to get to share our little Q&A with you. Here it is!
Liz: When you picture someone reading Church Camp, who are you thinking of—and what do you hope they’ll get out of it?
Cara: First of all, I hope they laugh. Camp is, well, campy. Camp is funny. Camp is silly and fun and a place, ideally, where the facades we humans often times put on ourselves are instead stripped away. So, in between all those moments of seriousness and betrayal camp also caused, I also hope that readers are able to pull out the funny bits.
Second, I hope that readers are able to sense the tension of the both/and, which is to say of paradox.
As I write in the book, “Church camp has housed my greatest joy and my 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.”
This paradoxical tension runs throughout the book, so I hope readers are also able to catch this tension and perhaps see how it might apply to their lives.
Third, I hope that readers will think of new ways forward: how can the Church be a place of belonging and inclusion, instead of a place that creates caveats around belonging through exclusionary practices?
How might we preach a better theology, a theology that does not require people feel like shit about themselves in order to understand how much God loves them?
The list goes on, but I hope the book spurs a little bit of reimagining.
“Church camp has housed my greatest joy and my 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.” -Cara Meredith
Liz: What do you mean by “church camp”? What different kinds of experiences fall into that category for you?
Cara: I think it’s important for readers to note and understand that when I’m talking about church camps, I’m talking about a particular subset of church camps found under the umbrella of white evangelicalism.
Not every church camp falls into this category, but as I define early on in the book, my experience in a wide variety of denominational, nondenominational, and Young Life camps all fell into this category.
When we’re able to think about it this way, then we’re able to read the book with a lens of understanding that has the possibility of opening our eyes to understanding the many facets of white evangelicalism as a whole.
The camps where I was a camper, a volunteer, a summer staff member, and eventually a camp speaker for over twenty-five years of my life, all find a place in this ecosystem. I think this is important to note because if a reader walks away thinking that I believe all camps or even church camps are like this, then they’re also going to walk away thinking I’ve made wild generalizations and robust claims that are simply untrue.
In that way, the book starts by defining white evangelicalism – because if we can understand where we start, then we can understand where we’re going in the end.
Liz: “Betrayed a generation” is some strong language—did you wrestle with that and consider other options, or was it clear that this was what needed to be said? How do you feel about it now? Have you gotten pushback?
Cara: When my agent and I first started shopping this book around, we knew we wanted to stick with the title Church Camp and we knew we wanted to have some element of white evangelical betrayal in the subtitle. And when it comes to this particular evangelical betrayal, I am not the first author to do this (in the subtitle) nor will I be the last.
But to me, as I stepped away from this environment and embarked on a journey of spiritual evolution, betrayal was obvious. When women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community are excluded in the name of Jesus, a betrayal exists; when bad theology is employed, often in an effort to simply garner conversion numbers, a betrayal exists.
Betrayal, after all, is a matter of the heart, so yes, I do believe “betrayal” is an accurate word to use in this instance – and for the tens of thousands of former Christians who are walking away from the faiths of their childhood on a daily basis now, I dare say it’s happened because that which made sense for a long time no longer makes sense anymore.
Sometimes a betrayal has happened because the people, the institution, the beliefs, and the system at large no longer resonates or speaks to their hearts like it once did.
Oh, there’s absolutely been pushback against the book (and the subtitle specifically). Even though we added in Bad Skits and Cry Night to perhaps add a little bit of levity and balance it out, the reality is that church camp is often the sacred cow of Christianity.
Folks don’t want their dear traditions and memories challenged, not of those people or that place. But what about those who were harmed? What about those for whom camp wasn’t a safe place but wasn’t instead terribly harmful?
In this way, I criticize that place called camp specifically because I love that place called camp. And not everyone’s going to agree with this choice.
Folks don’t want their dear traditions and memories challenged, not of those people or that place. But what about those who were harmed? -Cara Meredith
(Back to Liz writing.) As you can probably tell, Church Camp has funny bits and spicy bits, and Cara has a voice Christians and former Christians need to hear. And it releases next week—April 29th, to be exact!
Consider giving it a read. Maybe even getting together with a group of friends from church camp (do y’all still keep in touch?), or from your college fellowship group if you were involved in one, or from your current church if you have one, or anyone else who might enjoy reminiscing on the good things and critiquing the messed up things about their time in evangelicalism.
With you in unpacking all these things as we move forward together.