I suppose it could be said that I'm not exactly the target reader for Cara Meredith's "Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, and How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation."

After all, I wasn't exactly raised evangelical. I was raised Jehovah's Witness, and we sure didn't have church camps.

I didn't really reach the evangelical world until my late teens and early 20s. It was long after the JW's had tossed me aside, shunned because of sexual abuse I was told was my fault.

So, I have no experience with camp other than a few years spent attending Indiana's Camp Riley, a camp dedicated to children with disabilities.

While I'm not quite the target audience for "Church Camp," I resonated with this biting and yet surprisingly tender exploration of a world that provided a home away from home for many evangelicals - though, it must be said, mostly white evangelicals in their teens and young adulthood who would start off as campers and eventually move into various roles of responsibility.

Yet, as Meredith quickly points out it's also often the place where those of us who do identify as Christian, myself included, inherited a toxic image of God and of each other. A longtime camp speaker, Meredith takes us through it all from purity-driven admonitions to the infamous and emotionally manipulative "cry nights" to commodified faith and "heat of the moment" faith commitments born as much out of peer pressure as they were any genuine expression of faith.

Truthfully, I can't help but return to that word "tenderness" word again and not just because it's my favorite world in the human language. I was sort of enveloped by the tenderness of Meredith's writing, somehow managing to acknowledge toxic faith without making faith itself toxic.

It's a gift and I really appreciated it.

Throughout "Church Camp," Meredith immerses us in the history of the camping movement, revivalism, and white evangelicalism. She lays bare truths about, in particular, one-week camps with each day's theme and how they built upon one another. There's a sense of melancholy as she short of confesses her own involvement in this toxicity and those moments when she began to realize that things were changing inside her. Meredith shares her own experiences, that's for sure, and yet she invites others to share theirs as it becomes clear this wasn't just a one-off experience but an actual movement that occurred over and over and over again.

Truthfully, I've always wanted to go to "church camp," though I'm now in my 50s and church camp these days, having become a fairly new Presbyterian (PCUSA), would involve something resembling adult summer camp.

I practically wept...okay, I did weep as Meredith shared the ways in which church camps have excluded, whether by race or ability or any number of other measures. Having visited a few church camps, I must admit that I'm always struck by how inaccessible they really are and how difficult it would be for me to function even as a relatively independent disabled adult.

I don't know. What can I say? I can say I expected something a little different from "Church Camp," perhaps something a little more bitter and yet something pretty miraculous happens along the way as Meredith paints us all toward a better way, a healthier faith life, and even a different vision for church camp.

In the end, I'm not really sure I'd ever want to experience the kind of toxic experiences Cara Meredith writes of in "Church Camp," however, the church camp she dreams of sounds pretty amazing.

Thanks to NetGalley and Broadleaf for the eARC!
I really enjoyed this book. I think Meredith has a way with words and exploring ideas that I've had swirling around in my brain but been unable to pin down for myself.
While I don't have a TON of camp experience, I was a camp counselor for a number of my high school years, and I went to a couple of YoungLife camps when I was helping out with a youth ministry.
This introduction felt like coming home - I could tell she knew what she was talking about - that she at one point held camp as a sacred place, but that she understood that there are things we didn't know then but that we know NOW that change the way we look at things.
There were a couple of places where I wish she had gone into more detail about what was bothering her or what changed her mind, but I think she asked a lot of really good questions.
Would highly recommend for any deconstructing (or deconstructed) Christians, or any Christians who wonder if the God we learn about at camp is really a good being, or if, perhaps, there might be a better way.
Maybe you can tell I'm still trying to digest this book, but I really, really got a lot out of it.

This is not the typical book I would choose to read. But as a former church camp kid, I was intrigued. The author took me right back to the days of shaving cream fights and bunk beds in cabins. As someone who has left the church i appreciated the reflection of the author. Looking back on the summers now I do see them in a different light and found this book to be very in line with how I feel.

Oof what a book. There were a ton of lines in this book, especially early on, that I noted to journal through. Many that put many of my own discomfort with evangelical theology and its type of evangelism into words. It's important to note that while this is part-memoir, the author's deconstruction did not lead to a loss in faith. She is still a Christian, just a different sort than she was when she was working at the church camps.

This was a thoughtful and incisive look at white evangelical church camp that I hope spurs on more conversations. As Meredith mentioned, it was harder to get interviews from BIPOC former campers for whom camp was a traumatic week rather than the "best week of their life."

This book is organized like a typical week at church camp:
1. Welcome to Camp!
2. God the Mostly Father
3. Superhero Jesus
4. Dirty Rotten Little Sinners
5. Cry Night
6. Side Note, Rose Again
7. Now Go and Live the (White) Way of Jesus

For me, most of my own highlights were in the first half of the book. The second half was rough, and I found myself rushing through just because I was feeling triggered by my own evangelical church trauma. If you grew up in white evangelical culture but was in any way marginalized, I think you might also really enjoy the labeling in the first half and then need a bit of time to rest from Day 4 and onward when Meredith discusses the manipulative parts of evangelical Gospel messages. It is affirming to hear someone else say that yeah, they really are just trying to hit a KPI for salvations, but it still sucks. Also very helpful to see someone point out that white evangelicalism is trying to convert you to white, cishet, able-bodied Christianity and it excludes those of us who are not.

The Navigators, the evangelical group I was in, is mentioned on page 13, but not much beyond that, I'm guessing because it's primarily a college parachurch organization. Young Life and FCA were mentioned much more.

Meredith has done her reading and cites some excellent writers and theologians, in addition to the former campers and camp staff. As a person of color, I especially liked her quote from pastor Jared Stacy who pointed out in a 2021 blog that evangelicals focusing on "just preach the gospel" was a way to reject social justice because hey, if only Jesus matters, you don't need to worry about earthly things like power and change. I love a book that has a good bibliography, and this one has about 17 pages of endnotes.

For me, this book was helpful for labeling. I think this is a good resource for those deconstructing their evangelical childhoods and for those who want to understand. I'm not sure you'll necessarily feel inspired, but at least you won't feel crazy or alone.

Thanks to Netgalley and Broadleaf for this ARC.

I was really excited to read this book. I grew up in white evangelicalism, albeit in the UK rather than the US. White evangelical culture has its differences here, but many aspects have been somewhat exported from the US to the UK, and ‘church camp’ culture is definitely one of those aspects.

Reading this book as someone who experienced a lot of the culture described here was deeply validating. I’ve been in a ‘deconstructing’ period with my faith for over a decade now, and I’ve read many works and memoirs on experiences with white evangelicalism in that time. I will say that this is probably one of the books I’ve read that has most validated the extremely weird and complicated feelings that come with growing up in a faith and then later coming to realise the harm that the toxic theology you’ve been exposed to and perpetuated has caused to yourself and other people. It’s extremely hard to explain or convey how you can be almost nostalgic for places that were actively harmful for you, because they were also somehow places where at one point you felt deep joy and belonging. I felt this book and the author really well explained and validated that feeling, and it was an emotional read.

I also want to say this book is extremely well referenced and researched, and I found some great new resources and reading material in the footnotes. If you’re expecting purely a ‘memoir’ this is not what this is book is, but the deeply researched and well thought out explorations of why white evangelical church camp culture is the way it is (and also what we could do instead!) are very important.

I do think this book is a little ‘niche’, in the sense that I think someone who hasn’t experienced white evangelicalism would be quite lost reading this. Having said that- for those of us who did experience and grow up in that culture, especially those of us who have trauma associated with it, this will be an important, emotional and validating read.

Thank you very much to Broadleaf Books and NetGalley for the ARC!