The Ecstasy and Exclusion of Camp Experience
A Feature Review of
Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, & How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation
Cara Meredith
Hardcover: Broadleaf, 2025
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Reviewed by Ann Byle
Cara Meredith knows her church camp. She attended Christian camps as all good church kids did, then became summer staff, then joined the camp world as a full-timer and later as a camp speaker. As she says in the prologue to her new book Church Camp, “…Church camp became my destiny, the place I was meant to go and the person I was meant to be” (xvii).
Until it wasn’t. “Within my body, 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—for the things we thought stood for Jesus—as we sheltered under the umbrella of white evangelicalism,” she says (xviii).
Meredith explores that disjunction between joy and grief, faith and damage. She digs deep into the tension of creating spaces that deepen the faith of those who fit into the camp mold and hurting those who don’t—either because they don’t buy into the rah-rah of camp faith or because they aren’t the right color, socioeconomic strata, culture, or church background.
Church camp as a whole is a relatively unexplored layer of white, evangelical culture. It was a piece of our childhoods (and sometimes adulthoods) that had the capacity to welcome us in with cheery counselors, bunk beds, troughs of ice cream, bug bites, goofball games, and a series of talks/messages/sermons designed to take us straight to Cry Night, when we realized the horrible depths of our sin.
After sitting in that sin for a day, finally came the night when campers would cheer and raise all manner of ruckus because Jesus isn’t dead! He’s alive, he’s risen, and he’s ready to save us from our sins and an afterlife in hell. Yippee! You’re in the club! At the very least, we could rededicate our lives to Jesus because we got saved at age 6 after a similar message at Vacation Bible School.
And, at last, the final exhortation to take God with you into the real world as you leave the protected spaces of camp. To make God part of your heart, soul, and life. Herein, according to Meredith, is one of the problems of camp she recognized as a camp speaker: “I couldn’t erase the reality of what I was really inviting them into, which is to say, into a place of whiteness that begged them to pull up a chair and stay” (170).
Church Camp considers both sides of issues: that camp can be a great experience and a great place of spiritual and personal growth, but that it can also be a place of exclusion. That it can be a place of grace, but also a place where God is small and admittance to his world is limited. That camp can be glorious, if you can afford it.
Meredith offers a wide-ranging look at many aspects of the Christian camp subculture, as well as provides an excellent place to start a conversation about what camp can and can’t do for all kinds of people. She builds the book around the seven talks she gave each night as a camp speaker, readily admitting that “camp shaped me into the human I am today, even if I sometimes wish I could hit the rewind button a couple thousand times” (xix).
She loved camp and loves it still, but Meredith doesn’t hesitate to expose the tough questions and tough history of an evangelical subculture that did some damage over the years to those who attended and those who worked there. This is a book for all who are ready to think hard about their experiences and the legacy of this predominantly white, evangelical experience.
“As it goes, I critique that place called camp because I love that place called camp,” she says (xix). You’ll be glad she did and that you can join her for a visit to camp.
Ann Byle
Ann Byle lives in West Michigan with her science teacher husband, Ray. Their young adult children are in and out regularly. Ann writes for Christianity Today and Publishers Weekly, among other publications, and is author of Chicken Scratch: Lessons on Living Creatively from a Flock of Hens.
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