The Potent Ideological Stew of Evangelical Church Camp

I first read about Cara Meredith’s book on evangelical church camp over at Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s newsletter, and as soon as I saw “cry night” in the subtitle, I knew any conversation with her was gonna be a real one. Put differently, I knew she was ready to talk about what drew people to these camps — but also how they worked to deftly manipulate the young people who attended them. I went to church camp for a decade. I was a counselor for several years. I cried on cry night; I watched bad skits; I highlighted the crap out of my Youth Bible — and I adored it. But I also internalized a lot of contradictory and harmful messages, and felt weird about some of the ways we were counseling young kids.

Cara and I process all of that in this episode — and also answer a bunch of your complicated questions. And as always with these episodes, we’re working hard to make the episode accessible to people outside of the culture (or who find it weird, which, real talk, it is) while also going deep into the weeds. I’m so eager for your thoughts.

Thanks to the sponsors of today’s episode!

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Show Notes:

• Follow Cara Meredith on Instagram here and buy Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Nights, and How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation here

• What could be more millennial church camp than Michael W. Smith singing “Our God is an Awesome God”

• The type of stuff we always played on the boom box at breakfast at camp:

• And if you liked this episode I strongly recommend our previous episode on Contemporary Christian Rock

We’re currently looking for your questions for future episodes about:

• Questions about genre & publishing for Leigh Bardugo, author of Ninth House and so many other Culture Study favs

• Birding Culture!

• Running a Small Business — and How to Make It Sustainable & Survivable (with Jen Hewett!)

• Hoarding Culture / How to Navigate Hoarders in Your Life

• Different Modalities of Hanging Out (aka, best ways to hang out with different people) with Mary HK Choi

• Starting over in mid-life with Jen Hatmaker

• Food Trends (like, what are you seeing on the menu in all the restaurants? Why are people pushing this particular ingredient or prep in their recipes???)

• Baseball Culture (with Ali Liebegott and Melody as additional co-host!!!)

• Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment. You can ask about anything, it’s literally the name of the segment!

• As always, you can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here

For this week’s discussion: If you didn’t go to church camp….what felt wild about this discussion? If you did, what was hard or validating?

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