This book was not what I expected, but I still really enjoyed it! I was expecting more memoir-style stories, but this book had a ton of research and information from multiple sources. It was a dense read, with lots of info to think about! As a former “church camp kid”, this challenged me, in a good way!

2 stars for a general audience

4.5 stars for those involved with church camps and youth pastoring

Church camp. A beloved rite of passage for some. An unimaginable nightmare for others. Mark our author down on the “loved it” side, and so much she seems to have made it into a full time (maybe, I can’t tell) adult job, working as a counselor, head of camp and, later, as a camp speaker where she “spoke the message” to groups of campers each night.

Now, understand that throughout this book we are speaking of WHITE, EVANGELICAL church camps. I was raised a Southern Baptist girl in the South and attended church camps, retreats, etc., so I’ve been there. It’s the hard sell, but by the time I was going to sleep away camp everybody had already been saved anyway, so what was the big deal, I figured. I didn’t know the people got extra credit if you went forward and rededicated your life. If I had, I would have tried to parlay that into something for myself, then would have marched right on up. Working the angles. That was youthful me. A budding lawyer already.

So, as per my ratings for this book this gets down in the weeds a bit, breaking down the specific messages given to the kids each night, and while I recognized them, and appreciated what the author had to say about, “maybe we’re manipulating the kids, maybe we should be more friendly to people of color and LGBTQ kids, etc.” I wasn’t really her target audience. I’m no longer an evangelical Christian, I have no kids, and this is all pretty inside baseball. However, what a wonderful resource it SHOULD be for those in the community. I sincerely hope they use it.

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.