What Church Camp Taught Me About Relationships and Sexuality
And a review of Cara Meredith's new book Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, and How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation.
My sexual debut was with a girl I met at church camp. I was 18. (We had sex a few months after church camp.)
The first girl that I explicitly talked about marriage with? Also a church camp fling.
I was 17.
I told my colleague Jordon, also a survivor of Purity Culture (and in their case, conversion therapy) that I was writing this article today, in conjunction with a review of
’s new book Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, and How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation.Their response responded, “You mean “Baptist Breeding Grounds?”
For some context. Over the last two weeks, we’ve been writing about sexual debuts in conjunction with our latest podcast episode, titled, “What Do I Need to Consider When I Have Sex for the First Time?” Our guest is Erica Smith, sex educator and founder of Purity Culture Dropout.
And while we’ve been talking about a diversity of potential first-time sexual experiences, from group sex to anal sex, for folks who grew up in Evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal spaces, church camp was a common setting for the exploration of adolescent sexuality.
I highly encourage you to check out the new book Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, and How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation by
.
I love the way that Cara structures Church Camp, inviting readers on a seven-day programming of a typical church camp.
The depiction of camp as a clear separation between “the world” (read: the public school that you attended and the secular sources of media you consumed) and “the church”.
The jealous, terrifying deity, God, who wants you to give him your everything, the father who is never satisfied, who demands more.
The loving Jesus who sacrificed himself for you. (Cara does a fantastic job exploring how substitutionary atonement, that most dastardly of theological principles, gets experientially explained to teenagers.)
Oh yah, the reason Jesus had to sacrifice himself is because you suck. We all suck. And we’re all required to share how much we suck through a variety of metaphors (for Cara, it was throwing pine cones into a fire), forced disclosures, and the emotional manipulation heaviness of hyper-spiritualization, all while an acoustic guitar played a series of arpeggios in minor keys.
Cara shares a uniquely devastating experience of 10-year-old her:
“Can you hear me? Cara, are you okay? Do you need to get right with God?”
I cocked my head to the side, puzzled. Did she [a camp counselor] think I was crying?
Maybe that’s when it hit me: When she saw me lean over and my head refused to angle itself from my legs, she thought I was having a “moment with God”. (My quotes, not Cara’s.) When she saw my body shiver and shake from the cold, she believed the bristling heave of my shaking flesh the remorseful upheaval of a sinner’s cry” (p. 124).”
The final night of church camp started with me taking off my left shoe and leaving on the pitcher’s mound of the softball field.”
The benediction of exhausted teens whose parents have paid gobs of money to the church camp to share the good news of Purity Culture Jesus to their friends in their communities.
Church camp is ultimately an indoctrination process for the Evangelical Church and Republican Party. A Lord’s Resistance Army, with the rifles that armed the children and young adult warriors abducted by Joseph Kony replaced by the weapons of apologetics, a fear-mongering emotional manipulation (often sung through CCM earworms), and the financial backing of powerful religious institutions.
And the root of the mission of church camps? Abstinence-only sex education.
Cara writes:
“At camp, the movement [of Purity Culture] explicitly played out around gendered sexual expectations, for both campers and staff.
Here, a concept of purity reigned.
Sexlessness for everyone, but especially for girls, became the expected and accepted norm.
To no one’s surprise, “girl campers” were generally considered the more sexless of the genders—sexual desire supposedly the least of a girl’s worries. Young men were taught their minds were evil, whereas young women came to believe their bodies were evil—which is to say, “men’s thoughts and actions are said to be either pure or impure, while women themselves are said to be either pure or impure” (p. 45).
Each church camp had different ways of presenting the values of abstinence-only sex education.
The one that I attended involved a pile of shoes on a pitcher’s mound.
No, really. The final night of church camp started with me separated from my left tennis shoe.
It was accompanied by a hundred other left shoes on the pitcher’s mound of the softball field. Some were larger tennis shoes, like my size 11 feet, while some couldn’t have been bigger than a 5Y.
The girls of the church camp circled around the pitchers mound, waiting for the camp counselor to blow their whistle, which would send them into a dead sprint toward the pile of shoes on the pitcher’s mound. Their objective was to select a left shoe, and return it to the male owner of the right shoe.
The girl who returned my left shoe was my date for the night.
You’d have to ask who also attended my church camp, such as
, what the experience was like for girls; she’s actually writing a fictional telling of church camp, and I’m eager to read how she depicts this tradition.It’s also unclear how the closeted queer students at the church camp navigated this; sadly, you KNOW they weren’t out if they were attending this church camp. Also, west Texas in the very early aughts.
For me, standing somewhere on the first-base line, the anticipation was intense.
After all, I learned that dating was intense. Dating is the prelude to marriage, the Evangelical movement’s signifier of adulthood, maturity, and righteousness.
Marriage had cosmic implications. While my faith tradition didn’t overtly teach the umbrella of authority, where men are responsible for getting their wives and children to heaven, I learned that my marriage was the mechanism by which I participated in “going forth and making disciples of all nations”. My success in “discipling”, and behaving well along the way, equivocated to my ticket to eternal life. I trusted that I was going to do my part to change the world; a woman who lacked the tenacity, dedication, and administrative skills (there’s the gender role piece) threatened my spot in heaven.
Dating was essentially “practice marriage”. I saw this played out with two of my best friends in high school, who constantly received questions as 16 and 17 year olds from people in my church and conjoining religious spaces about where they were going to college, with the implication that once they moved out of our Dallas suburb, they would get married.
In fact, many of my dating experiences in high school were with girls that I was only mildly interested in. One of my biggest regrets is talking myself out of dating someone in high school who I deeply cared about (and deeply cared about me), partly because of self-confidence issues (she was way cooler than me) and partly because interested I didn’t want the pressure that my religious community tacked onto long-term teenage relationships.
Even fake dating setups like this were intense, never mind the absurdity of what happened when I was 17 and a small 12-year-old girl returned my shoe, and the inappropriateness of being forced to walk arm-in-arm into the mess hall.
That story ended with a girl—let’s call her Elizabeth—who was actually my age working a trade with the 12-year old to be my date for the evening. She lived an hour and a half away from me, and we attempted to work a long-distance relationship through the powers of AOL Instant Messenger. Two months into that relationship, we were talking about attending the same college together, and the theme of marriage was thrown around.
Again, we were 17-year-olds, about to start our senior years.
Fortunately, we both had the sense to acknowledge that we didn’t want to sacrifice the relationships and opportunities in our own towns, and decided to break up after that conversation.
I think fondly of the maturity that Elizabeth and I had, and also a ton of rage toward the institutions that likely would have celebrated had we decided to date from afar, attend Abilene Christian together, and get married at the age of 19.
Part of the work that Julia and I do through Relationship 101 and our coaching business, Let’s Heal Together, is evaluate the messages that we’ve learned about relationships, gender, and sexuality, separate them from the systems that endorsed the messages, and determine what arrangements, presentations, and agreements work best for your particular relationship.
For what it’s worth, this article was difficult to write because there were three or four drafts in which I attempted to highlight the following:
The camp counselor who yelled at me as I laid on the grass with the girl I was dating curled up against me. Let me correct that. The camp counselor yelled at the girl as we were curled up on the grass.
The gender segregation in sex education between girls and boys, and the ensuing differences in sex education. Tiffany and others have shared that the values of abstinence-only sexuality and ensuing metaphors that compared sexually active girls to chewed up pieces of gum were pronounced in girls-only sex and relationship education spaces.
The relationship education that boys receive are centered around a combination of boys being sexual deviants and girls being passive, fragile, emotional beings. Fortunately, I don’t recall being directly told that my sexuality was a threat, although I passively learned that through my youth group leaders enabling terrible, homophobic, bullying behavior from the other boys in my youth group. My religious relationship education was heavy on reflecting that girls are passive, fragile, emotional beings, a lie that severely informed and influenced my first marriage.
Julia and I offer free 30 minute consultations with couples who are interested in pursuing relationship and sex therapy/coaching and unlearning these limiting, terrible messages about relationships and sexuality that we learned in church camp and other youth spaces. (And 60 minute consultations for paying members of Relationship 101!)
We specialize in working with who participated in an Evangelical, Mormon, or Pentecostal community, and are looking to discover or rediscover the role that sexuality might play in your life and relationship.
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia
Oof. Jeremiah. First, thank you for turning me on to a book that is SO niche and I’m its intended audience. Second, yes, the shoe game. I called it sneaker Sadie Hawkins in my book. Maybe that’s what it was really called… I don’t remember. I do remember that it was just as traumatizing as you described.