The Potent Ideological Stew of Evangelical Church Camp

Culture Study Podcast

Anne Helen Petersen

Fashion & Beauty, Society & Culture, Arts

4.6 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 13 August 2025

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I have a whole bunch of prompts for you as we plan some upcoming recordings. We need your
0:03.8	questions about baseball culture. This is for a special episode pegged to the playoffs. Melody is
0:09.8	going to be co-host. And then we have another amazing co-host birding culture, running a small
0:15.5	creative business in like a sustainable way. And then hanging out, like different modalities of hanging out why we like
0:23.0	limit our understanding of what hanging out looks like questions in that general vicinity we're
0:28.6	also working on an episode with Jen Hatmaker about starting over in midlife you can take this
0:33.3	any direction you want and we're also super excited to be talking with Lee Bardugo about whatever you
0:38.6	want, fandom, genre, YA, fantasy, whatever. You can send in your questions for those and for asking
0:45.8	anythings. We always need more at tiny URL.com slash culture study pod. Thanks and enjoy today's show.
0:56.8	Before we got on to tape, Melody texted me and she said, should I read from my church
1:04.3	camp journal? And my response, like I texted back as quickly as I've ever texted back.
1:09.9	And I was like obviously so melody
1:12.5	what is your selection for us today okay so this is I believe the year 2002 would have been between
1:21.2	seventh and eighth grade oh perfect if I remember right so perfect 23rd, 1145 a.m.
1:29.2	Fell off my bunk last night.
1:31.3	I was okay.
1:32.7	We are having two and a half hours of silence and solitude.
1:35.9	It's incredible.
1:37.3	I wrote a two-page letter to God, and I plan to write more.
1:41.4	Kelly got hit in the head with a huge rock.
1:43.5	It bled horribly. I hope she's okay. God really spoke to me more. Kelly got hit in the head with a huge rock. It bled horribly. I hope she's okay.
1:46.6	God really spoke to me today. I've set some goals that will hopefully please him.
	...

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