'Cry night': Inside the secret tactics used at white evangelical church camps

21 May

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One new book is delving into how church-sponsored summer camps across the United States can end up causing "harm" to kids in the cause of converting them into true believers.

Religion News Service (RNS) recently interviewed author Cara Meredith, who wrote the book "Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night and How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation." Meredith described her Christian upbringing — which included annual week-long stays at Christian summer camps — as both happy and positive but also riddled with trauma when reliving old memories. Meredith went from attending summer camps to working at them seasonally, to being invited to address young campers as a guest speaker.

"I’m writing about white evangelical church camps, and all of them share a focus on conversion. It’s a very different ethos than, for instance, you’d find in a mainline church camp," Meredith told RNS. "Because conversion is the end goal, there are a lot of similarities that happen along the way, oftentimes in a progression of messages that are preached to try to get campers from a point of disbelief to belief, or from a point of being a 'lukewarm Christian' to being on fire for Jesus.

Meredith emphasized that at white evangelical church camps, leaders often practiced a "commonality of exclusion" which meant shutting out and ostracizing "women, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community." And she likewise observed that there was implicit "belonging" for campers who "played by the rules" like "adhering to straightness," acknowledging "norms of whiteness" and "den[ying] their sexuality or their gender."

She also revealed that most white evangelical church camps will have a designated night known as "cry night," in which camp staff create an environment of "extremely heightened emotions" to encourage kids to "get right with God."

"Because donors need to see tangible results of their dollars, camp directors might be standing in the back taking notes of how many kids accepted Jesus into their heart," she said. "It’s typically also presented through the atonement theory of penal substitution. As one interviewee noted, that theory is used ubiquitously because it’s the one that gets results. Oftentimes, the way that message is received by children and youth is as a message of them having killed Jesus, of them having put Jesus on the cross. And from that there are extremely heightened emotions, and they might feel bad, they might want to get right with God. There might be guilt or shame involved."

According to Meredith, the public readings of her book have sometimes turned into events in which the audience "begin[s] processing their own spiritual trauma," adding: "There is so much grief that people are holding in. These spaces were just their everything until they weren’t."

Click here to read Meredith's full interview with RNS.

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