I Went To Bible Camp!

future atheist slept here!

My family is Catholic. My dad, very much so. My mom once wrote a college paper on how Eve reaching for the apple/knowledge/empowerment was a profoundly feminist act, so, probably less so. We were at St Mary's Church every Sunday and her Catholic gradeschool every weekday. But for one week out of the summer, I ended up at fundamentalist Protestant Bible camp.

And I luuuuuuuuuurved it.

Camp HaLuWaSa was built into a former cranberry bog in South Jersey.  The name stands for "Halleluiah What a Savior!"  My mother and her sister went there when they were young, which is I guess how we found out about it.  They went to Catholic school growing up, which was odd enough because my grandparents' philosophy was pretty much, "maybe God's up there, but we just don't really wanna hang out with him."  But then Bible camp?  Were there no other camps in South Jersey (it's like, ALL farm)?  But then again, in the early 60's even Haluwasa was new, so maybe not.

According to the website, the mission is:

to evangelize and disciple believers to maturity through the instruction and demonstration of Biblical principles and values

  And also to reenact the crucifixion. Or maybe that team just lost at flag football? [Slides! Kayaks! Wilderness! Crucifixions!]

The camp is nondenominational, and while we were always welcomed with open arms, it definitely does have an evangelical bent.  It was this that worried my mother, as every year before I'd go I would be sat down and reminded to be wary of people trying to "save" me.  Catholics believe the soul is saved at baptism, and then you reinforce that with being good all the time, and erase any sins in confession.  Most protestants will tell you that throwing water at a baby doesn't do squat (a position I have come to embrace though not for the same reasons), and you have to ask for Jesus to come into your heart, and really, really, super mean it.  So in this scenario Jesus is like a vampire vis-a-vis your house, which makes sense considering the resurrection/undead squickyness.  But the tradeoff is you don't have to reallllllllly worry about the good works thing, so you're spared the humiliating charade of confession.

Anyway my mother was worried that I'd get all wrapped up in the Jesusness of it all, and go and get myself saved (perhaps she sensed my future all-consuming lust for Vampire Eric?).  Somehow, being "saved" the evangelical way would have completely negated my Catholicism. I guess when you believe that pouring water on an infant makes them believe one thing over another, that seems like a pretty logical fear. She also feared that if there was a particularly fundamentalist counselor who could make Biblical absolutism seem like more fun, I'd come home with nine years of Catholic school indoctrination completely undone.

Thus, I was sent off to Jesus camp for one week every summer, and told to just keep it to myself that I was Catholic, listen to Bible study but only halfway, and if anybody tried to make me ask Jesus to come into my heart, to stall and mumble something about being on Team Jacob and then RUN. And also to have fun in arts-and-crafts and not spend all my money on chipwiches the first night.

By the early 90's this could not have been the only sleep-away camp in existence for a thousand miles.  So...What in the hell (um, oopsie!)...WTF?

Whatever the reason for sending me off to Bible camp, I can honestly say, all these atheist years later, It.Was.The.Greatest.EVER.  We lived in the development at that time, and while we visited my grandparents on what would become the family farm later, I was pretty much an inside kid, save for time invested in trying to swing all the way around the backyard swing set. For an entire week in the summer, I got to try on the life of an Outdoor Kid. And no one knew me but the friend or two I brought along, who were perpetrating their own similar fraud anyway.

I slept in a teepee that let in the rain (and it rained alot!)!  I did the zipline and the rappelling wall! I hiked in the woods and slept under the STARS! I went canoeing on the Batsto river! And there was a train! I learned how to sleep through constant bullfrog song, which probably helped me a lot in Temple's dorms. I played Freedom USA and American Eagle 123, which aren't as xenophobic as they sound and involve diving into the woods and being tackled.  And when you're 13, being thrown to the ground by 13-year-old boys in whatever context, even because they're trying to tear a nerf ball out of your hands, is exhilarating. My first year, my cabin got Super Cabin ribbons to take home, because we had the most points in a system that works exactly like the House Cups in Harry Potter.

Because I was a weird little kid with emotional problems, I cried from homesickness the first day or two.  But by the time the week was over, when my parents would show up and my mother would pronounce me Dirty, I was weeping to leave.  In fact, every year I cried myself to sleep for several nights after camp from missing it.  I wrote letters to my counselors for the whole summer: Aunts Beth, Joy, Allison, and Jill (they were called aunt or uncle to circumvent the ill-mannered problem of calling an adult by their first name).

I don't remember much of our evening services, but I remember walking back to the cabin, exhausted and thrilled at the thought of bed, and being absolutely in awe of the sunset on the lake.

And I know that after spending five days without air conditioning, one comes to worship the coolness of the morning air at dawn.

And it was absolutely not-for-a-second like that horrible place in Jesus Camp.

I don't remember much of the Jesus stuff, except for a few of the songs, and that I was sad to learn that Green Day's "All By Myself" was about masturbation.  I didn't exactly know what masturbation was then, but I knew I should feel bad for liking a song about it. Maybe it was because in the early Clinton years of prosperity before the rise of the Religious Right there were far fewer bogeymen: no one had decided that The Gays were out to melt children's brains and no one had ever heard of Sharia Law. What I remember was that Jesus loved us and we were great the way we were and we should be nice to everybody else because the same was true for them.

And maybe that was the point? I don't remember any teasing, bullying, hazing, mean girls, cliques, fights, or general tween-anger shenanigans.  The belief that we were all good, were capable of doing good, and were loved equally by something whose scale was larger than humanity's struggle created an environment free of cynicism, irony, and world-weary detachment.  It's the one good thing, if nothing else, about religion. And for four summers I got it in an IV drip of that evangelomorphine, 24/7.  At the exact moment in my life when I needed it the most.

Which is probably the reason that, even after realizing that I don't believe in any kind of God stuff and turning away from it completely, I still consider my time at Bible camp as some of the greatest weeks of that part of my life.

Although, PS, mom?  I got saved with Aunt Jill during my Wilderness Outpost year, at night after service in the field.  Clearly it didn't take, though, so no worries.