Church Camp Is Out!

Well, it’s been a hot minute, but I have a rather good excuse: my second book is now out and available for purchase!

Church Camp: Bad Skits, Cry Night, and How White Evangelicalism Betrayed a Generation is a love letter to one of the most formative, life-giving spaces for me. But, as you may have guessed from the subtitle, there’s also a fair amount of critique found within this love letter.

Organized by the seven main talks I gave as a camp speaker for nearly two decades of my life, the book is equal parts cultural commentary, theology, and spiritual memoir. (Want to read more about the progression? Read this article I penned for Baptist News Global). As Kelsey McGinnis recently said on a collaborative Substack post that centered on worship in the church camp environment, “the book is critical and hopeful, incisive and generous.”

I found myself particularly grateful for Kelsey’s feedback precisely because, as a regular writer for Christianity Today, (which is often referred to as the flagship magazine of evangelicalism), she still finds a home within this environment.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I imagine the book is most for people who’ve been impacted by white evangelical culture – but this includes those who still find a home within the culture.

Sure, Church Camp is for those of us who went to camp, but it’s also for those who swallowed lies about purity culture and about a version of God we believed wholly male (and wholly White). It’s for those who thought we killed Jesus, because twisted and warped versions of the Gospel manipulated us into carrying such a weight on our shoulders.

And it’s for those of us who were left feeling like shamed, like we were dirty rotten little sinners, and all of this merely for the sake of understanding God’s love.

But also? It’s for readers who just want to know more and understand more about this weird, wacky, sometimes hidden part of evangelical culture (that also speaks volumes to what’s happening in our country today). It’s for readers who yearn for belonging, who deep down in their hearts put their trust in a God who is wildly for them and not against them.

It’s for readers who want to get a little theologically nerdy and it’s for those who also want to chuckle a time or two.

Given all those caveats, I hope it’s the same for you, dear reader, although of that I cannot be sure.

I will say that those who seem to harbor feelings of ill will toward the book generally seem to think that my analysis of camps is far from the truths for all camps. And sure, that makes sense to an extent, but then I think about the nearly fifty folks I interviewed for the book, whose stories and thoughts and insights live between the lines of every sentence I penned. Because the aforementioned naysayers hold the church camps of their youths as sacred cows that cannot, will not, should not ever be muddied, they cannot therefore find themselves in the pages of the book.

But if you do pick up a copy of Church Camp, I hope you find a home in the pages of this book. I hope you experience belonging. I hope you walk away with a radical understanding of God’s love for humanity.

Want to be supportive? Here are some ideas:

Buy the book! I encourage you to pick up a copy from your favorite independent bookstore. Want a signed copy? Order from A Great Good Place for Books here in Oakland and they’ll pop it in the mail to you.
Ask for the book at your local library!
If you’re in California, join me at an event in the Santa Cruz Mountains this evening, in Oakland on Sunday morning, or in Auburn on Sunday evening. For a full list of events, head to my website for details.
Share about Church Camp on social media.
Rate and review Church Camp on Amazon, Goodreads, or StoryGraph (because hey, lucky for you, I’ll never actually read those reviews).
Read and share more about it from one the following Substack accounts: Kristin DuMez, Micha Boyett, Amy Julia Becker, John Hawthorne, Liz Charlotte Grant, Courtney Ellis, Erin S. Lane, and Liz Cooledge Jenkins. There are more!
Choose Church Camp for your book club, then invite me to join in a discussion over Google Meets or Zoom.