For me, back in the public access TV days, my local station had a broadcast made by the John Birch Society. You guessed it: They had summer camps. I did have Web access at the time, and saw that most of them were at Y camps, at times in the summer when the Y themselves didn’t have camp sessions. I can’t think of anything most t(w)eens would find less interesting.
This is probably going to sound quite mild, but since I grew up in an agnostic/atheistic home, when I first learned about summer Bible camps I was horrified. To 12-year old me, I wondered what kind of brainwashing crap is this? I’m still mildly horrified by the thought of it.
To add a little context, when I was about 3, my mom somehow agreed to let a neighbor take my brother and me to a vacation Bible school, along with a few other kids from the neighborhood. I had absolutely no idea what was going on all day, since I didn’t even know what the Bible was, and I was confused that my ‘classmates’ were familiar with the stories presented by the teacher. My brother came to the rescue at the end of the day, though. The neighbor had loaded up all the kids into her station wagon, and on the way home, my brother barfed in the back seat. IIRC, this station wagon had a convertible third row/storage area, and he barfed into the mechanism. It must have been murder cleaning that out. We were not invited back to VBS the next day. That one day was the sum total of my formal religious education thus far, and I’m 64 now.
My Daddy sent me to a camp for diabetic kids.
I spent one day horrified. That night I gathered my stuff. Made my way to a pay phone. Called him with a long distance card(next county over).
I told him come get me or I’m gonna sit on this bench all week and die. Or maybe start walking(
).
What really bothered me was my snacks and insulin were taken and put up “for me”.
I did not trust that.
Daddy got there in 30min.
There are several campgrounds in my area that specialize in camp experiences for people with disabilities or chronic illnesses, and diabetes camp has existed for many years. I was noodling around on one of the websites, and that’s one camp where kids may be allowed to keep their phones on them, because of the new monitoring devices.
Some years back, I donated to one of them, and got their newsletter for a while. This camp also did respite care, mostly for senior citizens, on weekends during the school year, and they had a picture of the oldest camper they’d ever had, taking her very first canoe ride at the age of 105.
Well. That’s nice, of course.
But I wasn’t fixin’ to stay there.
A weird thing about my life is that I was an evangelical Christian (like hella devout) from roughly the ages of 11 to 17.
This is how I ended up at a Bible camp in North Carolina that was f*cked up even to me.
- They were obsessed with homosexuality. Preached about it constantly. Now me, I’d had a close family friend who was gay ever since I was six. I didn’t buy any of this homophobic shit. I vividly remember how perplexed I was when the pastor announced, “You’d be so disgusted if you knew what they did to each other.”
I was thinking, “Am I missing something? I’m pretty sure they just do it up the butt.” Ultimately I think I decided the pastor maybe wasn’t clear on the details.
-
They spent the entire time trying to guilt teenagers into destroying their entire collection of Christian rock CDs. The logic was that if someone heard you rocking your DC Talk and they didn’t immediately know it was Christian music, it was a sin. Man, so many kids destroyed their music collections. I felt so bad for them because I knew they’d regret it. That’s just an evil thing to do to a teenager. All that allowance money down the drain.
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Not anything to do with the politics but I did something incredibly dangerous that could have gotten me killed and yeah I guess it’s on the camp counselors that it even happened. We were on a hike in the mountains and there was an area at the top of the waterfall. Where the path ended was a sloping ravine that led straight into rushing water. Some kids started clinging to branches and climbing the ravine and about four of us ended up hanging out on a big-ass rock in the middle of the river that, if we’d slipped into the water, would have sent us right over the falls.
You don’t often realize how dangerous something is until after you’ve done it.
Ah, the things we do for love. (My pastor’s son was going. How could I not go?)
My husband’s family is very Catholic. About a year ago we took my young son to a family funeral, where he would see his first dead person. He was unusually patient getting up there, but immediately turned to me at full volume and yelled, “Why is there a giant T on her casket?”
Just in case they wondered who the heathens of the family were.
I’ve talked to him about what Christians believe and he finds it pretty perplexing. He’s a very concrete thinker, so the idea of something outside the material world is a bit of a stretch for him.
Camp Chippewa? From Addams Family Values? 
I only went to Scout camps, and they werent very strange at all,
I attended a very mainstream Presbyterian church as a teenager, and the weirdest thing that happened at camp was the huge marijuana plant that was growing next to one of the cabins. It had two big branches growing out of a single trunk, which was woody in the center, something we discovered when the pastor made us chop it down. Of course we tried to burn it (unsuccessfully; it was awfully fresh) and later, a boy who was also in marching band with me picked up the two branches and started marching around with them, singing the school’s fight song.
My oldest sisters best friend came home from a Baptist church camp with a baby on the way.
She was working as a student (highschool junior)counselor or something of that ilk.
Seems like it was made much of at their highschool.
Which reminds me, when I lived in my old town, I knew a husband and wife who specialized in relationship (i.e. sex) therapy, and he once did an informal survey: “How old were you the first time you had sex, and where did it happen?” The ages were pretty consistent (late teens, for the most part) but the location wasn’t. After about 1970, it was usually in the home of one or the other’s parents, but before 1970? Church camp. Yep, lots of hiding places and no parents around.
Between my 11th and 12th grade, my “best friend”, who later revealed her true self, and I went to a 2-week speech and debate camp, although “camp” was a bit misleading because we stayed in a college dorm. It was a great experience, until I figured out that I was basically treading water in a sea of (future) valedictorians, something I experienced a decade later when I took organic chemistry.
OK, I may have looked like the loser there, but I was not the one who was getting drunk during lunch, and getting into a van with multiple boys to be gang-banged and possibly spit-roasted, and had my parents find out what I was REALLY doing when, one fine night, the boys who weren’t driving opened up the van and threw me out at highway speed. I’ve always wondered how she explained that to her parents, and how they reacted when they found out the truth. TBH, if I’d had a son and he ever did anything like that, he’d have been in even bigger trouble than my daughter would have been.
As for the camp, the boys were on the lower floors and the girls on the higher floors, and the boys were not allowed to use the elevator unless they were disabled, and the girls were not allowed to use the stairwell (of course, an emergency would have been an exception to this). Had anyone been caught on an opposite-sex floor, both would have been sent home C.O.D., as they would have if they’d been caught with drugs or alcohol. (I don’t remember if they had a policy on tobacco; probably not because this was 1980.) We did have some friends down the hall who said that the hedge near the dorm was not as camouflaging as some people thought it was. I remember that there was a music camp in an adjoining building.
Huh, I went to a friend’s Church Camp as a grade schooler, and I don’t remember any religious stuff (maybe because it was a Casual Lutheran church).
Just crafts, sports (kickball, volleyball, frisbee, canoeing) and a lot of swimming.
It was on a big lake with a huge beach, and a raft out in the middle of the lake. My friend and I practiced holding our breath until we could tickle or pinch a girl in the swimming area, then swim deep underwater as fast as we could, not coming up for air until we were on the opposite side of the raft.
Epilogue: thirty years later, I dropped off my daughter and her friends at a Lutheran church camp, then looked around… it was the same camp I’d gone to!
But the cabins, the dining hall, and the beach were so small… and that raft we’d struggled to swim to?
It was only about thirty feet out in the water.
I was a scout leader taking our troop to a nearby ski hill that had bunks for overnight campers (they had “moonlight” skiing). We saw it was mostly church groups in the other cabins.
The next morning I asked the scouts how they slept. One of them laughed and told me to go look what was written on the wooden frame of the top bunk they slept on. Someone had written, “I lost my virginity here last night.” Obviously church campers.
YMMV of course, but over the decades, the filthiest graffiti I’ve ever seen was not in a bar restroom, but at Girl Scout camp. Yes, I am completely serious about that.
I had totally forgotten about the video game production day camp my nieces attended as tweens ca. 2010. IIRC, they had a limit of 25 at a time, and when they walked into the room, there were 23 boys, and my two nieces, none of them quite old enough to really appreciate any of this. I do remember that they had a great time.